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Robert David STEELE Vivas

User Profile Image Robert David STEELE Vivas
Member since : May-24-2009 (Verified)
8 Ideas, 162 Comments, 207 Votes

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I thought someone else more qualified would put this up, but I see a need to get it up now.

I believe we need two Truth & Reconciliation Commissions--one to address what we have done as a nation and as independent states to our Native American, our Americans of African descent, and other groups; and a second one to address what we have allowed our government and our corporations to do to others "in our name."
I spent the morning reading every single posted idea, many of the comments, and then posted my own five ideas and thought to leave it at that. However, during the mowing of the lawn it came to me. Idea first, then the short explanation

Free Obama. Simple, straight-forward, and the ONE THING that we can all focus on to achieve ALL of the ideas posted so far.

Right now, President Barack Obama is president in name only. He is being guided, controlled, constrained, influenced, lied to--by whatever attribute one might wish, he is anything but free. He is also, according to one of my sources, mindful of being assassinated if he attempts too radical a departure from the agenda that has been set for him by Wall Street and the four big complexes that own the US federal government: Wall Street fronted by the Fed and Treasury, military-intelligence, prison-slavery, and hospital-pharamaceutical.

There can be no more telling proof of the validity of my concern for his well-being that the fact thatupon entering office he immediately abandoned what little status he had given to non-partisan, post-partisan, trans-partisan, and immediately became the puppet of the winner-take-all Democratic mafia who--this is the important bit--place higher importance on keeping the two-party monopoly of power alive, than they do on serving the public.

FACT: Obama was elected by 30% of the eligible voters. 56.4 or so of those eligible voted, with a bare majority within that number. 70% of us did not vote for him.

FACT: 39% of eligible voters are now Independent, with the Democratic party falling to 33% and the Republican Party to the mid 20% range.

FACT: The two party criminal system controls every aspect of the election process and has betrayed the public trust in gerrymandering and manipulating all aspects so as to keep incumbents in power and deny Independents access to debates at any level.

FACT: Secrecy in Washington is used to keep power in the hands of those who have betrayed the public trust, from Senators and Representatives to intelligence officials doing warrantless wiretapping and torture, to contractors cheating the military.

FACT: I put a memorandum under Obama's door in Des Moines, with the gentle support of the hotel staff which gave me a room next to his despite the hotel being sold out, and the Secret Service detail, to whom I introduced myself. That memorandum told him two things:

A) You have to embrace all the parties, not just the two criminal parties. The Libertarians, Greens, Reforms, Independents, and even the Socialists. Diversity matters, inclusiveness matters. Re-establish democracy in America.

B) You cannot allow Congress, lobbyists, or Wall Street to set the agenda. You need to have a strategic analytic model that mandates a coherent strategy for addressing all ten high-level threats to humanity across all twelve core policy areas, while doing outreach to the eight demographic challengers that will set the future. Without the model, you will be bounced off the walls.

And so it came to pass. In his first 100 days Obama turned into a look-alike of George Bush, "going along" with the idiocy of bailing out Wall Street, surging in Afghanistan, keeping Guantanamo open, and so on. He is not well-informed, he is not in charge, and at this rate he will be the stake in the heart of the Democratic Party that Dick Cheney was to the Republican Party. Who would have thought...

So I say, FREE OBAMA. Make it a bumper sticker. Make it a meme. He needs to know that 100% is a lot better than 30%, and that 100% is achievable if he will BE President to We the People, not to those who lied, cheated, and bought (still waiting for the accounting on that last $300 million) the election for him.

Captive to others? Right now, yes. BE the President, pass Electoral Reform in time for 2010, and lead America back to its Constitutional greatness as a Republic Of, By, and For We the People.

WHO IS Robert David STEELE Vivas to say something so utterly outrageous?

Recovering spy, #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction, CEO of OSS.Net and Earth Intelligence Network.
Learn more at www.oss.net and www.earth-intelligence.net which was created to give Obama the model.
All of my books are free online as well as on sale at Amazon, the three I recommend for citizens are:
NEW CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE: Personal, Public, & Political at www.oss.net/BOOKS
COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace at www.oss.net/CIB
ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig at www.oss.net/PIG with an annotated bibliography of 500+ books on reality

I pray for this country every day. We need to reach Obama in a way that no one close to him is capable of comprehending because with the exception of his wife, everyone around him is in love with power, not the USA.
I have five longer proposals up, on Electoral, Intelligence, National Security, and Governance Reform, as well as an Open Source Agency that enables the reforms and reconnects citizens to information and power, but it has been suggested I offer a simplified variation for general consideration.

1. Stop spending $65 billion a year on secret intelligence that ignores 80% of what can be known in 183 languages (but is not secret), and delivers less than 4% of what the President needs to know, and ZERO to the Cabinet, independent agencies, action officers, and Congress.

2. Create a Smart Nation but connecting education, intelligence as decision-support, and research under one "czar" (Colin Powell or Derek Bok or both), using an Open Source Agency to get smart at all levels about using open sources and methods of information collection and sense-making.

3. Stop focusing $1 trillion a year on inter-state conflict, which is both least probably and only one of ten high-level threats to humanity (the others are poverty, infectious disease, and environmental degradation above, and below, civil war, genocide, other atrocities, proliferation, terrorism, and transnational crime.

4. Use the Open Source Agency to focus on all ten threats by providing decision support across all twelve core policies (Agriculture, Diplomacy, Economy, Education, Energy, Family, Health, Immigration, Justice, Security, Society, Water), and demand that the taxpayer dollars be redirected toward creating prosperity at home and peace abroad.
Governance Reform—Coalition Approach, State Power, More Ethics

“America can’t be governed by one man and his buddies—it takes a coalition team.

The world, and America, have gotten too complex to rely on a single President being elected, and then leaving the rest of the team up to his preferences. America needs to see a candidate for President that has both the courage and the “big tent” philosophy of non-partisan teamwork to pre-select and offer for inspection as part of their two-year campaign, a complete Cabinet. The process of devising a Coalition Cabinet should start now. A leader of a multi-party team, with a landslide popular and electoral vote behind them, should be able to carry out this comprehensive reform agenda that puts the power back in the people, and common sense back into a down-sized government.

Emphasizing the need to use federal funding to empower state & local governments with respect to intelligence & counterintelligence could also set the stage for proposing new national initiatives for elementary and secondary education as well as public health across America. Thomas Jefferson said “A Nation’s best defense is an educated citizenry.” The people of this Nation are its seed corn, and we must tend these fields. Every American should receive the same high-quality education, regardless of the prevailing real estate values that now fund vastly disparate levels of education. At the same time, some form of universal health insurance is needed, not only to cover the uninsured, but also to liberate America’s workers from their dependence on corporate health plans that constrain job mobility and innovation. Finally, we must dramatically re-invigorate our preventive medicine and public health programs to lower the costs to the taxpayer and our families of disease—including animal-borne epidemics—that could have been prevented in the first place.

At the same time, we need a candidate who is very strong on ethics—America suffers when their leadership is perceived by both the people and the international public as being “in the pockets of” big oil or big pharmaceutical companies, or other special interests. The right candidate, with a proven mind of their own, can make the economic case for ethics. A Nobel Prize was awarded for a demonstration that trust lowers the cost of doing business. Ethics is pro-business and pro-consumer at the same time.

Finally, we need a candidate and a team that can change the paradigm of the Presidency—our new President should plan to spend more time on “Seventh Generation” challenges that bear directly on the future of the entire world as well as the future security and prosperity of America seven generations out, and less time on top-level day to day Executive matters. The new Vice President should spend two thirds of their time actually managing the government, and one third training to be President in the future.

All this puts power back in the hands of the people, while tackling the tough issues head on.
28 May 09. Responding to comment: Re-Invention would be better than Reform but I cannot change that now. National Security is spending $1 trillion a year against ONE of the ten high-level threats to humanity (Inter-State War) and is completely inept (terrorism, crime, civil war) or unintentested in the others (poverty, infectious disease, environmental degradation, genocide, other atrocities (includes human trafficking), proliferation. The whole point of this idea is to STOP spending $1 trillion on a largely worthless and corrupt military-industrial complex, REDEFINE national security to mean Creating a Prosperous World at Peace and a vibrant informed democracy at home. Free books at www.oss.net/CIB and www.oss.net/PIG.

President and General Ike Eisenhower warned us. Today we have a military-industrial complex with 750 bases overseas, two elective wars, and a firm plan for a 50-year war that will "recycle" all military equipment (code for destroy in use and mandate replacement at higher cost). Out of the ten high-level threats to humanity identified by LtGen Brent Scowcroft, USAF (Ret) and other members of the UN High Level Threat Panel, the Pentagon is "optimized" (that is a kinder term than merited) for just one of those threats: Inter-State War, threat number four. Below are some ideas:

Global Issues & National Security Reform—Revitalizing Soft Power

“The world is on fire, but we can put this fire out!

America leans toward isolationist and what I call “false neutral” positions. In a world at war with itself there are no neutral positions—only victims, if not today, then tomorrow. We need a candidate and team that can help America to properly interpret 9-11 as the early warning of global chaos, and terrorism as the least of our problems. There are 23 conflicts between countries killing 1000 or more a year; 79 conflicts between states killing less than 1000 a year; and 175 violent internal political conflicts within states. The world is at war and no one at home realizes the threat this implies for America’s future. At the same time there are 32 complex emergencies—failed states—today; there are 66 countries with millions of displaced persons and refugees; 33 countries suffering famine and starvation; 59 countries and rising with plagues and epidemics. There are 18 genocide campaigns going on, today; child soldiers are killing and being killed in 41 countries; corruption is common in 80 countries, and censorship in 62 countries.

This is the real world and it is a world that the two mainstream parties and their corporate paymasters are ignoring because they travel first class and can make their money from the safety of their gated communities. America spends over $500B a year on a “heavy metal” military that is useless 90% of the time, at the same time that we underfund special operations and low intensity conflict forces, underfund diplomacy, overt intelligence, and economic assistance, underfund education at home and abroad, ignore public health, and ignore public safety around the world, allowing warlords and crime kingpins a free run. This has to stop but it will not stop unless America finds a leader of gravitas who is truly representative of both our values, and the power of our budget if spend wisely. This new national security strategy could be called “1+iii” and could, within the $500 billion a year now being spent (greater than what the next 20 nations, including Russia and China, spend together), redirect funds as follows:

1) Big War. Fence at $250 billion a year, fully 50% of the national security budget. Designed to be able to take on the Russians and the Chinese simultaneously, inclusive of strategic nuclear forces, a 12 division-wing-carrier battle group team, and reserve-reinforcement bridges to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces. Protected from small war or other distractions, focuses on being ready for catastrophic confrontation at all times.

2) Small War. Increase from $20 billion to $75 billion a year, 15% of the national security budget. Continues the elevation of the U.S. Special Operations Command as a global operational force, but introduces constabulary-gendarme forces that can impose order within failed states while providing police, medical, and other critical public services needed in the transition back to local control and security. Creates a new “ground truth” force that provides each regional theater with a battalion of foreign area officers skilled in foreign languages and cultural understanding. Creates a new national foreign area and foreign language reserve of both citizens and immigrants who provide peacetime translation services for intelligence, and wartime translation through 24/7 video cell-phone connections to units in the field.

3) Peace Force. Increase from $20 billion to $100 billion a year, 20% of the national security budget. Dramatically restores the competency and global presence of the Department of State; reinstates the independence of the U.S. Information Agency, doubling the latter. Increases the Peace Corps and the Agency for International Development, with a special emphasis on water and food security as well as public health. Creates a new fund for economic assistance to individual entrepreneurs (micro-lending) and a new fund for environmental sustainability, as well as an international peace reserve (part of a national security education initiative) of language-qualified citizens ready to engage in short and mid-term sustainability and stability projects at entry-level, mid-career, and in retirement.

4) Home Force. Increase from $38 billion (was $16 billion) to $75 billion a year, 15% of the national security budget. This investment recognizes that in the age of networked non-state actors—what Thomas Friedman from The New York Times calls “super-empowered angry men,” it is not possible to federalize security at the state & local level. Apart from the investment in a Homeland Security Intelligence Program discussed above, major investments are needed in securing our borders and ports while providing massive restoration of public health capabilities (preventive medicine and early warning of emerging infectious threats) together with new initiatives in electronic and physical infrastructure hardening and protection. In combination with the intelligence reform initiatives, this investment will also “wire” state & local governments into the global grid and help create a “Smart Nation.”
The secret intelligence world spends $65 billion to $75 billion (and perhaps more) per year stealing the 10-20% they care about, to provide the President, their only "real" customer, with 4% of what he needs to know. They refuse to embrace Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), calling it "Open Sores," and are totally irresponsible in failing to provide decision support to every Cabinet Department, every Agency, and every member of Congress.

Below are some fundamental things that could be done to dramatically enhance "decision support" across the entire government and across the Nation:

Intelligence Reform—Global Understanding, State & Local Security

“Nothing in the existing or planned Federal budget makes America any safer!

