Truth & Reconciliation Commissions 

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."

Free Obama (No Kidding) 

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.

Redirect Secret Intelligence Toward Open Democratic Intelligence 

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 

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.

National Security Reform 

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.”

Intelligence Reform 

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.

Electoral Reform 

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.

Open Source Agency per 9-11 Commission 

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.