Public Intelligence Blog

Robert David STEELE Vivas

I visited New York City 6-7 October 2011.

First I met with Alexa O’Brien, one of the brilliant minds behind U.S. Day of Rage and its focus on Electoral Reform and non-violence as an absolute.  [My memo that Fox news still has not read is here.]

Although they are also focused on a Constitutional Convention, as Lawrence Lessig has been, I reiterated the point that Electoral Reform is the one thing that can be demanded today (no later than 6 November, one year prior to Election Day), with severe consequences for every elected person if Congress fails to pass Electoral Reform by President’s Day (February 2012), to include recall or impeachment, and camp-outs at their offices and in public spaces near their homes through to Election Day 2012.

Photos and Additional Comments Below the Line

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Robert David STEELE Vivas

TINY URL for this post:

http://tinyurl.com/OWS-Steele

Below are the working papers that have been posted for discussion in New York City, first with the Day of Rage team (it is neither a Day nor a Rage and it is all about electoral reform), then with the General Assembly at OccupyWallStreet, beginning with a handful of self-selected facilitators.

I will be driving a 1964 MGB, red in color, license VA MGB 64.  If we do the human megaphone, it should be around 1700 (5 pm) Thursday or 1100 Friday.

The best context for understanding what I hope to accomplish is provided by Tom Atlee in his Tom Atlee: Occupation Catalytic Butterfly.  My summary views are at Robert Steele on Russia TV: Occupy Wall Street & Electoral Reform, General Strike Needed?

My Interpretation of the Emerging Message:

CORRUPTION is the common enemy, both in government and in the private sector.

ELECTORAL REFORM is the singular demand.

SUNSHINE CABINET is the method.

INTEGRITY is the core value.

COMMONWEALTH RESTORED is the outcome.

Document Form

NYC A Message and Method One Page.doc
NYC B Electoral Reform Act 1 Page 9 Points 2.2.doc
NYC C Preconditions of Revolution in the USA Today.doc
NYC D Seven Promises to America.doc
NYC E Citizen in Search of Integrity.doc
NYC F Integral Government in a Box.doc

 Online Full Text for Google Translate

Robert Steele: OccupyWallStreet Message and Method

2011 Electoral Reform Act 2.2 (Full Text Online for Google Translate)

Graphic: Preconditions of Revolution in the USA Today

Seven Promises to America–Who Will Do This?

Robert Steele: Citizen in Search of Integrity (Full Text Online for Google Translate)

Reference: Steele at Huffington Post Updated

See Also:

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Tom Atlee

Tom-Atlee’s posterous

Random Communications from an Evolutionary Edge

Occupation Catalytic Butterfly

Along with a lot of other people, I’ve been wondering what’s going on with Occupy Wall Street. Although it obviously shares energy with the Wisconsin occupation and Arab Spring, its mix of persistence and lack of demands makes it a puzzle, dragging it right out of the usual boxes we think with. It gets under the skin like a disturbingly peaceful ongoing Stonewall riot or something…

I’ve been trying to sort it out because Occupy Wall Street’s sibling, the October2011DC occupation, is imminent. Should I go there? Will it be a watershed “trigger event” I shouldn’t miss if I want to weave my ideas, visions, and life energy into its impact on the world?

About a week ago I decided not to go. I’m trying to focus on writing a book on empowered public wisdom. But every day I feel more ironic. I mean, isn’t that what I’m seeing?! How old fashioned is it to focus on a book when exuberant Transformational Aliveness is exploding before my very eyes! Nevertheless, I’m sticking to my decision. At least I think I am.

I’ve read a few brilliant articles about Occupy Wall Street that dig deeper than the usual commentaries from the Left, Right, Center and Alpha Centauri. Two this morning – here and here – stimulated the bloggy response you are currently reading. But I don’t know whether any of these analyses – including my own – are correct. But then again, is “correct” what’s going on here?

My own tentative take is that Occupy Wall Street – and perhaps each of its offsprings and siblings – is a catalytic butterfly. “Catalytic” because a catalyst makes big things possible, easier, and faster without, itself, seeming to do or change much. “Butterfly” because the “butterfly effect” arises in complex, chaotic systems like 21st century global civilization – and any given small flap may (unpredictably, depending on circumstances) generate hurricane-stimulating power. My own suspicion is that important things will happen because Occupy Wall Street is happening. But they probably won’t be anything that Occupy Wall Street is trying to make happen.

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Robert David STEELE Vivas

The Russians over-hyped the headline, but otherwise did a superb job of cutting to the chase and presenting a short live (no edits) interview and a compelling transcript.

‘USA might face a potentially violent revolution’

Published: 04 October, 2011, 22:57

VIDEO 4:03 (Click on Image)

Fury over corporate power in the US is spreading from New York across the country. Thousands have joined the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement, angered by the economic slump that may lead to a revolution in the country.

­Robert David Steele, political analyst and former intelligence officer, told RT the US right now is much more desperate than people realize.