When both the incumbent President and the incumbent Director of Central Intelligence persist in telling America that 9-11 was not an intelligence failure, they demonstrate nothing more than their ignorance and their lack of respect for the common sense of the people. Below are specific intelligence reforms I want to see championed by a candidate and team of substance, because how America understands the rest of the world and its dangers really matters to the future security and prosperity for many generations:

1) National Security Act of 2005. Will provide for the revitalization of national intelligence and counterintelligence in the context of a “Smart Nation” in which every element of government—non-secret as well as secret—is wired together so we can collect the dots, connect the dots, and never again drop the ball. Within this Act should be the following specific reforms:

a) Restructuring of the Presidential staff to create four Director-Generals for Policy, Strategy, Intelligence, and Research. America has no serious strategy for its future, intelligence is not impacting on policy or strategy, and government research (as well as taxation policies) are retarding rather than advancing the private sector’s ability to be innovative.

b) Creation of a consolidated National Foreign Intelligence Program that gives the Director-General for Intelligence control over the three technical intelligence agencies now within the defense department, while earmarking 50% of the program in peace, 85% in war, for defense needs.

c) Elevation of the National Intelligence Council to the Office of the President, where it can do a better job of harnessing the distributed intelligence of the entire Nation, while also working more closely with the Cabinet departments.

d) Establishment of the Global Knowledge Foundation, a $1.5 billion a year “.org” dedicated to helping all elements of the government as well as the private sector gain better access to open sources of information in all languages of the world—80% of what we need for 5% of the cost of secrets. Includes creation of a “virtual national intelligence community” of leading experts on everything who do not want top secret clearances, and Digital Marshall Plan for Third World.

e) National Analysis Agency. Redirection (with downsizing) of the Central Intelligence Agency toward strategic analysis, while restoring the responsibilities and capabilities of the individual Cabinet departments to do coherent strategic and tactical intelligence analysis.

f) National Processing Agency. Redirection (with downsizing) of the National Security Agency to leverage its extraordinary capabilities in processing, such that it can “make sense” of all non-secret as well as secret information needed to keep America safe while improving government decision-support over-all (e.g. visualization of complex non-secret databases).

g) National Collection Agency. Redirection (with downsizing) of the National Reconnaissance Office to become an “all-source” technical collection agency able to both create multiple forms of technical collection platforms, while avoiding competition among different “pipes.”

h) Clandestine Service Agency. Coincident with a gradual decommissioning of the existing clandestine service that is not clandestine at all, create a completely new but very narrowly-focused capability for in extremis requirements that is characterized by very deep non-official cover, multi-national career personnel, and the ability to manage both unilateral and multi-lateral clandestine penetrations of both state and non-state actors threatening the Nation.

i) Homeland Security Intelligence Program. Redirect 20% of the existing $38 billion per year from wasteful earmarked expenditures on emergency responder and “hard-wired” counter-terrorism capabilities that are not agile, toward the establishment of state & local Community Intelligence Centers and networks—we must teach our localities to fish for sharks, don’t try to fish for them.
Both the Executive and Congress are in constant betrayal of the public trust because they represent less than 30% of the public. 70% of America did not vote for Obama, but to be fair to him, he is the same as Bush--irrelevant as long as we have a system owned by Wall Street.

We must demand of Obama and Congress, the latter as the price for not being recalled or defeated in 2010, an Electoral Reform Act along the following lines, drawing on Ralph Nader's lifetime of experience, as refined by Jim Turner and myself.

Phase I to be mandated for 2010 Election

Holiday Voting. Proposed, that to avoid undue hardship to the hardest workers in America, the working poor, national and state elections shall only be held over a week-end or on a holiday. If held on a Saturday, Orthodox Jews should have the option of voting in person on Sunday or by ballot in person the week prior, to be opened and counted on Election Day.

Honest Open Debates. Proposed, that to end the current monopoly of the debates by the bifurcated two-party alliance against independent and third parties, that the League of Women Voters be restored to their role as the managers of honest open debates, to include third, fourth, and fifth parties.

Expanded Debates. Proposed, that to end the charade of one individual being up to the task of managing America, that the debates be expanded to include a minimum of three Cabinet officials to be announced in advance, and generally to include the Attorney General, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of State. Should the League of Women Voters desire, the Transpartisan Policy Institute would undertake the scheduling of substantive policy debates engaging all announced candidates for specific Cabinet positions, and shall provide, on the basis of open source intelligence from the Earth Intelligence Network, and budgetary costs and implications from the Public Budget Office, a range of viable policy options for debate and deliberation.

Instant Run-Off. Proposed, that to ensure the election of a winner elected by a majority, that the instant run-off concept be adopted for all national and state elections.

Phase II to be mandated for 2012 Election, with Districts Redrawn by November 2009

Full and Balanced Representation. Proposed, that to ascertain a properly representative balance in the House of Representatives for each state, and Open Registration be provided and that all parties having at least 10% of the voters registering a preference for their political philosophy, shall be eligible for assigned districts proportional to their number, and also to a proportional share of leadership positions in legislative bodies at all levels including the Congress of the United States of America.

Tightly-Drawn Districts. Proposed, that we end the corrupt practice of gerrymandering, replacing it with compact computer drawn districts similar to the kind used in Iowa.

Full Public Funding of Diverse Candidates. Proposed, to eliminate all federal financing of campaign, and all political action committees and structured bundled contributions to any candidate, that we institute a Campaign Contribution Tax Credit up to $100 per candidate up to ten candidates per individual in each election cycle to encourage broad based individual political campaign contributions.

No Legislation Without Consultation. Proposed, to eliminate special interest dominance of the legislative process, and to end the practice of passing legislation such as the Patriot Act without its actually being read, and to end all secret earmarks, that We all major legislation be published on line in Wiki format, with an easy to understand one-page summary, one week prior to its coming to a vote. This also includes a demand that all earmarks be listed no less than one week in advance of their being considered for a vote, and that all earmarks be publicly announced and offered for amendment to the voters in the relevant district at least one week prior to the passage of national legislation affecting them.
Create the Open Source Agency (OSA) recommended by the 9-11 Commission on page 413, consistent with the Aspin-Brown ("should be a top priority") and Moynihan Commissions and others, to accomplish three things:

1. Serve as the public intelligence agency, creating Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) that can be used to support the 99% of the US Government, state and local governments, and citizen groups that do not receive secret intelligence support today (i.e. everyone except the President, who only gets 4% of what he needs at a cost to the taxpayer of $65-75 billion a year).

2. Serve as the national proponent, skunk works, and support agency for moving the entire nation to Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) to end the corruption, fraud, waste, and abuse as well as the massive loss of productivity associated with proprietary software that is also unsafe.

3. Serve as the national proponent, skunk works, and support agency for Open Spectrum as recommended by David Weinberger, Jock Gill, and others, to end the monopolization of frequencies by parties that are inherently inefficient and often corrupt.

HOWEVER, the OSA should NOT be part of the secret intelligence community, which calls Open Source Intelligence "Open Sores", but rather be fully-funded by the Department of Defense via non-reimbursable funding to the Department of State, where the OSA would be the sister agency to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (one brings global knowledge in, the other broadcasts US knowledge out).

750 international professionals have spoken to and worked with 7,500 international mid-career professionals across eight tribes of intelligence (government, military, law enforcement, academia, business, media, non-governmental, and civil society including labor unions and religions) for 20 years in pursuit of this objective.

The Open Source Agency as formulated by all of these professionals, and as discussed with citizen groups in recent years, would fund:

1. National Strategy Center with full public transparency and participation, such that the Executive and Congress and Governors would be required to create coherent strategies that address the ten high-level threats to humanity (Poverty, Infectious Disease, Environmental Degradation, Inter-State Conflict, Civil War, Genocide, Other Atrocities, Proliferation, Terrorism, and Transnational Crime) by coherently harmonizing the twelve core policy domains (Agriculture, Diplomacy, Economy, Education, Energy, Family, Health, Immigration, Justice, Security, Society, Water) and budgets, all transparently, all with public "common sense" participation, all with a total elimination of the earmarks that have led to a Congress Of, By, and For Wall Street.

2. Multinational Decision Support Center, building on the pioneering done by the US Central Command with the Coalition Coordination Center, but bringing together mid-career intelligence analysts from 90 nations instead of logisticians, working only with public information, and providing decision support to all organizations world-wide that are working toward peace and prosperity in the public lnterest.

3. Assistant Secretary General for Decision Support in the United Nations, a ten person office funded by the OSA with a US Ambassador as Deputy and double-hatted as the Director of the Office of Information Sharing Treaties and Agreements. This is how we vacuum clean the raw data in the UN System, which is nearly incoherent, and give back to the UN sense-making while leveraging the information across the ten threats and twelve policies to harmonized the budgets of 90+ nations against common objectives.

4. Global Range of Needs and Gifts Table, an online capability that can be connected to via RapidSMS such as being pioneered by UNICEF so brilliantly, such that anyone can enter a "peace target" and anyone (or any group of individuals, or organizations) can commit to meeting the need. Like needs can be clustered, blocks of giving can be distributed, all transparent.

For more information about all of this, visit www.oss.net and www.earth-intelligence.net. Two free books online relevant to evaluating this idea are COLLECIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace, at www.oss.net/CIB; and ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig, at www.oss.net/PIG, with the chapters on Substance of Governance and the Annotated Bibliography particularly recommended.

We pray that this Administration will understand that "bipartisan" is what happens when the two parties shutting out all other parties agree to get together and stick it to the US taxpayer. An Open Source Agency will empower all of the people all of the time, and leave no corrupt deed hidden--"put enough eyeballs on it, you get honest government Of By and For We the People."

-----------ADDED COMMENT FOR PERSPECTIVE--------------

A colleague whose knowledge I deeply respect has pointed out that as written my proposal for an Open Source Agency alienates every single major constituency now in power. As much as I regret that, that is the point.

HOWEVER, while demanding that we all take back the power and become the informed citizens in charge of the Republic and the government that is supposed to serve We the People, not treat us with contempt as is now the case, I do wish to point out a couple of things:

1) Intellectual property, spectrum rights, and various other trappings of capitalism as we now have it need to be reviewed, respected, and renegotiated. To take one example, the purchase of Congress by Disney and other publishers to extend copyright far beyond the vision of the founders is corrupt, plain and simple. Similarly, patents filed to keep new technologies off the market (including green energy, permanent paints, long-lasting anything) need to be restrained in the public interest--use it or lose it.

2) Predatory immoral capitalism has destroyed the Republic and most of the world. I point to John Bogle's book on The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism, William Grieder's book on The Soul of Capitalism, and Howard Bloom's forthcoming book on The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalsim that I totally endorse. MORAL capitalism seeks to do well by doing good and that kind of capitalism is what I support.

In a nutshell, I apologize to all those that will be offended by my scorched earth depiction of what an Open Source Agency needs to do in the public interest (the book length version at Amazon and free at www.oss.net/BOOKS is THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest). There is absolutely no question in my mind but that an Open Source Agency will allow We the People to manage every aspect of our Nation's transformation with accountability, integrity, and transparency. The Golden Rule will apply. It's time we take our country back.
Displaying 1 - 25 of 4205 Ideas

Comments Posted

Helpful comment. Obama, like Bush, is the Borg. He is busy perpetuated the policies of Bush, including more power to the Federal Reserve that is neither Federal nor a Reserve, but instead the Central Banking authority. visit www.freeobama.org for a starting perspective. Free online annotated bibliography (and book that called it in October 2008) at www.oss.net/PIG.
Being very deliberate in consultation with others. In a day or so, say for sure by early next week when I do a nation-wide press release, freeobama.org will point to freeobama.net, and you will find a site that is at least a word press open to all, and am hoping to include a voting system.

We are looking at the software behind this specific site here (Open Government) but it does not allow for clustering and linking ideas and comments which is something I really want (e.g. all the marijuana comments here should be clustered into one umbrella parent with siblings).

The change in my own thinking that has occurred as a result of extensive dialog away from this site is that the focus needs to be on helping everyone see the full range of the Borg--it's not just the two political parties that have sold out and breached the public trust, not just the Federal Reserve, not just the insurance companies, etc. It is an entire system that separates the haves from the have nots, and as I learned from Deer Hunting with Jesus, it is present in every small town across America, not just in the big cities with their urban poor.

What we are talking about here is a paradigm shift. Cheney was not enough. Obama fooled most of the young and all the idealists unwilling to look too closely. Now we are at a point where I believe two conclusions can be drawn:

1) Obama has the power to embrace the 39% independents and the roughly 30% moderates from each of the two bi-opoly powers, and BE the President. He could actually have a transpartisan Cabinet, an Open Source Agency instead of a CIA, and a Congress with one third Independents that do not caucus with one of the two bi-opoly powers. He could subject the Fed to GAO srutiny while planning to wind it down, enact the Electoral Reform Act in time for 2010, etcetera.

2) If Obama chooses not to embrace the larger public and the demand for a restoration of the Constitution and the Republic, then I believe we face a national crisis in which 2010 will be the beginning of a break-up, with states like Alaska, Hawaii, and Vermont withdrawing from the United STATES of America, many states like Montana and Oklahoma nullifying federal regulations that are often stupid and sometimes criminal (like mandated ceilings on environmental regulation, instead of floors) and at some point--this is inevitable--I see a massive tax revolt across the country.

