ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig, Call to Arms—Fund We Not Them
Call to Arms: Fund We Not Them
Our plan—eight years in the making and reflecting the insights of over thirty pioneers—has now been accepted by a major national university for implementation as a public policy engagement project. This plan is also ready to be implemented in terms of fund-raising if the third party candidates and/or Mayor Bloomberg will agree to ONE Public Trust that fully funds all third party candidates initially, and eventually ALL candidates—we need to get BOTH the federal government AND corporations out of the campaign finance business.
Earth Game will also be explained, the urgency of addressing the needs of the eight demographic challengers will be touched on, and the Global Range of Gifts Table will be described.[1] All of this has huge Open Money, Open Spectrum, Jeffersonian Local, Natural Cure, and Zero Waste/Clean Energy implications. Here I present the original vision as developed by the 24 co-founders of the Earth Intelligence Network, with important inputs from Joe Trippi (the Liberty Bond subscription under $20 a year) and Jim Turner (make it annual). I conceptualized the migration of this model to the rest of the world. What this does is create an aggregation of both bottom-up funds and bottom-up direct access to information that no one controls—that is completely independent of banks, governments, and Google. It also energizes the potential for giving by one billion individuals, 80% of whom do not contribute to foundations or have a means of identifying micro-cash gift opportunities among the five billion poor.
Concept for a Liberty Fund Of, By, and For We the People
It is now public knowledge, courtesy of a leak from a professor at a north eastern university, that the Contract with America led by Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, was the culmination of a deliberate Republican Party campaign to “buy” the US Government “from schoolhouse to White House,” and that the amount of money they calculated was necessary to achieve that objective was $300 million a year. Today that would be $500 million a year, and that is our benchmark.
The Republican Party is just as broken morally and pragmatically as is the Democratic Party, but Republicans are better at statistics, mathematics, and ultra-sophisticated bribery of candidates. The Republicans have not been as effective as the Democrats at election fraud, but with the thefts in Florida (2000) and Ohio (2004) they have learned, albeit clumsily, and in 2008 they are holding their own with the Democrats—one could even conclude that electoral fraud in this election, despicable as it is, has leveled the playing field.
Electoral fraud and campaign finance are the two sucking chest wounds in the Republic. We must eradicate both. The online public policy engagement tool described at the beginning of this chapter does the first, by establishing a universal means (including call centers for engaging the poor who have cell phones and localized caucuses in the workplace for those that do not wish to use cell phones) for engaging every citizen and creating a public transparent statistically reliable baseline that not only makes deliberative democracy and self-governance possible, but also provides a baseline accurate at the zip code and county levels for flagging electoral fraud from voting district to voting district.
That leaves us with campaign finance and abusive political party power, both means of legally—but unethically and unconstitutionally—disenfranchising the voter.
Regardless of how honest a person is on the day they are elected—and we do send honest people to Washington—within a few weeks they realize that they must spend half or more of their time with their hand out, fund-raising, and that taking bribes or “contributions” from corporations is an efficient way of meeting their funding needs.[2]
They also learn that “party discipline” is code for turning over their vote and abdicating their responsibility to serve as an honest broker for their specific constituency. Party discipline, enforcing a party leadership choice rather than a public consensus choice, is the second form of corruption in Washington.
A third form is new, at least in my own lifetime: the complete abdication by Congress of its Article 1 responsibilities to balance the power of the Executive. During the past two Administrations, despite some opposition from a handful of Republican Senators of stature, the Republicans on the Hill chose to become foot-soldiers doing the bidding of the White House. Every single one of them is eligible for impeachment.[3] When the Democrats came to power, however tentatively, they became doormats, and have refused, for example, to act on Representative Denis Kucinich’s valid call for the impeachment of President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney—the first a well-intentioned village idiot; the second a nakedly amoral war criminal.
Concept for Public Engagement in the Policy-Budget Process
Strategic Objective: To use the real US Government Budget as a basis for inspiring policy discussions and agreements among all US citizens regardless of party affiliation, in order to efficiently identify areas of agreement and disagreement on both specific policies and on the relative priorities for spending among the 30 agencies within the US Government that have discretionary spending authority. Ultimately this generic Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) system could be migrated downstream to all state and local jurisdictions, and also exported to other countries to be used to inspire similar bottom-up citizen’s engagement in the political and policy processes of their own countries. At some future date, using the Information Economy Meta-Language (IEML) being developed by Dr. and Professor Pierre Levy, Canada Research Chair in Collective Intelligence,[4] we make this language-independent, and begin cross-fertilizing historical and cultural perspectives with a special focus on migrating as much useful knowledge as possible to the five billion poor, one cell call at a time. Politics done honestly is about group consensus regarding means (revenue), ways (programs), and ends (outcomes), all in the context of a fixed Earth, constrained resources, and a shared commitment about nurturing a community.