“We have 22 per cent unemployment and on our way to 30 per cent. We are 16 per cent below the poverty line and on our way to 30 per cent. There is no question in my mind that this is going to be a very dark winter in the United States,” he stated. “Unless the government restores its own integrity and starts paying attention to the public interest rather than to the special interests, I believe that we will have a form of revolution, initially non-violent, but with the potential to become violent,” he added.

Despite the fact that “Occupy Wall Street” protesters have raised everything from lack of jobs to global warming, there is a common cause uniting the activists, Steele believes.

“These are not stupid people. They are very smart and they understand that at root this is about corruption in government and corruption on Wall Street,” he explained. “And until you have electoral reform, you cannot restore the integrity of US government. So there is a common cause, but it is voiced in many different ways,” he maintained.

The protest started out peacefully, but now it is the third week and more than 700 people have been arrested on Brooklyn Bridge. And according to Steele, the NYC police have on the one hand been very well-managed and on the other hand have gotten out of control at lower levels.

“My personal hope is that the general non-violent strike will be used to force the issue of electoral reform,” he concluded.

Core Proposed Program for Occupy Wall Street (Across the Nation):

CORRUPTION is the common enemy, both in government and in the private sector.

ELECTORAL REFORM is the singular demand.

SUNSHINE CABINET is the method.

INTEGRITY is the core value.

COMMONWEALTH RESTORED is the outcome.

See Also:

Seven Promises to America–Who Will Do This?

#Occupy #OccupyWallStreet Rolling Update + US Revolution RECAP

John Robb

OCCUPY WALL STREET (the theory)

Really simple:

Occupy Wall Street is an open source protest.

This type of protest has been very effective over the last year in toppling regimes in north Africa. It’s proving relatively successful in the US too.

Open source protest is an organizational technique. Probably the only organizational technique that can assemble a massive crowd in today’s multiplexed environment. Essential rules of open source protest include:

• A promise.  A simple goal/idea that nearly everyone can get behind.  Adbusters did pretty good with “occupy wall street.”  Why?  Nearly everyone hates the pervasive corruption of banks and Wall Street.  It’s an easy target.
• A plausible promise.  Prove that the promise can work.  They did.  They actually occupied Wall Street and set up camp.  They then got the message out.
• A big tent and an open invitation.  It doesn’t matter what your reason for protesting is as long as you hate/dislike Wall Street.  The big tent is already in place (notice the diversity of the signage).  Saw something similar from the Tea Party before it was mainstreamed/diminished.
• Let everyone innovate.  Don’t create a leadership group.  The general assembly approach appears to work.
• Support anyone in a leadership role that either a) grows the movement or b) advances the movement closer to its goal.  Oppose (ignore) anybody that proposes a larger, more complex agenda or those that claim ownership over the movement.
• If a new technique works, document it, use it again, and share it with everyone else.  Copy everything that works.
• Spread the word of the movement as widely as possible.

That’s the gist of it.

What’s the real goal of this protest? Frankly, it’s probably a recognition that the center of power in the US doesn’t reside in Washington anymore. It’s on Wall Street. This protest dispenses with the middle men (the US government) and goes straight after the real power.

My guess is that the Adbuster team that launched this open source protest felt that an October financial meltdown was possible, hence the September start-date. If the meltdown does occur, this movement is going to go global, just at the moment when the banks are going to be at their most vulnerable. Regardless, this effort is going to set the groundwork for a fast launch in the future when the next financial meltdown occurs.

What’s the big picture? Global guerrillas are getting better at building open source protests. We are going to see more and they are likely to become a prominent feature of the geopolitical landscape. It will also be interesting to see if open source protests could end up taking down a Too Big To Fail bank (i.e. Goldman) or a US President in the next 5 years. That would be very cool to see.

Phi Beta Iota:  Goldman Sachs could be destroyed by liquidation in the face of government claims starting with Greece.  All evidence points to the high likelihood that Goldman Sachs as an institution, and its partner-owners, will be bankrupted by legitimate documented claims.  What the OccupyWallStreet movement can do is bring down the two-party tyranny and restore integrity to the US electoral system.  As we have been saying for some time, there is nothing wrong with America that cannot be fixed quickly by restoring the integrity of the electoral system, and hence of the government.  This is what we see when we look at Day of Rage and OccupyWallStreet:

CORRUPTION is the common enemy, both in government and in the private sector.

ELECTORAL REFORM is the singular demand.

SUNSHINE CABINET is the method.

INTEGRITY is the core value.

COMMONWEALTH RESTORED is the outcome.

Patrick Meier

Theorizing Ushahidi: An Academic Treatise

[This is an excerpt taken from Chapter 1 of my dissertation]

Activists are not only turning to social media to document unfolding events, they are increasingly mapping these events for the world to bear witness. We’ve seen this happen in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen and beyond. My colleague Alexey Sidorenko describes this new phenomenon as a “mapping reflex.” When student activists from Khartoum got in touch earlier this year, they specifically asked for a map, one that would display their pro-democracy protests and the government crackdown. Why? They wanted the world to see that the Arab Spring extended to the Sudan.