So, we live in interesting times.

Sorry to disappoint on the website today, I want to be certain it is a neutral friendly place before it goes up. I plan to avoid any posting myself, but will respond to comments and moderate the trolls.
Great contribution, thank you. No argument--it makes me so very sad to see Independents blocked from all the public debates at the state and national levels. The Republicans and Democrats conspired to displace the League of Women Voters with the Presidential Debate Commission, and the League lost its integrity in allowing that to happen. They should have raised holy hell and stuck with their core value of asking questions not provided in advance, and including third and forth party cnadidates as warranted.

Resist the Borg.....everyone knew Cheney was part of the Borg, I see a lot of little lightbulbs going on across America as folks figure out that no matter how good a person Obama might be, no president can be effective on behalf of We the People without a fundamental change in the system.
Thank you for your comment. I would love to hear about what changes you would make.

The origin of the list is as follows:

Roughly five of the idea from Ralph Nader's book Crashing the Party, the other three developed with Jim Turner (Naderide #2, now a global health legal champion), and I put together the list in two stages.

The point is to restore the one man - one vote rule, to restore the ability of all parties to play instead of the two parties that monopolize power, corrupt their own members (party discipline trumping constituency needs), and actually implement the Constition (Article 1, balance of power not foot soldiers for the president).

You can reach me direct at oss.net you know what goes here cox.net.
Good grief. I guess you missed the part where all my books are free online.

This has actually sparked a wonderfully constructive dialog offline away from the trolls, and I summarize the highlights below:

1. Striking out at the two criminal parties, while accurate, is not helpful.

2. More helpful is the "resist the borg" meme, and I am working on both a book and a bumper sticker along those lines, to be presented (free--remember that part) at www.freeobama.org.

3. The more I read about him, the more I am seeing him as a slick willie counterpart to the village idiot fielded before him, which just goes to show, who is president really does not change a thing.

Resist the borg!
A worthy comment that I have heard before. At 56, with multiple life experiences and credentials, I came to the conclusion that "diplomacy" is ccode for "goping along." Take David Walker, for example, who told me in an email that "how you [compalain] matters." This is a guy that spent seven years telling Congress politely that the USA was going involvent, finally declaring in 2007 that the USA WAS insolvent (both Senators McCain and Obama ignored him), and then--finally--he quit when he got offered a cushy job withte Peterson Foundation to "educate" the public on the budget. That was two years ago and I have not seen anything worth a damn come out of the Peterson foundation--Walker appears to be making a movie and loving the black tie crowd.

We do not live in a democracy. We live is a country that has been run into the ground by a mix of political and financial "pals" who have committed treason (in time of war) and multiple impeachable offenses across both parties, not least of which was the complete abdication by BOTH parties in Congress of Article 1 of the Constitution, allowing Dick Cheney to run an imperial presidency.

Today Obama is trapped in a closed circle, very much to his liking I am sure, but he is capable of more if we can break him out.

With respect, I appreciate your comment very much, but it is not realistic. It is going to take 50 million pissed off Independents aligning with 50 million "very disappointed" Cultural Creatives to take this government back in 2010, and I don't see it happening if everyone plays nice.

Look at Bloomberg as an example. He got sucked into the bi-partisan nonsense, and blew a perfectly good chance to become President by not sticking them them that brought him to power, the Unified Independents. He betrayed them and they are not supporting his third term run. I went to Oklahoma to watch Bloomberg make a fool of himself with a mix of Democratic and Republican has-beens (Sam Nunn was the only person still breathing on stage).

This is real simple: first, we get Obama's attention and make it clear that 2010 will NOT be a two-party election. Then we ask him to pass the eight point electoral reform act as the price for keeping one third of Congress Democratic. If he does not, I believe we should dismiss 80% of Congress, to include recall elections for those Senators not up for re-election in 2010.
www.freeobama.net and www.freeobama.org now in my possession. installing word press and making them totally available to the public to load bumper stick ideas, discuss how he can be freed from the mafia that has him under virtual control, etcetera.
From a senior colleague:

It was not my intention to contact you quite so soon, but I think the “bumper sticker” that you so kindly shared goes to the heart of the problem. The duopoly that has been running this country is made possible because wheather a Democrat or Republican is elected President; the elected is immediately enveloped by either the Democratic or Republican branch of a more or less homogenous policy establishment that sets the real agenda for both foreign and domestic policies (including intelligence policy).

This establishment is primarily interested in ensuring a more or less seamless system of governance. The congress is under the spell of this same establishment (indeed congressional staffers move effortlessly from their staff jobs to the establishment and back again).

The sort of reforms that you are advocating, no matter how cogent or necessary, would endanger the status quo and the comfortable niche that the duopoly establishment currently occupies. The way the U.S. Government works any suggestions related to policy and governance must go through this establishment. Figure the odds.

Whence the Terror Hysteria?
Follow the Money
by Philip Giraldi, June 02, 2009
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One of the unique pleasures of living near our nation’s capital is to
sit down with the first morning cup of coffee, open the Washington
Post, and flip through the full-page ads placed by defense
contractors. The ads almost always feature dedicated young soldiers,
fierce bald eagles, and American flags. They extol our heroic
warriors and note how they, the contractors, are on the front line
defending freedom and the American way. They do not mention that the
ads are paid for by the taxpayers, courtesy of the huge profits
generated by unneeded defense spending. Their CEOs and shareholders
must smile when they see the ads. The rest of us shouldn’t.

This is not to suggest that defense contractors don’t do a lot of
good in the world. They support armies of lobbyists and contribute to
congressmen who otherwise would have to find real work. They make
sure that the pundits and ideologues who promote a vigorous defense
of American interests at home and abroad are well-funded through
their contributions to think-tanks like the American Enterprise
Institute, the Hudson Institute, and Frank Gaffney’s ubiquitous
Center for Security Policy. They hold gala dinners and invite Bush
administration hacks and blue dog Democrats to speak, paying them
generous honoraria to make sure they have comfortable retirements.
They sometimes show incredible ingenuity, figuring out how to make
gasoline that costs $1.13 per gallon in Kuwait cost $8 when it
arrives in Iraq a day later. They produce ships and planes and
missile systems that America doesn’t need, but doing so surely keeps
workers in their factories in key congressional constituencies from
having to file for unemployment. It’s a win-win.

And defense contractors know how to make people afraid and keep them
that way. The next war, against Iran, will no doubt be prepped by
claims that Tehran was involved in 9/11 and that it is the principal
supporter of al-Qaeda. Those Persians are "killing our soldiers." And
nothing much changes when you flip from Republican to Democrat. Even
if the Global War on Terror (GWOT) is now being referred to as
Overseas Contingency Operations, there has been no shift in how
Washington approaches the terrorism problem. Overseas Contingency
Operations are just as big a business as was GWOT; they are designed
to make money and create good jobs for a lot of people. If one opens
that same Washington Post featuring the full-page self-congratulatory
ads and turns to the employment pages, the few jobs available in this
recession-wracked economy are in the quarter-page listings for
defense contractors. Squeezing money from the taxpayers or borrowing
it from foreigners appears to be the entirety of Washington’s local
economy.

This huge war-driven economy is particularly difficult to comprehend
given that the principal enemy is neither a foreign country nor a
coalition of states. Contemporary terrorism is best describable as
the tactic employed by a loosely wired political movement. There are
no accurate statistics on how many terrorists there are in the world,
but it is safe to assume that there are probably no more than several
thousand Salafists, Islamic extremists who have an international
agenda that makes them ideological foes of the United States and its
allies. Al-Qaeda is one of several Salafist groups.

Those several thousand militants are most often engaged in carrying
out actions against their own countries of origin. They are
essentially stateless even when they take up residence somewhere.
They are harried, arrested, and killed whenever possible by every
police force and intelligence service in the world. They have
occasional successes but more often find themselves running from one
safehouse or cave to another to avoid detection. Ideologically
speaking, they are a force whose time has passed, with ever fewer
young people attracted to the revolutionary rhetoric. Apart from
places like Afghanistan, where carrying a rifle is the only job
available, new recruits are few and far between.

These couple of thousand terrorists should be the principal target of
United States counterterrorism efforts, which should focus on good
police work and intelligence operations combined with cooperation
with friendly governments working to the same end. But the United
States instead apparently prefers to use an elephant to swat a fly.
The buildup of the new U.S. military commands in Africa and Latin
America continues with no peace dividend in sight, as if the 101st
Airborne provides a viable solution to a band of militants hiding in
a hut or in the jungle. The Pentagon budget under President Barack
Obama has gone up by 12 percent, not down, and exceeds $581 billion,
excluding special appropriations for Iraq and Afghanistan. The
intelligence budget is in excess of $70 billion, and Homeland
Security costs $43 billion annually. Other agencies and bureaus, such
as the Department of Energy, have their own security budgets. Much of
this spending is directly or indirectly attributable to the terrorist
threat or, to put it more accurately, the perception of the terrorist
threat.

The inflated cost of doing business in the age of terror means that
U.S. taxpayers are spending as much as $200 billion per year in a not
completely successful attempt to deal with a couple of thousand
terrorists scattered around the world. Dividing the money spent by
the number of terrorists suggests an astonishing $100 million or so
per terrorist per year. Is this money well spent? The defense
contractors and Beltway bandits who have gotten fat on government
contracts think so. But anyone not directly profiting from the status
quo would likely look at the "business model" and conclude that it
might work far better to buy each terrorist a nice villa on the
Riviera with a Mercedes parked out front and give his kids a full
scholarship to Harvard to make the problem go away.

To shift the failed counterterrorism paradigm, the first thing
President Obama should do is delegitimize the fear merchants with a
dose of reality. His intelligence briefings should be telling him
that while terrorism is a serious problem, it is not an "existential"
threat, as the currently fashionable expression has it. Obama should
calm the waters by telling the American people that terrorism is a
containable problem that is in decline anyway. He should reduce
everyone’s blood pressure by observing that terrorism cannot
seriously damage the United States unless we Americans let it do so
by ruining our economy using borrowed money in a futile attempt to
spend our way into some kind of terrorism-free nirvana.

If Obama truly wants to change the perception of terrorism, he first
has to cut off the flood of money that makes the whole anti-terrorism
effort a huge feeding trough for defense contractors and other
parasites who would not exist but for the flow of cash. The full-page
ads in the Post gushing with faux-patriotism don’t mean a thing
except that the military-industrial complex has a lot of money to
burn courtesy of U.S. taxpayers. Without the money feeding the
contrived narrative about the global threat, the whole terrorism
mythology will wither and die. The contractors can go home and
hopefully find something useful to do, such as giving something back
to the American people who have made them rich. America can stop
getting involved willy-nilly in other people’s quarrels overseas and
might even be able to return to being a normal country with normal
people aspiring to normal things.=
Cool comment. This is exactly what Collective Intelligence can accomplish, what we do not have is the "World Brain" Web 4.0 system. If the Obama Administration could create that, starting with Medard Gabel's brilliant EarthGame design (he was co-designer with Buckminster Fuller of the original analog World Game).
I am neutral on Obama. Apart from a decent family, I am not willing to hold anyone to blame for "going along" with forces they perceive as more powerful than them *up to the point* where they start hurting others. Shinseki and Powell both hurt as all by not standing up to leaders they knew to be liars and nakedly amoral. Obama right now is in the cat bird seat IF and only if he "betrays" the money that bought him in and restores the connection between We the People (all of us) and our government.

Right now he is in a "closed circle" and everything that reaches him is carefully screened. The young were swept up in the theater of Obama at the same time that the Bushies betrayed McCain and Palin--the latter should have been pitched as "First Mom, All Ears" not sliced up and fed to the press as she was. McCain has cut corner too, on the POW/MIA issue, for example, but on balance I consider him to be "less controllable" than Obama.

I am beginning to think that the substitute for government regulation that is now possible is public information and public intelligence ("true cost" of everything. Government is collapsing because DC is trying to micro-manage everything and spending more and more on achieving less and less. The Fed and the federal government are inept when it comes to resilience, adaptability, and so on.

Your last comment grabs me. Animal Farm really nailed it, and I do believe all of this is theater. Today Pravda of all places had an editorial on the USA going communist and below is a paragraph from that editorial:

-----------BEGIN QUOTES----------------

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their "right" to choke down a McDonalds burger or a Burger King burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our "democracy". Pride blind the foolish.

Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different "branches and denominations" were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the "winning" side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another.

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America's short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

----------END QUOTES---------------

I have designed a FREE OBAMA sticker, negotiating now for a nation-wide price at all FedExKinko's, and talking to a publicist that has been "donated" to this cause about how to roll out the FREE OBAMA campaign. One thing I am certain of: no one next to Obama less his wife can be trusted to advise him in the public interest, only their own and that of their financial masters. We need to break him out of jail or watch him die in captivity.