Tactical Objective:To help all citizens, beginning with students studying the policy process and how to engage all stakeholders; learn how to access, share, and make sense of relevant information;
There is one very important vacuum that must be filled for the above democratic deliberative dialog and decision-making to be successful: the U.S. Government in particular, but all organizations in general, must adopt an “Open Everything” philosophy that shares rather than hoards information, which makes possible the harnessing of the distributed intelligence of all of our communities as well as foreign communities. I want to stress this—we have so many challenges, many of them potentially responsive to low-cost and low-tech solutions that might occur to someone who has not been raised in the USA that we cannot neglect a much broader multinational dialog on all aspects of our future. The Earth Intelligence Network, in partnership with all those organizations and virtual social networking groups that choose to adopt the F/OSS platform for what we now call—inspired by the Swedish military—Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2), is creating a public F/OSS platform in partnership with a major US university, and we hope to make it available, free, within a few months.
We create wealth—what Yochai Benkler aptly has named the Wealth of Networks[5]—by doing what Alvin and Heidi Toffler understood was possible back in the 1990’s: using shared information and open sense-making as a substitute for violence, for wealth, for time, for space, for labor. Among all their books, PowerShift:Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century,[6] will always have a special place in my heart and head, because it was an influence in my choosing to leave the Marine Corps to pursue my vision, and it was the last book of theirs I was to read before meeting them personally, when they agreed to speak in 1993 to over 800 people from around the world on the topic of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT).
After twenty years of helping 90 governments around the world understand the importance of getting a grip on the 96% of the information they do not have to steal, in 183 languages we in the USA do not speak or understand, I have turned away from OSINT, which has been virtually castrated by the secret intelligence world. I focus now on public intelligence in the public interest, and believe that We the People can put both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Google out of business….and if John Chambers does not produce a router-server with distributed search and at rest encryption, we can put CISCO out of business at the same time.
On this page and the next I will very concisely outline my view of the ease with which We the People could use existing capabilities, notably Amazon, and our own inherent brilliance as human beings, to create Collective Intelligence or Group Genius that is timely, relevant, and infinitely scalable to meet the challenges that bureaucracies and machines cannot comprehend, much less resolve.
Here is a shared vision on what any individual should be able to access from any hand-held device, without giving up their privacy including their location, and without turning a complete copy over to Google to exploit in ways most people do not realize—including sharing with the CIA. In the Figure below are the very basic eight functionalities that any citizen can begin to use and to share. AltaVista was going in the right direction, but Hewlett Packard had no idea what they represented, and Google took them over, which is not a good thing, because Google is focused on control and ownership, rather than low-tech community building able to scale infinitely with human brain sense-making.
Here I offer a construct that was originally developed by Diane Webb, then working in the Office of Scientific and Weapons Research (OSWR) in the Directorate of Intelligence (Analysis) at CIA, one that I subsequently modified to reflect what was possible in a cloud-computing environment in which some form of Application Oriented Network (AON) service was available to the end-user, with control provided to each at the point of data creation, not as an afterthought.
There is one reason and one reason only that we do not have all eighteen of these functionalities available to us today via F/OSS, and that is because Microsoft has persisted in migrating and mutating Application Program Interfaces (API) so as to force third-party developers to pay tolls or join the Microsoft conspiracy against free and open information sharing. Bill Gates is reputed to have stated that open source software is communist. That is of course idiocy, but it does make one wonder if Bill Gates is comfortable being regarded as a fascist by the very people that he demeans, people who have given their lives in service to the broader public.
I will not address promising developments in visualization, other than to make the obvious point that most of us are now far beyond data mining, and well into semantic meaning and the integrated use of geospatial and time spectrums combined with powerful combinations of color, sound, and even feel.
As an interim solution for those wishing to combine access to public sources and a handful of analytic tools, I strongly recommend SILOBREAKER, at
Below I list the functional elements of the public policy engagement platform that is underdevelopment (in beta within the sponsoring institution), and the cover of a sample weekly intelligence report covering the world, where one can drill down into any threat, policy, or challenger to a line item level of detail.