The Ushahidi platform is increasingly used to map information generated by crowds in near-real time like the picture depicted above. Why is this important? Because live public maps can help synchronize shared awareness, an important catalyzing factor of social movements, according to Jürgen Habermas. Recall Habermas’s treaties that “those who take on the tools of open expression become a public, and the presence of a synchronized public increasingly constrains un-democratic rulers while expanding the right of that public.”

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Koko

Occupy Wall Street Protest Being Systematically Ignored by Mainstream Media

Even a rather non-observant person would have noticed by now that the Occupy Wall Street protest is being ignored by the mainstream media, or at least not taken seriously. Corporate-owned media knows its masters well.

DJ Pangburn

Death & Taxes, 23 September 2011

Read full report.

Phi Beta Iota:  The Wall Street Occupation, now going into its second week, with many additional demonstrations planned across the USA for 6 October 2011, is being ignored by the elite and their media sock-puppets.  This is one reason most do not realize that the “Day of Rage” is about electoral reform and a non-violent repossession of the US and the US Government.

See Also:

2008 ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig

DefDog: PSYOP Reading List for Citizens

Journal: Third Party Desired by 58% in America + ReCap

Koko: Day of Rage 17 September–How Will it End?

John Robb: Anonymous on Wall Street Occuption

Paul Fernhout: Global Groundswell Mad as Hell

Review (Guest): Confidence Men – Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President

Review: Grand Illusion–The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny

Review: Griftopia–Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

Review: Rebooting the American Dream–11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country

Review: Running on Empty–How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It (Paperback)

Review: The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown–Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash

Robert Steele: Day of Rage = Electoral Reform & Integrity Plus General RECAP on Purple Public & Third Party Rising

Steven Aftergood: Obama Ambivalent on Open Government

Steven Aftergood

Using Mobile Phones to Engage Citizen Scientists in Research
E. A. Graham, S. Henderson, and A. Schloss
[Abstract] [PDF]

Mobile phone–based tools have the potential to revolutionize the way citizen scientists are recruited and retained, facilitating a new type of “connected” citizen scientist—one who collects scientifically relevant data as part of his or her daily routine.  Established citizen science programs collect information at local, regional, and continental scales to help answer diverse questions in the geosciences and environmental sciences. Hundreds of thousands of citizen scientists contribute to recurring research projects such as the Audubon Society’s annual Christmas Bird Count, which drew more than 60,000 observers in 2009, or the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Volunteer
Monitoring program, through which trained volunteers improve the monitoring of water quality in lakes and streams across the United States. These programs have relied on traditional recruiting techniques and written observations. New methods for engaging participants through technology, specifically, mobile applications, or apps, provide unprecedented ways for participants to have immediate access to their own and others’ observations and research results.

Phi Beta Iota:  Changes to the Earth that used to take 10,000 years now take three.  Real-time science is no longer a dream, it is a necessity.  Governments and corporations as well as universities appear to be largely out of touch with the possibilities, but we do note that for years Taiwan has been paying a bounty to citizens who capture polluters in the act with a snapshot and GPS location.

Steven Aftergood

Phi Beta Iota:  Act I was 1988-1993.  Act II was 1993-2011.  Act III began with the publication of NO MORE SECRETS with a Foreword by Senator Gary Hart (D-CO).

Below the line in full (or click on links to originals):

OPEN UP OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE

THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE

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This is the Cabinet and Congressional-level access point for staff on the Open Source Agency.

Short persistent URL is:  http://tinyurl.com/OSA2011

Two-paragraph version:

An Open Source Agency funded at $125 million for a first year, going toward $2 billion at at full funding, has been approved by the Office of Management and Budget senior staff, with one requirement: that the Secretary of State ask for it.  A single letter from the Secretary of State to OMB before 15 September will yield $25 million in end of year money, and a new presidential initiative at $125 million from 1 October 2011.  The OSA will over time help justify the redirection of up to $100 billion from Program 50 (Military) to Program 150 (International Affairs).

First recognized as a need in 1969, prominently addressed by the Aspin-Brown Commission, the WMD Commission, and various other studies, the Open Source Agency appears on pages 23 and 423 of the 9/11 Commission report, as a proposed secret agency, which is completely contradictory to the need and the reality that the secret world cannot do open source with integrity.  OMB agrees that the Open Source Agency should be a sister agency of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), both under the arms-reach auspices of the Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy.  Stated in relation to the President’s needs at this time, the Open Source Agency would enable the Secretary of State to contribute immediately and forcefully to Open Government, Citizen Engagement, Participatory Budgeting, Global Engagement, and more tangibly, to a national jobs retraining program for all those unemployed who need to retrain for the Information Era jobs market. A one-page draft legislative outline and a two-page synopsis are below, along with two graphics.

Graphic: Open Source Agency Broad Concept

Graphic: Intelligence Maturity Scale

Open Source Agency Synopsis 05E

Smart Nation Act (Simplified) 4.1

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