Gald to see your comment and have a chance to interact.
Sort of agree, the CFP is certainly a "Members Only" meeting ground for the two-party system and its Wall Street masters but they are a service, not the power. The Trilateral Commission comes closer--Obama is a repeat of the Carter coronation by the Brzezinski crowd, and Obama is going along for multiple reasons including love of the job and fear of assassination if he breaks ranks. I actually believe in his goodness and potential, but right now he is under control and not allowed to stray. Books I would recommend to you are Senator Coburn's Breach of Trust on Congress and Peter Peterson's Running on Empty on the two party system. Rule by Secrecy and Crossing the Rubicon have valuable perspectives, while I tend to pull back from the total conspiracy theory, there is unquestionably a lock on power by a "bi-partisan" system that is, as Grover Norquist likes to say, code for screwing the taxpayer. Right now the federal government is a wealth transfer system from the individual taxpayer to the corporations and the banks, and thinks like welfare and social security are going bankrupt and are in any case a form of shell game, like fool's good sprinkled on the ground in front of the dead mine.
I voted for this sometime back and am glad to be brought back by your comment. Public Media 2.0 is a righteous good document and I have linked to it from Earth Intelligence Network.
You are an abusive obsessive troll. Please go away.
Trying to understand your comment. Political correctness is one thing, e.g. don't ask don't tell, but abuses against the Native Americans, disenfranchisement of the Americans of African descent that continues (e.g. in Ohio, seven hour lines for them, five minute new machines for the pro-Bush whites) and so on. I am heartened by a number of ideas from others centered on truth and the importance of restoring integrity to our lives. Political correctness is a white lie, truth and reconciliation is focused on big ugly black lies that have gone on for centuries. Will come back to this if you respond.
Nine people against electoral reform and someone systematically nullifying any votes for governance reform.....seems like there are some folks that like the mess we have just fine.
I created this suggestion, and the meme "Free Obama" for good reason.

You children with your ranting are off-topic and irritating. You have no clue about the depth of my reading or life experience, you are shallow, annoying, and will henceforth be ignored.

If and when you can bring yourself to think, start with the annotated bibliography at www.oss.net/PIG.

I have no doubt, "Sam," that you are the kind of troll who will then systematically vote negatively for each of my non-fiction reviews, most of which you will not understand.

PLEASE. stop hijacking a serious idea with your persistent childish uninformed nonsense. Go poop in someone else's sandbox. I will not be seeing any more of your annoying automated emails so if you stay here, you are talking to yourself. Have fun.
Comment:
REPOSTED as not seeing it, the first intelligent on-topic remark after carries, thank you.

Where is all this transparency? we vaguely breezed over some of the evil doers, and threats that control Obamas agenda, some of the most important was omitted altogether, like,PNAC,JINSA,AIPAC, And other powerful evil neocon (most not even from our country) supporters that control our country.
A simple problem, gov. officials intentionally broke the laws.. A simple solution, prosecute, it doesn't matter who you are. does it?? what if it was me, or a neighbor, Lets stop all this nonsense of looking ahead and not behind. Our gov. cannot recover without prosecuting these criminals
Guy P Fraser
Cola SC
May 29, 2009 12:19 PM PDT
A Cybersecurity Quiz: Can you tell Obama from Bush?
by Declan McCullagh
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10252263-38.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

The U.S. president has announced a comprehensive cybersecurity
strategy for the federal government, saying Internet-based threats
have risen "dramatically" and the country "must act to reduce our
vulnerabilities."

A 76-page White House document calls for a new way of looking at
Internet and computer security, saying that private-public
partnerships are necessary, collaboration with international
organizations will be vital, and that privacy and civil liberties must
be respected in the process.

Sound familiar? The year was 2003, and the president was George W.
Bush, who wrote the introduction to what he called a "National
Strategy to Secure Cyberspace."

On Friday, President Obama announced his 76-page "Cyberspace Policy
Review" -- with precisely the same number of pages as his
predecessor's -- at an event at the White House.

While the Bush document discusses centralizing cybersecurity
responsibilities in the Department of Homeland Security and the Obama
document shifts them to the White House, the two reports are
remarkably similar. Perhaps this should be no surprise: Obama selected
Melissa Hathaway, who worked for the director of national intelligence
in the Bush administration and was director of an Bush-era "Cyber Task
Force," to conduct the review.

To test your political acumen, we've taken excerpts from both and
placed them side-by side in the following chart. Can you tell which
quotations come from which administration? (An answer key is at the
end.)



For information. The commentary is from Chuck Spinney, featured on cover of TIME in 1980's as the ultimate truth-teller on Pentagon fraud, waste, and abuse. It merits comment that the below remarks address the "non-partisan" bureaucracy that is inter-locked (as are most non-profits) with the existing two-party hack system that excludes all other parties as well as external ideas & concerns.

Has Obama has gone off the policy cliff by irreversibly increasing the
US footprint in Afghanistan-Pakistan theater of operations (not to
mention the domestic policy cliff by bailing out the few wealthy
banksters who precipitated the financial meltdown that is now trashing
the economic hopes and dreams of the mass of non-wealthy Americans)?

The attached report in McClatchy Newspapers illustrates the staying
power of the permanent pol-mil nomenklatura in Versailles on the
Potomac (an accurate if mixed metaphor). The Bushian plans to build a
super presence in Pakistan that have been gestating for at least three
years remain alive and well. Obama might yet be able to save himself
from the ignominious fate these plans imply, but he would have to move
decisively to change course before the end of year, when he will be
faced with approving these appropriations. Unfortunately, decisive
moves are not in the cards. The only possible incentive for such
moves would be a massive catastrophe or faux pas, and with the
"policy" building blocks now in place, and it is far more likely that
such an incident would precipitate reactions that reinforce the
disastrous pathway Obama has been embarked on.

So, after a hundred plus days, say goodbye to "change we can believe
in" and hello to "business as usual."

Analogies are dangerous, because bad analogies can capture the
Orientation of a decision makers OODA loop, and seduce him/her to see
and act on the connections he/she wants to see, rather than those that
exist -- a problem that was extreme during the reign of Mad King
George. But this kind of analogical thinking is also evident in the
Obama Administration's strange belief that a "diplomatic surge" in AF-
Pak will produce a parallel success to the the sham success the
military surge in Iraq (which was hardly a surge, and more based on
bribing Sunnis to switch sides, by Iran's pressure on Moktada al-Sadr
to stand down, and by the successful ethnic cleansing Iraq's mixed
Sunni/Shia neighborhoods) at a time, ironically, when the Iraqi
"surge" is showing signs of coming unglued.

Recognizing this danger of misplaced analogies, I am wondering if
Obama is beginning to look more like Emperor Claudius than President
Abraham Lincoln -- an analogy first suggested to me by Tom Cleaver, a
democratic activist, an Obama supporter and indefatigable Obama fund
raiser. Whereas Lincoln help to create a new birth to American
democracy, Claudius was a best a speed bump on the slippery slope to
ruin. Like Claudius, Obama is clearly better his predecessor, but as
in the case of Claudius, Obama faces a very low bar for comparison
(Claudius' predecessor was Caligula). And being better is not enough,
because like Claudius, Obama is not making (or can not make) the hard
political changes needed to evolve a salutary pathway into the
future. And in not doing so, like Claudius, Obama may be a precursor
to an evolution wherein more corrupt successors -- remember,
Claudius' immediate successor was Nero -- continue to lead the
(American) Empire deeper into the darkness of decay and ultimate ruin.

But then maybe my OODA loop is distorted by the fact that I am now
surrounded by detritus of dead empires, after a passage thru the
historic Dardanelles, passing Gallipoli on my port side and Troy on my
starboard side and Byzantium in front of me.

Chuck
-------------------------

Iraq redux? Obama seeks funds for Pakistan super-embassy

By Saeed Shah and Warren P. Strobel
McClatchy Newspapers
Wednesday, May 27, 2009


ISLAMABAD — The U.S. is embarking on a $1 billion crash program to
expand its diplomatic presence in Pakistan and neighboring
Afghanistan, another sign that the Obama administration is making a
costly, long-term commitment to war-torn South Asia, U.S. officials
said Wednesday.

The White House has asked Congress for — and seems likely to receive —
$736 million to build a new U.S. embassy in Islamabad, along with
permanent housing for U.S. government civilians and new office space
in the Pakistani capital.

The scale of the projects rivals the giant U.S. Embassy in Baghdad,
which was completed last year after construction delays at a cost of
$740 million.

Senior State Department officials said the expanded diplomatic
presence is needed to replace overcrowded, dilapidated and unsafe
facilities and to support a "surge" of civilian officials into
Afghanistan and Pakistan ordered by President Barack Obama and
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Other major projects are planned for Kabul, Afghanistan; and for the
Pakistani cities of Lahore and Peshawar. In Peshawar, the U.S.
government is negotiating the purchase of a five-star hotel that would
house a new U.S. consulate.

Funds for the projects are included in a 2009 supplemental spending
bill that the House of Representatives and the Senate have passed in
slightly different forms.

Obama has repeatedly stated that stabilizing Pakistan and Afghanistan,
the countries from which al Qaida and the Taliban operate, is vital to
U.S. national security. He's ordered thousands of additional troops to
Afghanistan and is proposing substantially increased aid to both
countries.

In Pakistan, however, large parts of the population are hostile to the
U.S. presence in the region — despite receiving billions of dollars in
aid from Washington since 2001 — and anti-American groups and
politicians are likely to seize on the expanded diplomatic presence in
Islamabad as evidence of American "imperial designs."

"This is a replay of Baghdad," said Khurshid Ahmad, a member of
Pakistan's upper house of parliament for Jamaat-e-Islami, one of the
country's two main religious political parties. "This (Islamabad
embassy) is more (space) than they should need. It's for the micro and
macro management of Pakistan, and using Pakistan for pushing the
American agenda in Central Asia."

In Baghdad and other dangerous locales, U.S. diplomats have sometimes
found themselves cut off from the population in heavily fortified
compounds surrounded by blast walls, concertina wire and armed guards.

"If you're going to have people live in a car bomb-prone place, your
are driven to not have a light footprint," said Ronald Neumann, a
former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and the president of the
American Academy of Diplomacy. Neumann called the planned expansions
"generally pretty justified."

In Islamabad, according to State Department budget documents, the plan
calls for the rapid construction of a $111 million new office annex to
accommodate 330 workers; $197 million to build 156 permanent and 80
temporary housing units; and a $405 million replacement of the main
embassy building. The existing embassy, in the capital's leafy
diplomatic enclave, was badly damaged in a 1979 assault by Pakistani
students.

The U.S. government also plans to revamp its consular buildings in the
eastern city of Lahore and in Peshawar, the regional capital of the
militancy plagued North West Frontier Province. The consulate in the
southern megacity of Karachi has just been relocated into a new
purpose-built accommodation.

A senior State Department official confirmed that the U.S. plan for
the consulate in Peshawar involves the purchase of the luxury Pearl
Continental hotel. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity
because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly.

The Pearl Contintental is the city's only five-star hotel, set in its
own expansive grounds, with a swimming pool. It's owned by Pakistani
tycoon Sadruddin Hashwani.

Peshawar is an important station for gathering intelligence on the
tribal area that surrounds the city on three sides and is a base for
al Qaida and the Taliban. The area also will be a focus for expanded
U.S. aid programs, and the American mission in Peshawar has already
expanded from three U.S. diplomats to several dozen.

In all, the administration requested $806 million for diplomatic
construction and security in Pakistan.

"For the strong commitment the U.S. is making in the country of
Pakistan, we need the necessary platform to fulfill our diplomatic
mission," said Jonathan Blyth of the State Department's Overseas
Buildings Operations bureau. "The embassy is in need of upgrading and
expansion to meet our future mission requirements."

A senior Pakistani official said the expansion has been under
discussion for three years. "Pakistanis understand the need for having
diplomatic missions expanding and the Americans always have had an
enclave in Islamabad," said the official, who requested anonymity
because he wasn't authorized to discuss the matter publicly. "Will
some people exploit it? They will."

In Kabul, the U.S. government is negotiating an $87 million purchase
of a 30- to 40-acre parcel of land to expand the embassy. The Senate
version of the appropriations bill omits all but $10 million of those
funds.

(Shah is a McClatchy special correspondent. Jonathan S. Landay
contributed to this article.)
Herb Meyer actually understands both the world of government and the world of intelligence. Here is his spoon-feeding version of what is going on.

May 20, 2009
Revolution
By Herbert E. Meyer


During the last 30 years we Americans have been so politically divided that some of us have called this left-right, liberal-conservative split a "culture war" or even a "second Civil War." These descriptions are no longer accurate. The precise, technical word for what is happening in the United States today is revolution.


Because of our country's history, we tend to think of revolutions as military conflicts, and of the revolutionaries as the good guys; the image of Minutemen fighting valiantly against the British forces at Lexington and Concord lies deep within our DNA. But sometimes -- quite often, actually -- revolutions aren't military conflicts, and the good guys are the ones trying to keep the revolution from happening. In January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany by its elected president; he would spend the next two years consolidating his power with the legislative connivance of his political allies in the Reichstag. In October 1917, Lenin and his Bolsheviks took control of Russia from Kerensky and his Social Democrats -- who had overthrown the Czar earlier that year -- entirely through parliamentary maneuvering in Russia's fledgling Duma.


