Below, as a memory aid and brought forward from the second post that named the Virtual Cabinet, are the elements and proposed leaders within the Vice Presidency for Education, Intelligence & Research, each linked to more information about them as individuals. Access America, to implement and sustain Electoral Reform, was added at the suggestion of Jim Turner.
Vice President for Education, Intelligence, and Research: Michael Bloomberg
Access America: William Greider
Chaplain: Jim Wallis
Culture: Jello Biafra
Education: John Taylor Gatto
National Intelligence: Brent Scowcroft
Open Source Agency: Carol Dumaine
National Research: Vint Cerf
Office of Management and Budget: Joseph Eugene Stiglitz
Patent Office: Lawrence Lessig
Strategy Center: David Abshire
Global Truth & Reconciliation Centre: Lee Kuan Yew (SG), Nelson Mandela (ZA), & Fidel Castro (CU)
A couple of quotes from two of our Founding Fathers have guided me for decades:
Thomas Jefferson: A Nation's best defense is an educated citizenry.
James Madison: Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
The USA in particular, but Europe as well, is coming off a few decades of ethical and intellectual decline. Philosophy has been displaced by ideology, thinking displaced by technology, and particularly the technology for war. America has become a cheating culture, led by a Cheater in Chief (regardless of which of the two party tyranny wings he is closest to) and a Congress of Cheats who abdicate their Article 1 responsibilities and betray the Republic every single day of their pathetic unethical existence.
Although the Vice President for the Commonwealth is the Principal Vice President, the Vice President for Education, Intelligence, and Research is arguably the most important Vice President, the key figure in rethinking and reinventing and reinvigorating the American body politic. This is also the Vice President that would have my direct encouragement to run for office in 2020 when my two terms are done with.
Access America is placed under this Vice President's oversight because citizenship, education, and voting are like the DNA spiral of the Republic. None can exist effectively without the other two.
Faith and culture have been denigrated for too long. Fundamentalism is blind, ignorant, and often racist. Faith is the opposite of fundamentalism -- it inspires acceptance of the universal Golden Rule, it inspires clarity, diversity, and integrity. America is one nation, under God, and whether one chooses to believe in the God of collective community on Earth or the God of divine Providence, God is alive and well and America the Beautiful cannot do without God and faith and respect for the sacredness of life.
Culture joins with faith as the "glue" of a civilization, and culture, the home for conventions proven over time, is vital to the transmission of the lessons of civilization that are not taught in classrooms, but rather lived in multi-generational communities. One cannot have a Nation without a culture. It is culture that embraces diversity, assimilates diversity, and yet maintains the integrity of the whole.
We know that our educational system is in the basement. It will take a great deal of money to do a complete make-over of our national educational system, one reason why I am so pleased to place the bloated, wasteful, and largely ineffective national intelligence community--and its budget--under the direct influence of Vice President Michael Bloomberg.
Within intelligence, which is about decision support, not about secrets, we will implement the various initiatives I have defined in my Human Intelligence Trilogy. The centerpiece of our national intelligence reform will be the Open Source Agency, starting at $125 million a year and growing quickly to $3 billion a year as a sister agency to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), but remaining firmly under the budgetary and policy control of the Vice President.
Research is largely dead in America. The universities have sold out to corporations, the patent system is ignorant, corrupt, or both depending on the domain, the "web of knowledge" is virtually non-existent with a plethora of sub-disciplines and no "integrating" umbrella. No one is studying "true cost" of every element of every supply chain, and we only have 67 people studying computer code at the offensive and defensive levels of play. A third of the secret intelligence budget will be used to revitalize research, but in a multidisciplinary, firmly ecological, and very multinational manner. Open Everything will be our battle cry.
The Vice President for Education, Intelligence, and Research will also oversee the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the new Strategy Center that David Abshire has long championed and Tony Zinni wrote about in The Battle for Peace, and the new Truth & Reconciliation Centre that we invite three prominent internationalists to lead for our common well-being. All three of these are not now, but should be, intelligence-driven organizations. I will of course take a personal interest in all three of these. Before I die, I want to help America achieve a "clean sheet" rebirth as a world power, one that acknowledges the truth of its past sins, and reconciles sincerely toward creating a prosperous world at peace. Information and intelligence, not guns and violence, are the only means to achieve this goal.
Now as with Vice President Kucinich, I am giving Vice President Bloomberg nine general marching orders.
1. Voting will become mandatory in stages over four years, as part of the Electoral Reform program.
2. Education will be year-round, life long, blended with free online learning and call centers.
3. Everyone, including immigrants, will come together in national service at 18 and again at 38.
4. The Open Source Center will empower all eight tribes of intelligence, will be firmly rooted in "true cost" investigations of every product and service, and will have as its objective the use of intelligence to eradicate the ten high-level threats to humanity by harmonizing spending by all across the twelve core policy domains.
5. The Open Source Center will be the parent but not the controller of the Multinational Decision Support Centre and the global network of regional and national intelligence and call centers.
6. All research funded by the public will remain in the public domain.
7. Open Spectrum and Free/Open Source Software communications and computing are a priority.
8. Every citizen will have free health insurance; we will buy all drugs overseas and wholesale.
9. The Strategy & Truth & Reconciliation Centers will have as their objective the creation of a prosperous world at peace within twelve years, 75% within eight years, 50% within four years.
I will address long-needed specifics about the draconian reforms needed in the secret world in a later posting. For now I will simply say that in combination with the above initiatives, we can and should be able to reduce funding for secret intelligence sources and methods to $25 billion a year in 2012 dollars.
Learn More About the Smart Nation Concept:
1995 GIQ 13/2 Creating a Smart Nation: Strategy, Policy, Intelligence, and Information
2006 THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest
Next Tuesday: Global Engagement, or Newt Gingrich Gets His Wish
Next Thursday: Strategic Analytic Model for Creating a Prosperous World at Peace
In the beginning God created a Capitalist and a Worker. To the Capitalist he gave money and property. To the Worker he gave nothing. On the first day, the Worker approached the Capitalist and said: "Hey, I don't have anything to eat and no place to sleep." "Don't worry," said the Capitalist "you can scrounge around on my property and after you've come up with everything you need, I'll pay you ten dollars." So the Worker worked all day and finally gathered a little pile of food and put together a little hut. "Good job," said the Capitalist "here's your ten dollars.' "Now can I go inside and eat and take a nap?" asked the Worker. "That'll be eleven dollars" said the Capitalist. "But you only gave me ten dollars: I don't have eleven." complained the Worker. "Well," said the Capitalist "my cost of doing business was the ten dollars I gave you, and I expect to make a ten percent profit." "But where will I get the other dollar?" asked the Worker. "Don't worry," said the Capitalist "I'll loan it to you at ten percent."