What this does, in essence, is this:
1. Anyone can register, free, being asked only to identify themselves by postal code and party if any (totally flexible).
2. They then have access to each of their budgets from municipal to county to state to national, and can create “MyBudget” for each or any one of those levels.
3. These varied choices are then aggregated by postal code and party preference, and the competing aggregate choices visualized as a foundation for appreciative inquiry and deliberative group decision-making, crossing party lines in the context of a balanced budget that forces choices to be made.
4. It is at this point that the citizen is both given access to existing public intelligence sources and analytic tools, and incentivized to discover, discriminate, distil, and disseminate public intelligence in support of their views. Unlike Wikipedia, where any moron can destroy the work of others, we protect all points of view—only moderators and certified non-partisan masters can delete, while respecting the right of all, including trolls and malicious morons, to contribute. Below is a depiction of what this means in terms of increasing the amount of relevant information that can be brought to bear on the public dialog.
5. Not yet developed, but possibly the most exciting and catalyst for human engagement, is the EarthGame™ that will begin as a decision-support platform focused on the ten high-level threats and the twelve policies, and then gradually expand outward, offering its generic open code to one and all. When combined—an infinitely scalable EarthGame™ and an infinite number of human brains engaged in both providing relevant information for sharing, and in collaborative sense-making, I am quite sure we will change both the manner and the outcome of all organizational and group endeavors.
6. After integrating the EarthGame™ and ensuring that it emulates the very high standards set by the open source software community for propagating itself in a trusted manner, the next step will be the migration of the total offering—all free—to other languages beginning with Portuguese, Chinese, and Hindi. Ideally, each of the seven demographic challengers would choose to create a national call center and a national gaming and simulation center, all inter-connected, and all able to both mobilize and inform each of their citizens via cell phone.
7. Finally, the entire package is converted into a Global Range of Gifts Table that is constantly updated and includes every individual with something to offer, and every individual with a need, however small.
Earth Game™
A complete but concise overview of the EarthGame™, under development by Medard Gabel (co-creator with Buckminster Fuller of the analog World Game), is posted online at Earth Intelligence Network. He needs $2 million a year to create the EarthGame™ platform that we would link to, in which every citizen ys themself at every level on every issue of interest to them.
Many people have come to appreciate the value of Serious Games and Games for Change, and I will be the first to say that those two movements inspired me to seek out Medard Gabel and fund the early definition of the EarthGame™. He taught me something very important that I wish to share here.
Medard Gabel taught me that the existing Serious Games cannot be merged to set the stage for a larger EarthGame™ for the simple reason that they were not designed to be inter-operable and do not have the right “hooks” to be integrated. As he said to me, it would be like trying to combine soccer, baseball, football, basketball, wrestling, and swimming into one big game called “Sports.” Won’t work, cannot be done.
What can be done is to create an open source software platform that is stable, transparent, and offers standard settings by which game developers can plug in to incoming data feeds, assumption settings, participation settings, and so on. Read the top-level description for more details. Earth Intelligence Network has no equities in the EarthGame™ other than to hope that it is funded, directly to BigPictureSmallWorld, as soon as possible. If we are able to attract funding sufficient to these needs, the EarthGame is the first element to be funded beyond the policy-budget engagement platform.
Strategic View of Need to Invest in the Eight Challengers
Before concluding with the Global Range of Gifts Table, I want to offer up a visualization of the why and the how of engaging as a Republic with the eight demographic challengers. My reasoning is quite straight-forward. With their demographic mass, each of the challengers cannot be defeated nor even directed by force of arms—the power of people is a power no government can suppress.[7] We must therefore strive to educate all people, and empower them with wealth-creating access to information. Alvin and Heidi Toffler nailed it in War and Anti-War and again in PowerShift: information is a substitute for violence, capital, labor, time, and space. Information can and should create infinite revolutionary the wealth, the wealth of knowledge, the wealth of networks.[8] Put bluntly: we help them create wealth and avoid our mistakes, or we die.
Global Range of Gifts Table
Long ago, while completing my first graduate degree, I learned what a “sparse matrix” is and how it can be used to make possible an infinitely scalable matrix where the empty spaces do not take up precious storage and power and memory. Imagine the below two-dimensional matrix (on the left) as consisting on one axis of everyone on the planet and what they need; on the other axis, all of them again, but this time representing what they can give. Now imagine this being geospatially and time aware, so that the person with the need is matched with the nearest person with a gift to give, e.g. mothers gifting used clothing.