What defines a revolution -- and this is the crucial point to grasp -- is that when it's over a country has changed not merely its leaders and its laws, but its operating system.


Since most of us think of computers when we hear the phrase "operating system" let me use this analogy to illuminate my point: Every computer has an operating system, and most of us are using either the Microsoft or the Apple operating system. If you want to do something with your computer -- send an email, watch a DVD, read an online essay like this one -- you must do it the way your computer's operating system is designed to work.


No operating system is perfect, which is why Microsoft and Apple send updates to their customers from time to time. And every so often these companies launch new versions of their operating systems that incorporate a lot of modifications at once. Can you change the operating system you use? Of course you can. Two years ago I threw out every Microsoft-based machine in our company's office and replaced them with Apple products. Last month I met a corporate CEO who had just done the opposite, and replaced the Apple computers in his office with ones that run on the Microsoft operating system.


Democracies and Dictatorships


Now, just as computers have operating systems so too do countries. In fact, countries have dual operating systems - one political and the other economic. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of each: Politically you can be a democracy or a dictatorship, and economically you can have either a free market or a command economy. Because countries don't buy their operating systems off the shelf, the way we buy our computer operating systems, each country develops its own versions. This is why our country's democracy is somewhat different from Canada's, which in turn is slightly different from Australia's, and so forth. These countries all have free-market economies, but again they aren't quite the same. Still, the similarities among democracies and free-market economies are more striking than the differences. Likewise, while no two dictatorships are the same, and no two command economies work in exactly the same way, the differences among them are comparatively trivial.


Since no country's operating systems are perfect, can they be improved? Of course they can. Every time our Congress passes a new law, or enacts a new regulation -- or whenever the Supreme Court issues an opinion -- that's the equivalent of an update to our political or economic operating system. Can you change a country's operating system? Yes, you can. And the precise, technical word for replacing one political or economic operating system with another is -- revolution.


When politics in a democracy is normal, the political parties all agree to preserve the operating system while they compete to improve it. This is what is actually happening when one party in Congress introduces a new piece of healthcare or education legislation and the other party opposes it or introduces its own healthcare or education bill, or when two candidates for the Senate argue over whether or not to change our immigration laws. Honorable people often will disagree about what to do -- sometimes quite strongly, just as the software engineers at Microsoft and Apple will sometimes argue through the night about whether a proposed change in the operating system's code is an improvement or just "kludge." But in normal politics the outer limits of all these disagreements are marked by a shared commitment to preserving and improving the operating system.


In abnormal politics, the objective of one party isn't to improve the operating system, but to overthrow it.


With this analogy in mind, now we can see clearly what's been happening in the United States during the last three decades. While conservatives have been working to improve our democracy and our free-market economy, liberals have been working to replace our democracy with a dictatorship, and our free-market economy with a command economy controlled by the government. The liberals couldn't say this aloud, because if they did the American people would have tossed them out of office on their ears. So the liberals worked covertly, feigning support for democracy and for the free market while working diligently to undermine both.


This is why our politics has been so partisan, so vicious, and so deadlocked. This is why words have lost their meaning in Washington, why we can never get to the bottom of anything, why we lurch from one manufactured scandal to another. It's all been part of a decades-long effort by the liberals to throw sand in our eyes -- to keep us from seeing clearly where they really want to take us. (And this explains why, when we question their judgment on some issue, they go berserk and accuse us of questioning their patriotism. They're afraid we're on the verge of catching on. If you want to have some fun, the next time you're chatting with a liberal and he goes nuts when you call him a socialist, say to him: "I'm so sorry you're offended. Please tell me, what is there about socialism you don't like?" You won't get a coherent answer; he'll just accuse you of a hate crime.)


Obama's Two-Front Offensive


With the election of Barack Obama as president, the liberals have launched a massive, two-front offensive they believe will end in victory. They have judged that our public education system is so degraded that only a few Americans are left who even understand what a democracy is, and how the free market actually works. They are convinced that the majority of Americans are too frightened by the current recession to care about preserving the principles that made us the most powerful, productive and innovative country the world has ever known. In short, the liberals are reaching for victory because they believe that history now is on their side.


The speed of their offensive is breathtaking.


At the core of democracy is the rule of law, and we have already lost it. The liberals lecture us incessantly that everything is "relative," but that's not true; some things are absolutes. You cannot claim to be faithful to your spouse because you never cheat on her -- except when you're in London on business. And you cannot claim to have the rule of law if the government can set aside the rule of law when it decides that "special circumstances" have arisen that warrant illegality. When the President and his aides handed ownership of Chrysler Corp. to the United Auto Workers union, they tried to avoid sending that beleaguered company into bankruptcy by muscling its bondholders into accepting less money for their assets than the law entitled them to collect. These contracts, and the law under which they were signed, were mere obstacles to a thuggish President bent on paying off his political supporters.


It's going to get much worse, fast. President Obama has told us time and again that among his criteria for choosing Federal judges will be "empathy." Empathy is a wonderful quality in any human being, but a judge's job is to rule according to the law. Once our courts are presided over by judges who will reach verdicts based on how they feel about an issue -- such as abortion or the right of citizens to bear arms -- the law will be whatever the judges wish it to be; the rule of law will become an empty phrase rather than the architecture of our civilization.


We have lost our free-market economy as quickly as we have lost the rule of law. Money is to an economy what blood is to a body; life and death resides within the organ that controls its flow. The government already owns our country's leading banks, which means the government now controls our economy. (And in all fairness to President Obama, it was the Bush administration that started us down this ghastly road.) One indicator of the Obama administration's real objective: When some banks that had taken federal money attempted to repay their loans, the Treasury Department refused to accept repayment and step aside. This shows the government's goal isn't to prop up the banks, but rather to control them.

Here, too, things are going to get much worse, fast. The government now owns General Motors Corp., is reaching for control of insurance companies, and has launched plans to take over our country's healthcare industry. It even wants authority to set the salaries of executives in industries that, at least for now, aren't being subsidized or underwritten by the government.


Put all this together, and what we have in our country today isn't a democracy and it isn't a free-market economy. Reader, what we have now is a revolution.


This revolution won't be stopped, and our country won't be rescued, by the Republicans in Washington. This isn't because they lack the votes. It's because most of them are careerist hacks who've been playing footsie with the Democrats for too long; with very few exceptions they lack the intellectual firepower to articulate the present danger, and the political courage to stand up to this Administration and really fight. But for the absence of frock coats and pince-nez glasses, these Republicans in Washington remind me of those bumbling Weimar Republic politicians in Berlin who never grasped where Hitler and the Nazis were going until it was too late to stop them, or of those hapless Mensheviks in Moscow's Duma who let themselves be tossed into history's dustbin by Lenin and his Bolsheviks. (Yes, of course I realize it's explosive to keep bringing up the Nazis and the Bolsheviks in an essay about the Democrats. I'm not doing this to be incendiary; I'm doing this to be accurate.)


The Future's in Our Hands


Our country's future now lies within our own hands -- yours, mine, all of us who comprise what the Washington insiders sneeringly call the grass roots. Good, because unless I'm very much mistaken the liberals have over-estimated their strength. There still are more of us than there are of them. I mean ordinary, decent Americans from across the political spectrum who may disagree about specific issues, but who understand who we are and how we became who we are; who love our country, have a genius for self-organizing, and won't let the United States go down without a fight.


We need to launch a counter-offensive, so to speak, and the place to start is at the local level. Working with our county and state political parties when we can -- or working around them when we must -- our objective will be to elect as many people as we can to public office who understand what a democracy is and how the free market works. This will include city council members, county commissioners, school board members, judges, sheriffs and even members of the local parks commission. With the strength and political momentum their elections will provide, we can surge to the state level and then -- before it's too late -- take back the power in Washington DC.


I know this isn't the kind of battle most of us want to fight; we would rather watch the talking heads slug it out on Fox News than stand on a street corner handing out campaign flyers. And given our country's history, for a while it will be uncomfortable to find ourselves fighting against the revolution and for the status quo. But we'll get used to this as we make our case over and over again -- to our friends, our neighbors, at barbeques and PTA meetings and at public rallies like those marvelous April tea parties that drove the liberals insane. And we'll draw strength as our ranks swell with new recruits.


The alternative to launching this kind of peaceful and political counter-attack is horrific. Right now sales of guns and ammunition are rising sharply. This reflects an intuitive grasp by grass-roots Americans of what history teaches may lie ahead. It was only after the Nazis had secured their grip on power in Germany, and only after the Bolsheviks had seized control of Russia, that they set out to disarm and destroy the vast numbers of ordinary citizens who - to the astonishment and fury of the revolutionaries -- just wouldn't go along.


That's when the real shooting started, and when blood began flowing in the streets.


Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council. He holds the U.S. National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, which is the Intelligence Community's highest honor. He is author of The Cure for Poverty and How to Analyze Information.
Anyone who wants to have a name in this forum can just go to their profile.

ttahiti, I appreciate your good intentions but the media is owned by five corporations, and to take the Iraq war as an example, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post all refused--I am told--$100,000 paid in advance full page ads against the war. There are a number of data pathologies and information asymmetries that you can consider at www.oss.net/HACK.

There are some very good folks that do spoon-feeding, I am not one of them.

With best wishes,
Robert
Do your homework. You are ranting. That's your demographic.
I've gone ahead and changed it, recognizing that your reaction is probably representative of an important demographic. Bibliography and more at www.oss.net/PIG (free book, in chapters, ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig).
Thank you for your comment, which brought me back to this rapdily drowning site.

"House Negro" is a termed coined by the pastors of color when they detected his having been "captured" by the mafia determined to beat the Republicans at any cost. In my own circles, it is considered both humorous and appropriate, not disrespectful.

You will find an annotated bibliography of roughly 500 non-fiction books that back up this post at www.oss.net/PIG. As much as I appreciate your well-intentioned rant, you know too little to be so indignant about what is actually a very legitimate concern among all those who recognize that the two "main" political parties are the major obstacle to the achievement of Democracy. If you look at every "decision" Obama has made, each decision is a "mafia" decision not an Obama decision. He is being fed packages of information that drive him in the direction they want him to go, and since you don't seem to have noticed, please note that on all the major themes, his policies are precisely those of George Bush led by Dick Cheney, only he is blowing even more money we do not have on Wall Street firms that *should* be closed down. We should be insuring individual Americans from the bottom up, not these monstrous badly managed firms that have bought a safety net they do not deserve and we cannot afford.
I am arranging for FREE OBAMA bumper stickers and also looking into FREE OBAMA 9-11 money.
Totally agree with Micahel. There is a "buzz" going around the software and social collaborative communities about how low rent this is (others are more diplomatic) and the question is being asked with increasing frequency and intensity: was this a throw-away effort never really intended to mobilize the nation? I think it was, but it is also a good start in terms of FREE OBAMA (see the idea).
See Open Source Agency for the implementing meta-idea and practice. Completely agree.
Voted for this, and really respect the detail you have provided.

Am regretfully dropping out of this entire process, the designers screwed this up so badly that it is now counter-productive.

Version 2.0, if there is one (the Administration appears to have wanted to dip a toe in and NOT actually attract more than the 2.000 or so we have here), is going to have to be MUCH more sophisticated.
Voted for this, the absence of clustering is really beginning to kill this website. Your three ideas were brought up by others and all like ideas need to be clustered and refined, one of the reasons I prefer wiki ofrmat where ANYONE can create but only moderators can destroy (the difference between collective intelligence online and Wikipedia trolls).
Voted for this, the absence of clustering is really beginning to kill this website. Your three ideas were brought up by others and all like ideas need to be clustered and refined, one of the reasons I prefer wiki ofrmat where ANYONE can create but only moderators can destroy (the difference between collective intelligence online and Wikipedia trolls).
Voted for this, see also the Co-Intelligence Institute (cii) ideas and the Open Source Agency that encompasses this idea.

You might enjoy the free book online, COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace, with 55 contributors, at www.oss.net/CIB, and on sale at near cost at Amazon (after their 55% cut).
Voted for it, this idea needs to be clustered (something this web site does not allow which is quite amazing int this day of Web 2.0) with all of the other truth and ethics ideas.

Truth and integrity are the bottom line for America, and if and when the rest of the joins the 2,000 or so folks focusing on this now, this database will crash, but perhaps then Obama will demand a serious outreach effort properly supported conceptually and technically.
Voted for it, on the right track. Needs to be combined with true cost open data, moral capitalism, government going green across the board, and truth & reconciliation commissions, all of which are encompassed in Open Source Agency idea.

You may enjoy my reviews at Amazon (#1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction). An annotated bibliogrpahy with over 500 book reviews on reality is at www.oss.net/PIG.
Voted for your idea but it has already been put up. Unfortunately, this first level software does not permit easy aggregation, linkages, clustering, etc. I have reviewed most of the books and DVDs on 9-11 at Amazon and absolutely agree that it was a whitewash and needs to be properly investigated. I hope Dick Cheney does not die of natural causes before he can be brought to justice.
Please read my review of "Someone Would Have Talked" at Amazon. JFK was killed by Cuban exiles who were trained and equipped to kill Castro by the CIA, but used their training and equipment to kill Kennedy in revenge for the Bay of Pigs. Oswald was a patsy and the US Government knew this because he tested negative for gunpowder.

What I found fascinating about the book was that JFK was warned by his brother RFK and blew it off. There was plenty of warning, the President himself blew it off.

According to the book, Johnson ordered the FBI and the Warren Commission to cover it all up and go with the nonense because Johnson was terrified that his influence peddling would come into play and he would lose his golden gate into the presidency.
There are several related ideas on the importance of truth. Will and Ariel Durant, in Lessons of History, say that morality is a priceless strategic asset. Not only has our government lost its morality, but we have allowed predatory immoral capitalism that externalizes true costs to the public.

I am so very glad to see so many focus on truth and morality--it's the only thing that will save this Republic.
This needs to be clustered with Truth & Reconciliation Commission idea.
Much needed. This was a "throw-away" implementaiton and they appear to have deliberately not publicized it, we can hope (and demand) that it be treated as a pilot. In addition to your idea, we need to be able to tag as part of the comments, to link, and to see rudimentary clustering as well as a strategic analytic model that is a system of systems architecture such as Medard Gabel has created for EarthGame.
This is an important idea, one I ma harvesting for the Open Source Agency idea posted earlier.

Strategies require both a strategic analytic model (e.g. one that recognizes all ten threats to humanity and can harmonize in a Whole of Government fashion across all twelve core policy areas) and a substantial amount of decision support. It also helps to have Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) as the government standard because right now none of the data sets all built by the lowest bidder, can talk to each other even with FirstGov and Gov USA.
This web sight DESPERATELY needs restructuring or replacement. I've seen better idea collection systems in elementary schools.

I have voted for your idea, and wish we could cluster it into Energy, sub-set government purchasing.

Your idea could join with govenrment going all natural gas, the phenomenal U.S. Army concept of "eating the tail" in which fuel convoys are made non-necessary by using renewable power for remote outposts, and so on.

IF the larger public discovers this website, something the Administration appears to be hoping will not happen, this system will both crash and become so bogged down in minutia as to be relatively useless.
Congress has proven corrupt, technology has matured, and so have We the People. I have voted for your idea, and would like to see it clustered with other similar ideas (this web site does not allow that), such as the NCDD idea. We will still need deliberative bodies from neighborhood to nation, but even Congress can be replaced by Citizen Wisdom Councils (Jim Rough's book, Society's Breakthrough, is really excellent).

Bottom line: we need to abolish or reinvent our government, and Congress needs to lead, follow, or get out of the way. They no longer represent the public interest and neither does the White House.
This idea touched me immediately. It could be combined with a national truth & reconciliation day that celebrates Martin Luther King while acknowledging that he was probably killed by a combination of FBI and Army snipers (see Act of State and my review at Amazon).
This idea has already been posted, those seeking to contribute would do well to search for the idea they wish to support first, and only if it does not already exist, enter a new one.

The flogging of blogs and pet rocks can be done in comments.
Hugely important idea that needs to be clustered with other related ideas.
Agree. See my review at Amazon of General Smedley Butler's classic, "War is a Racket". Also Derek Leebaert's The Fifty Year Wound. Obama has fallen under the spell of Brzezinski, a rapid Pole with one more war with Russia in him, who also believes we can push the Chinese out of Africa and Asia while refusing to wage peace the way China and Iran are doing so very successfully.

You might find the annotated bibliography on Reality 101 at www.oss.net/PIG of interest.
Great idea that needs to be clustered and developed. MIT is to be commended for placing its courses free online, and there is a movement around the world away from credentialing and toward team or project learning, just in time learning, etc.

Earth Intelligence Network has called for free cell phones for the poor and free education one cell call at a time via call centers in India and China (they have 1.5 billion poor each, and the capacity to teach in all the languages we do not speak).

I believe your idea needs to be combined with challenge testing, internships (trades in high school, professions in college), year round and life long learning, etc. Education is one of the twelve core policies and your idea has to be in there.
Google steals everything it touches. NOTHING you place with Google (including your supposedly private stuff on Google Enterprise, the digital Trojan Horse) is safe.

What we really need is CISCO AON for individuals, server-routers, so that each individual, through their lifetime, controls their own information and is both accountable for, and rewarded for the value of, their information.

There is another idea about demanding that no government business be done via private email, which is the equivalent of not allowing government employees to answer urgent questions from their home or cell telephones.

You are both on to a core idea that needs to be implemented in a fashion not now available.
Your idea deserves to be integrated with the numerous other ideas that call for a final and total commitment of the government to Free/Open Source Software.

The Open Source Agency is the "meta" idea that embraces all the micro ideas about education, intelligence, research, and open everything.
Great idea. We desperately need the capability to tag (e.g. community, education) at the comment level, and to link to other related ideas, what the "system" is providing is not nearly good enough. Voted for your idea.

COnsider visiting the Open Source Agency idea, it provides for free education and free access to all information in all languages both within the USA and globally to create "wealth of networks".
You're on the same wavelength as Arthur Clarke, who 20 years ago said that all telephone calls should be free. Shared free information is the creator of infinite wealth.

Your idea is embraced by my own, the Open Source Agency as recommended by the 9-11 Commission (but NOT under the spies, under the diplomats instead) and I commend that idea to you and your friends.
PS Notice all the drones voting against you. The two-party hacks are having a terrible time coming to grips with the fact that We the People want our government back.
This is very cool. I think the idea could be expanded to double the terms in office, prohibit political parties (see the new idea just posted by another contributor) and provide for a one month publicly funded campaign that summarizes what should have been an on-going "report card" from constituents on every factor.

I decided to never run from Congress when I read The Power and the Ambition, about Newt Gingrich's deliberate destruction of Speaker Wright, with the key phrase in the book being that office holders were spending half to two thirds of their time with their hand out attending fund-raising events.

You have introduced a very important idea. Thank you.
I *like* this and had not thought of it. 39% of us are now "Independent" according to the latest Pew Poll. The days of the two party crime system are numbered. There is a real elegance to your idea and I am glad you brought it forward.
I wish we could consolidate like ideas, because the really good ones that come up across multiple individuals are being diluted. I have voted for your idea which is fundamental.

You may wish to look at the Open Source Agency idea which includes F/OSS as one of three big open initiatives, the other two being content and decision support (Open Source Intelligence or OSINT), and Open Spectrum as articulated so ably by David Weinberger.
Count on a lot of negative votes from the drones monitoring this. The "closed circle" around tyhe imperial presidency probably fought against this forum, and then did everything they could to minimize its use: Memorial Day week-end, no federal employee announcement, no real publicity nation side.....

I support this idea and hope that active citizens will overpower the drones that are voting against good valid ideas such as this one.
Integrity solves a lot of problems. Free public health as with fire, police, and education solves a lot of problems. Oversight of an inherently crooked system, when those doing the oversight are crooked themselves, does not help, IMHO.
Too many are not online. This is premature.
I would really like to see all these citizen empowerment ideas consoldiated. This web site needs a complete make-over.
This is down in the weeds. Transparency increases integrity, integrity comes with dignity for all.
END the Federal Reserve. I stand with Ron Paul on this one.
Buckminster Fuller laid it all out, today his former co-creator of the World Game has defined an arhcitecture for an EarthGame that integrates all available information including budget and "true cost" information. Read more about this at Earth Intelligence Network (www.earth-intelligence.net).

The Meadows and Limits to Growth crowd also deserve a lot of credit. If government had listened to Silent Spring and Limits to Growth and Ecological Economics (Herman Daly) in the 1970's we would not be in crisis now.

The Open Source Agency idea that I have posted would implement your excellent idea as a foundation stone. All Medard needs is $2 million a year for an open source game that all others can build on.
Will Durant in his original 1916 thesis cited Plato as saying that the highest minister of all, the most important, was the minister of education. I tried to get Colin Powell interested in being Director of National Intellgence so as to redirect half the secret budget toward education and research, to no avail. Your idea is a very important one, and I hope we eventually get the chance to cluster and visualize in a more current version of this somewhat limited online capability.
I opposed DoD back in the day (1992) when ADA was the DoD standard and Object Oriented Programming was coming into being. Today it is semantic web.

I am DoD in soul, but it does not know what it does not know and command and control is history. Epoch B leadership deamnds Free/Open Source Software, transparent stable Application Program Interfaces, generative devices rather than locked down idiocy, and so on.

I respect your good intentions, but the CTOs are the last to know how to create interoperable, adaptive, self-healing systems.

Please consider the Open Source Agency idea as one that honors your intent.
This is a great idea, just as important as single payer health care. I would observe that it is a policy area that fits or spans or is spread across all of the twelve core policy areas (agriculture, diplomacy, economy, education, energy, family, health, immigration, justice, security, society, and water).

For example, we should be restoring neighborhoods and small to mid-size cities where pedestiran, bike, and zip cars are the norm, as well as mass transit, and dramatically reducing the externalization of costs from Wall-Mart and Exxon, where we pay $3 for a gallon of gas that externalizes $12 per gallon to the environment and the public for many generations down the road.

The US government is unintelligent because we have not held it accountable for making informed coherent decisions across all policy areas. The Cabinet departments fight for budget share on behalf of their FINANCIAL stake-holders, not in the public interest.

THAT is what has to change, and we change it by eliminating data pathologies and information asymmetries. I have a briefing on this (words in Notes format) at www.oss.net/HACK.

Please consider the Open Source Agency idea as one that would embrace your own contribution to this forum.
Health is one of the twelve core policies areas that is "out of control" in America, and deliberately so.

I have immediately voted for your idea, but want to make the observation that Health as a nation is a four-part solutions:

Healthy Lifestyle

Healthy Environment (toxin free which most public buildings and transportations means are not)

Alternative or natural cures (e.g. banana oil for breast cancer, the AMA does NOT want you to know this)

LAST RESORT: honest medicine as a public service co-equal to fire, safety, and education, but with standards that elevate education as well as health across the nation. Pharmaceuticals can be cut in price by 99% (not making this up)--the trick is knowing which country (Thailand, South Africa, etc) to buy the generic from for each of the top 75 prescriptions.

The Open Source Agency is intended to create public intelligence in the public interest across the ten threats and twelve policies so that citizens can self-govern and keep their elected representatives honest from day to day, vote to vote, issue to issue.
Resilience is at the local level. This is a great idea that should be expanded. The new meme at the bottom is a combination of "home rule" and "buy local" and I believe that over time absentee ownership will prove to over-turnable at the same time that public ownership of common corporations becomes the norm, e.g. the local milk factory, paper mill, etc.

The same week that Cheney was meeting secretly with Enron and Exxon, WIRED Magazine had a *great* cover story on the need for a new two-way electric grid that "gave back" power from local to regional, and it established the price points for all the alternative fuels.

This government is not seriously committed to green and sustainable because it lacks a strategic analytic model and the kind of transparency of true costs that this initiative (this web site) could lead to.

I am hoping that this web site turns into a Pandora's box that the "bipartisan" (aka criminal) parties in Washington cannot shut again.
I am a veteran who would protect his children from fighting in any war based on 25 impeachable offenses by Dick Cheney and 935 documented lies to the public. I have long felt that universal service was more about creating a civic culture, and that for that reason it should have three options after a common boot camp: Armed Forces, Peace Corps, and Homeland Service. No one should be required to take up arms absent a national ballot initiative--only the Nation as a whole shold go to war, not a bunch of filthy partisan hacks who risk no blood of their own. See General Smedley Butler's book, "War is a Racket," and the DVD featuring John McCain, "Why We Fight." War is a means of transferring wealth from individuals to corporations. Peace and prosperity for all cost one third of what war costs (this has been documented by Medard Gabel, E. O. Wilson, and Lester Brown among others).

This is a long way of saying that I love your idea and wish this web site allowed the comments to add tags that that connect your idea to things like the Open Source Agency from within which this idea could be implemented, making every citizen an "education-intelligence-research minuteman."
This idea can and should be connected with issues and zip codes and timelines and other actors (e.g. corporaitons receiving free public land, exemption from local and state taxes that deprive our local educaitonal systems, etc.

See Open Source Agency for an implementation that would embrace this. See free book online NEW CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE: Personal, Public, and Political, the Preface speaks to your idea with illustrations.

One of the things I am really enjoying about this web site despite the very low level of participation is all the new stuff I am learning. Your State of Grace document is remarkable, and also points out that we need two Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, one for all that has been done domestically to the Native Americans, Americans of African descent, other immigrant groups as well as the poor abused by the power holders; and one for all that has been done to the rest of the world "in our name."

Voted for this, truth and understanding are lacking in our government, this helps. Thank you.
Do not be discouraged if the partison trolls come in and trash your numbers. 9-11 scares everyone in government because they know:

1) 9 countries warned us in advance and FBI had three prior domestic alerts (two walk-ins and the pilot training)

2) Dick Cheney organized a national wide counter-terrorism exercise on 9-11, months in advance, so as to control the government on that day (and he put the local command center on the piers rather than using the command center in WTC that he knew would be destroyed)

3) WTC 7 was not hit at all, and the Pentagon was hit by a missile, not an airplane, and all the evidence that Rudy Guliani had trucks pre-organized to "scoop and dump" was still seen by architects and engineers that found straight heat cuts and thermite traces

The list goes on. For a fantastic list of intelligence officers that support your idea, see the following article by Alan Miller that was just refused by OpEdNews which appears to have finally folded in the face of pressure from the "bi-partisan" rule by secrecy government:

http://patriotsquestion911.com/Counterterrorism_Veterans.pdf
This is what Buckminster Fuller and the Meadows tried so hard to do. The more I learn, the more I appreciate the brilliance of the scholars in the 1970's that "got it" a half century before the rest of us. I totally support your idea and invite you to look at the Open Source Agency idea that would implement the strategic analytic model developed by the 501c3 Public Charity, the Earth Intelligence Center (just a shell at this point), www.earth-intelligence.net.

There are ten high level threats to humanity, the USA is ignored all but two and doing terribly at those two (inter-state conflict and terrorism) and there are twelve core policies from agriculture to water, and the USA is close to idiocy on all of them as the "closed circle" that surrounds Obama actively perpetuates the financial stakeholder interests at our expense.

Part of the Open Source Agency idea that I have posted is a Global Range of Needs and Gifts Table that seeks to harmonize the behavior and spending of all actors in relation to all of this. I also recruited Medard Gabel, co-creator with Buckminster Fuller of the analog World Game, to design the EarthGame (trademarked in his name), and for $2 million a year, he can do exactly what you want and exactly what NONE of the existing government or corporate stakeholders want: create a "true costs" systems model of the whole earth with honest feedback loops.

Your idea needs INTEGRITY as the primary ingredient aross all government actors, none of them have it at this time. Everyone is operating on flawed paradigms, less than 10% of the relevant information, no feedback loops, etcetera.
This is a very important idea, in part because BOTH Congress and the Executive are dysfunctional in the way they are trained, organized, and equipped. There are ten high-level threats to humanity (poverty, infectious disease, environmental degradation, inter-state conflict, civil war, genocide, other atrocities, terrorism, and transnational crime) and there are twelve core policies that have to be harmonized in both Whole of Government and Whole Earth budgeting (agriculture, diplomacy, economy, education, energy, family, health, immigration, justice, security, society, water). Both the Congressional committee systems ("jurisdictions") and the Executive agency and departmental system are totally disconnected from this reality, and also top heavy and lacking in decision support and information sharing across all fronts. The IC is not just useless, it is expensive and counterproductive, sucking up $65 billion plus to deliver 4% of what the President needs ("secrets for the President" while ignoring 96% of what the President needs because it is not secret and in 183 languages we do not speak.

Once implemented your idea could also be expanded to include state and local and other national governments as well as all eight tribes of intelligence (government, military, law enforcement, academia, business, media, non-governmental, and civil society including labor unions and relgions), all of which have distributed intelligence and distributed capacity that we as a collective body need to harmonize in the public interest (e.g. stop one side of government from killing prairie dogs while another side of government has an environmental protection program for prairie dogs, both on the same range).

I would love to see this web site enhanced to the point that we can actually design a government that works for all. See Tom Atlee's The Tao of Democracy among other books I have reviewed at Amazon.
Carrick, a combination of speculation and evaluation. I dedicated a half day to this site, which is still in its infancy, and I am a long-time observer of Amazon non-fiction voting, where blocks of Jewish and neo-con and other voters are active. This site is a GREAT idea, marginally executed, marginally advertised, that scares the "closed circle" mafia to death because they know they are a whisker away from being shut down by an outraged independent citizenry. Look and judge for yourself. The ideas that can be implemented without breaking the backs of the two parties are getting more votes, the ideas that directly threaten the two party system are being killed.....as best I have seen so far.
Thanks for the comment. Winston Churchill liked to say the Americans always do the right thing, they just try everything else first. Neither the President, nor Congress, nor the IC, have been held accountable for getting so many things wrong for so many years--see Derek Leebaert's "The Fifty Year Wound" or my short review at Amazon.

What I have read is that CIA had 4 people in Tehran when the Embassy was captured (that would be a communicator, a secretary, and two case officers) and none of them spoke Farsi. The Iranians were actually offended that they were held to so little account. The Israeli's, in contrast, had Farsi speakers across the country and on the streets.

Lots more on this at www.oss.net/HILL, a number of us have been trying for 20 years to get this public service going, OMB at the civil service level is now good with it, what is lacking is Presidential leadership, which is hard because Obama is trapped in a "closed circle" that shuts all of us out. He needs this as much as we do.
I voted for your idea but would like to see it clustered with a whole bunch of other ideas not yet presented her, on acquisition reform. To take the US Intelligence Community as an example, each of the 16 agencies has 5-15 internal divisions, and all of them have their own favorite contractor. OMB and GSA are very very good organizations that have been practically neutered in terms of common standards and sharing information about getting best in class at best cost.

The entire government needs to be rebuilt, it is a Ford Motor T in an era when everyone else, including third world countries, is leap-frogging past our decaying industrial era practices.
Totally agree. This site really needs work, the government went with what someone knew of, not best in class.
Fight the negative votes---there are 3,000 people monitoring this web site to vote against anything that might reduce Democratic-Republican lock on power. This is amusing. The last gasp of the monster, on its own sword.
Admire the passion. Consider reading about PRIORITY ONE on Amazon, which includes both respect for your idea, and for deep root farming.
Take a look at J. F. Rischard's HIGH NOON (or my summary review at Amazon). You may take some flak for being a conspiracy theorist but I am absolutely certain tha5t Kissinger and Brzezinski are interchangable (and as we learned recently, Bush and Obama are interchangeable as long as they both use Secretaries of the Treasury from Wall Street).

We the People need our own public intelligence agency. I have proposed an Open Source Agency, there is information about it at www.oss.net/HILL as well as an idea in this forum should it please you to take a look.
Right on! Singapore finally did this. Within the intelligence community, despite the lip service to information sharing, it can take an employee a full quarter of their day to make their way into and around the various databases because of exactly the same problem you have.
Am hugely amused by the Democratic operatives working non-stop to vote down any ideas that are critical of either the two party crime system (even petty criminals like to be in charge when the big dogs are out of town) or the FACT that the US government as now trained, equipped, and organized does not represent nor act on behalf of the public interest in a coherent responsible informed manner.

Let's see who wins: citizens with common sense, or Democratic operatives desperate to maintain the fiction that the two party crime system is good for all of us not just the insiders.
The government and its contractors are happily back in Web 1.0. Although some very talented folks created the architecture for GirstGov and gov.usa, the reality is that the various departments and agencies have refused to be r3esponsive to GSA offers of assistance (e.g. GSA's enormously talented citizen advocacy group amd at the same time, OMB's search for common standards has been hampered by an IT bureaucracy across multiple agencies that can only be called challenged. NASA and NGA are better.

I voted for your idea, and believe this endeavor could be expanded to become a genuine electronic democracy architecture such as Whole Earth Review envisioned in February 1986.

www.earth-intelligence.net offers a starting point.

My own idea here, Open Source Agency, may be attractive to you and I offer it for consideration.
These are all great links. See also Deep Debate and Mind Map. Where we have had real problems is with getting the facts before the public. The government at all levels has been using its power to enrich those that pay the leaders while concealing all the side deals and true costs from the public. This whole transparency idea will be NOTHING without a public intelligence agency.

See Open Source Agency idea. Lots of free information at www.oss.net and www.earth-intelligence.net. Bottom line: James Madison had it exactly right: a people that means to govern itself must be armed with truthful information if it is to oversee the government that is supposed to SERVE the states and the people.
I hope you will look at the Open Source Agency idea. Truth is what we have lost, along with the integrity of our government. I absolutely agree with your point, but we need a public intelligence agency that cannot be corrupted by Wall Street, Congress, or the Executive.
This is a big one. See the DVD and the book by the same title, The Corporation. I have reviewed both at Amazon if you want a quick summary.

Across America, "home rule" is joining Naomi Klein's NO LOGO and Jim Turner's "buycott" and Paul Hawkin's "true costs" in reining in corporations.

I anticipate the day when corporations finally realize that only moral green behavior is sustainable over time. SOONER than this I anticipate the day when the various bar code and SMS systems come together and individuals can instantly, at the point of sale, find alternatives to anything they are looking at that is more socially and ecologically responsible.

Glad you posted this. See Open Source Agency for an idea intended to help implement ideas like yours by creating a national "true cost" database with RapidSMS and cell-readable barcodes.
I'd like to see documentation on tax resistance. It infuriates me to see the disconnect between what we pay, what Congress appropriates, what bureaucrats spend, and what corporations pay. The IRS appears to be a wealth transfer mechanism from us to them.
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) is smiling down on you from heaven. I agree. See Open Source Agency idea for an implementation that will embrace your idea.
Do not be discouraged by all the negative votes. I have reviewed two books on natural and alternative cures and been totally impressed by both real-life experience in my family and by the literature.

The medical-death complex does not want healthy citizens or informed citizens.

See Open Source Agency for an idea that would among other things make full information about natural and alterantive cures available free to all, while also exposing the true cost of the medical and pharmaceutical fraud now prevalent across America--with 50% of all health expenditures recently certified by PriceWaterhouseCoopers as WASTE.
In 2000 I called for a University of the Republic to integrate entry-level, journeyment, mid-career, and senior leaders across the eight tribes of intelligence. The book, ON INTELLIGENCE, is free at www.oss.net as well as for sale at Amazon.

See Open Source Agency for an implementing idea that would fund your own idea as part of a schoolhouse to White House public intelligence in the public interest network.
Many cgovernments, from China to Norway, have come to the same conclusion.

See Open Source Agency for an idea that embraces your own, and is the proponent for F/OSS at all levels of government, as well as Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), Open Spectrum, and other Opens.

My briefs on Open Everything are at www.oss.net/GNOME and www.oss.net/UNICEF.
Totally agree. If I were ever DNI my first act would be to create a GAO section and to integrate all the IGs across all the agencies.

See Open Source Agency for an implementation idea that will move partially toward what you are envisioning.
VOTING FROZEN? The webmaster must think that a certain rate of positive votes suggests block voting, which is NOT the case. Voting needs to be UNFROZEN.
Outstanding! Learned from your post. See Open Source Agency as an implementation that would embrace your own idea within the everything open philosophy.
See Open Source Agency that embraces your own idea.
The poor still need paper. We must defer to their needs.
Absolutely. And (smiling) no A for any paper unless the author can find a customer who can use the knowledge.

See Open Source Agency for an implementing idea that unites with eight tribes of intelligence (decision support): government, military, law enforcement, academia, business, media, non-governmental, and civil society including labor unions and religions.
The negative votes tell you this site is rigged already.

See my review of Webster Tarpley's book on 9-11.
Lovely. See Open Source Agency for an implementing idea that would keep both Congress and the Executive honest while providing public intelligence in the public interest to the public.
Long overdue. See the National Budget Simulation for an early attempt.

See Open Source Agency for an implementing idea that would embrace your own.
Chuckling. The problem will be finding someone to run the place. It is insolvent, crumbling at the core, and so on.

America is at a turning point. Either we get Electoral Reform that reinstates the Constitution and citizens bearing arms as the soverign power (the federal government is a service of common concern created by the United STATES of America, it is NOT a power unto itself).

Am afraid your well-intentioned cry in the wilderness will not get much sympathy from those using this program, as most are heavily invested in the existing two party crime system.
Love your post. Jefferson said a nation's best defense is an educated citizenry, and Madison said that a populace that means to govern itself must be informed.

See Open Source Agency for an implementing idea that embraces your own.

Earth Intelligence Network is the 501c3 Public Charity created to pursue public intelligence in the public interest.
What I think you are proposing is a government planning, programming, and budgeting system (PPBS) that is based on full access to all relevant information, transparent sound decision making processes, and no hidden costs.

Agree. See Open Source Agency for an implementing idea.
Do not be discouraged by the negative votes.

So many people are ignorant of the fact that banks are lending money they do not have and charging interest they do not deserve (including 29.9% interest). This criminal misbehavior is authorized by Congress.

I stand with Ron Paul on ending the Federal Reserve (which is neither Federal nor a Reserve) and I believe that we need to return to public ownership of corporations and public oversight of how public assets are given away. Deer Hunting with Jesus opened my eyes to the crimes of local planning commissions that give tax breaks, public land, and public services to corporations in return for personal commissions that deprive the local educational system of funding.

The spirit of your recommendation is righteous--increased public understanding and acceptance will come with time.
This is huge. I am a big fan of World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility (WISER), Naomi Klein's No Logo and Shock Capaitalism, and the whole idea of true cost being available to anyone at the point of sale--4000 liters of water, 10 gallons of gas, 100 hours of sweatshop labor, $100 million in tax avoidance by the seller--what a difference this would make.

Howard Bloom has a new book coming out on moral capitalism and I have reviewed books by many on responsible capitalism--We the People have abdicated our role as informed citizens and informed consumers.

See Open Source Agency for an implementation idea that would absolutely honor and implement your idea.
What is really needed to implement your good idea is a National Strategy Center that can address all ten high-level threats across all twelve core policy areas, and then oversee the government as well as harmonize state and local, international, corporate, and non-governmental expenditures.

See Open SOurce Agency for a means to implement your good idea.
I have written several books on this topic and reviewed many others.

Your idea has merit in the sense that the totality of the budget (both CIA and Pentagon) should be revealed. I can tell you right now that the secret intelligence budget per year is no less than $65 billion a year and probably closer to $75 billion a year, and that for this we get no more than 4% of what the President or any combatant commander or agency head needs to know.

See Open Source Agency for an implementing idea that would ultimately justify your idea, which the Federation of American Scientists has also put forward.
This is what OMB is supposed to be doing, along with GAO, but on the one hand OMB gave up managing and settled for number stacking long ago, and GAO is blocked by the secret world and others from being effective.

I like your idea, very much, and would offer up the need to expand it down into state and local and upwards toward regional (e.g. Central American IG). The public lacks an effective means of oversight of its money, and your idea is a good starting point.
I have voted for this, but insert a caveat here: kum-ba-ya dialog is WORTHLESS in the absence of shared information and sense-making. The public needs decision-support, public intelligence in the public interest. See Open Source Agency for an implementing idea that would absolute make NCDD a primary conduit for citizen engagement with real facts for real people.
This is a spectacular idea, with one observation: first we need to mandate tightly drawn districts and get away from the criminal gerrymandering and other electoral crimes that the two party crime system has put in place. See Electoral Reform.
I have personally witnessed the abuse of this, both in the form of "Fitness for Duty" physicals which is how CIA intimidates its internal iconoclasts and whistle blowers, and in the removal of clearances from individuals who go public on 9-11 and other high crimes and misdemeanors.

This is something OMB could do if it every put the "M" back into its functioning, as there is no court of appeals on this outside of the very system that is abusive of its power.

Some of the people managing the Defense Office of Hearings and Appeals have jobs because the government cannot find chimpanzees willing to wear a suit and sit still all day.

BADLY needed reform.
See Open Source Agency.
Long-valued idea. See Electoral Reform.
Getting pretty sick of seeing your entire 20th Century idea stream here. A lot of good ideas but would have preferred to have some consolidated big ideas. Am going to bypass all other entries by your organization because I now feel you have been abusive.
This is an unrealistic idea.
Right on. This is at best a terribly executed endeavor and at worst a deliberate joke on the public.
This web site was not intended for every idea your group ever had.

The PFIAB is a joke. The Danish concept of a citizen's board is so far remove from this collection of "friends who cannot qualify for anything else" board that I have to wonder how little you actually know about the intelligence world.
Good stuff. See Open Source Agency proposed to be under diplomatic auspices.
This really is silly. How about an Office for Restoring the Constitution?

The government is BROKEN in near-treasonous ways. This is a well-intentioned badly executed initiative by the Obama Administration, but it is a crack that needs to be widened.
Classified imagery is code for secret contracts with preferred contractors who pay no penalty for being incompetent (Lockheed and SAIC come to mind). See Open Source Agency for a concept intended to put 75% of the secret world out of business.
Prison is a slavery business. I totally agree with your suggestion, but it is part of a larger problem of money buying Congress. The military-industrial complex has been joined by the prison-slavery complex and the hospital-death complex.
More to the point, get the money and the secrecy out of the people's business.
The problem you have with this idea is that you are focused on Bush. It is actually the two party crime system, owned by Wall Street, that comprised fascism.

Notice how Obama is a virtual twin to Bush. Under our present corporate controlled fascist system, who is president does not really matter, they are puppets. And Obama, as smart as he is, is surrounded by sleaze from Illinois and has-beens like Brzezinski and Summers--the fact that he went along with the Wall Street Bail-Out, is keeping Guantanamo open, and is planning a 50 year war for Central Asia tell me all I need to know about his incapacity.

Obama needs to be freed from captivity.
Truth and integrity are the core foundations for the Republic. When Senators are writing books about Breach of Trust (speaking of their own Congress), when we have books outlining 25 impeachable acts by Dick Cheney, and other books exploring the $300 million not yet accounted for by Obama's team, the truth is no where to be found in the US Government. CIA lies to Congress, Pelosi lies to her constituency, it all makes me sick to my stomach.

E Veritate Potens: Through Truth, We the People are Made Powerful.

LOVELY contribution, thank you.

See Open Source Agency idea for an implementation possibility.
What drives me crazy about USAJobs as well as DIA jobs website is that there is no coherence at the top. Qualified individual should be "qualified" and then linked to jobs for which they are qualified. We should not have to look for each and every job ourselves. We have an industrial era government playing at the Internet, and very little true incentive to serve We the People.
Do not lose faith in your good idea. Most people these days have no idea what Robert's Rules of Order are, or how to behave in a civil manner or how to access real truthful information about anything now being ideologically debated.

This is a lovely elegant idea that merits implementation.
The negative votes tell me that corporate voters are all over this website, and the citizens are not yet focused.
This idea may be in the wrong category. It is a very important idea, a fundamental idea, and merits more support as well as being clustered in with related ideas that are attracting more votes.
I like this. The meme is Whole of Government. We need a national decision support service to further this, as well as a national strategic analytic model. See Open Source Agency for one implementing possibility.
This needs to be clustered with other similar initiatives. Vote my mail is still needed for the poor, but the idea is sound.
FOIA needs complete reworking. It is being abused by foreign governments (including Israel, France, and Germany as well as China) and by corporations to obtain information they have no right to. FOIA should be limited to individual citizens, and ONLY the citizens concerned or their legally designated representative should be able to make absolute demands for disclosure, including to the classified databases of the US intelligence community.
The list may have been made public in 2006 (thank you for that insight) but it is still a total mess, with both way too many false positives and no real effectiveness at the stated objective. This does need more sunshine.
90% of secrecy is turb protection and concealment of fraud waste and abuse. I have written several books on this topic, all free at www.oss.net. The government spends $65 billion a year or more on the 20% we can steal, and for this the President gets 4% of what he needs in the way of decision support. See the Open Source Agency as an implementation vehicle for your good idea.
Very important, should be clustered with other related initiatives that demand reading the bill, consultation with constituencies, public information being made available, advance posting of the legislation, etc.

This web site is "out of control" and does not provide the most basic means for clustering....as if they WANT us to fail.
Anyone who has served their sentence should be restored to full rights.
See Open Source Agency.
See Electoral Reform.
Absolutely. See Electoral Reform for an idea that can consolidate all such ideas as this one. The League of Women Voters were displaced by the two party crime system explicitly to exclude Independents and third party voters, and I am furious over how Virginia and other states continue to deny Independents and others access to the publicly broadcasted debates.
This is fundamental. Truth is the core foundation for integrity. We have a government that lies to us.
Absolutely vital. Combine with Electoral Reform.
This needs to be consolidated with Electoral Refomr, I have posted the original idea of Ralph Nader as refined by Jim Turner and myself, an Electoral Reform Act should be the non-negotiable first step in Obama representing the 70% of the country that did NOT vote for him.
Absolutely on target. Your idea is a good one.
Don't be discouraged by the negative votes. The "fix" is in and this web site is being overly influenced by those with an agenda and very little immagination.
This needs to be consolidated with the multiple similar ideas along these lines. US Government either does not want to take this web initiative serioiusly, or id deliberately "handcapping it" by dumbing down what we can do here--this is a 1998 web site, at best.
"True cost" information is the way to go. The studies have been done, we can eliminate 99% of Medicare funding shortfalls by buying generic in bulk overseas. The trick is knowing which country to buy from for each of the 75 top prescriptions.

Congress and the Executive lack integrity. We must demand "true cost" information, and the Open Source Agency I have proposed is one way to consolidate all these good ideas and have them acted upon by an independent agency that cannot be manipulated by either Congress or the Executive. The media was supposed to do that, but Wall Street bought them up as well.
The sad reality that I have discovered in trying to work with citizen change groups these past few years is that they are "invested" in the two party crime family and don't have the integrity or the courage to break free. The Unified Independents is the only group I can see that is actually honest, and their honesty is gaining traction: 39% of the voters now consider themselves Independent.

The two party system is a constant breach of the public trust, and made a fool of Bloomberg, among others. As Grover Norquist likes to day, "bi-partisan is what you get when the two parties get together to screw (sic) the American people."

I am FURIOUS over the dismissal of the League of Women Voters from the Presidential debate system by the "Commission" specifically designed to monopolize the debate, and by the states that allow the two party system to exclude Independents from public debates.

Your idea is a good idea, an important idea, and anyone who votes against either lacks integrity or lacks a brain.
Awesome commentary. Great contribution.
See the Open Source Agency idea as the implementing vehicle for your idea, which is totally on target--kum-ba-ya dialog means nothing without decision support such as you propose.

The sad truth is that our elected representatives are in constant betrayal of the public trust in part because the entire system listens to money, not facts. Witness Bill Gates lying to Congress about needing more visas--what he REALLY wants is to be able to undercut the salaries of the qualified Americans who are available but cost $10-20 an hour more than an imported immigrant. No one called him on this lie.
I like this. See Open Source Agency which could adopt this as one of its missions.
You might be interested in the Public Daily Brief (pdb) that Earth Intelligence Network did for two years before financial situation stopped the work. There are ten high-level threats to humanity and twelve core public policy areas, and CIA and the rest of the USG do not do decision support on all but the military-oriented ones. It's time we demand a government that is not only open, but thoughtful and informed.
This is a super idea, and one that is consistent with Citizen Portal and the ideas in my book (free online at www.oss.net, not just for sale at Amazon), THE NEW CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE: Personal, Public, & Political, in which my own rendition of the citizen portal allows anyone to select their priority issues and then see who is spending what, who is deciding what, who is advocating what, and then "link in" and "weigh in."

The USG is not yet serious about this, this Open website effort limited to a few days over the Memorial Week-end is nothing more than a mini'circus that will go nowhere unless everyone demands that it be extended for 30 days, left online permanently, and upgrades to a proper Web 2.0 visualization and consolidation site by the Internet Center at Harvard and/or others.
This web site needs massive upgrade--it is so Web 1.0. We need to be able to link good ideas like yours to others, and group like ideas together. The way to implement your good idea given that the majority of the poor do not own computers or have Internet access is to mandate absentee voting without restrictions.
Agree with the spirit of your observation. Believe that tags need to be used to create new categories, e.g. Open Spectrum, Open Carry, Open Skies, Open Source Software, etcetera.

OPEN really means restoring the Constitution Of By and For We the People who may bear arms anywhere anytime.
Crowd-sourcing can be managed constructively. What you are really talking about is application of the Collective Intelligence of all, which demands accountability, transparency, participation, and INTEGRITY, something Congress and the Executive no longer display because they can get away with high crimes and misdemanors regardless of which party is in "power" because Wall Street and the Federral Reserve are still in charge.
ABSOLUTELY. We don't know what we already know. See the Open Source Agency initiative as a possible home for this important idea.
This is a very important idea that should be included in the mandate of the Open Source Agency that promotes public intelligence, free open source software, and open spectrum, ultimately making all information free to all citizens in all languages.
Right on target! James Madison and AThomas Jefferson both understood the urgency of having an informed public, not just an engaged public. You and others may be interested in my proposal, developed with over 8,000 others over the past twenty years, for an Open Source Agency that champions Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) for *all* government information operations at every level; and Open Spectrum as defined so very ably by David Weinberger. My brief on Everything Open is at www.oss.net/GNOME, and my brief to UNICEF on Open Everything is at www.oss.net/UNICEF.
The problem with the kum-ba-ya process is that it is uninformed. No amount of "dialog" is going to move society forward without DECISION-SUPPORT--all of the facts, from a 360 degree perspective, presented to all of the stakeholders. I support your idea, but it is VITAL that public intelligence (decision-support) be seen for what it is: both vital, and absent from all public dialog.
The staff do not read the bills either.

Open Government must demand that all bills including all earmarks be posted online for one week before being voted on, and that all expenditures of the taxpayers money in any zip code be pro-actively brought to the attention of every taxpayer in that zip code in advance of the legislation being voted on.
Problem with Wikipedia is too many destructive trolls. I believe in ALL can create and only MENTORS can destroy. Having said that, I consider your recommendation totally consistent with Epoch B management, which is the last thing this Administration or any other wants--as many will have noticed, there is no substantial difference between Obama and Bush--they are both captives of the Wall Street and industrial ownership of a craven Congress in which both parties have betrayed the public trust. We will not get open government until we break the backs of the two criminal parties and put Independents in the majority in both the Senate and the House.
www.oss.net and www.earth-intelligence.net are the home bases for the global movement that started in 1988. short-cuts are listed at the top of www.oss.net. Everything on both sites is totally free and in the public interest.
Totally agree. The data entry period and comment period should be extended by at least two weeks and ideally four weeks.

Your gut instinct is, I think, on target. It does not really matter who is president, the "system" is locked into place and we are not part of it. The contempt for voters that persists in this Administration is so close to that of the prior Administration that I cringe for our future.

Good news: 39% of the voting public is now "Independent." This could be the same last gasp for the democratic mafia that Bush-Cheney were for the extremist Republicans.