Source – ragingbullshit.com
– According to Robert David Steele, former Marine, CIA case officer, and US co-founder of the US Marine Corps intelligence activity, it would cost less than half a billion dollars for the U.S. public to reclaim its government. The problem, he says in the short video below, is that the vast majority of people are simply “too lethargic.”
Steele also talks about the need to get rid of central banks (as both Lincoln and Kennedy intended to do before they were assassinated), reform the country’s education system, put an end to the “fake” War on Terror and harness the power of blogging and citizen journalism to keep the public informed of the crimes and transgressions of the political and economic elite.
For those unfamiliar with Steele’s work, here’s a brief bio provided by former Guardian writer Nafeez Ahmed:
With 18 years experience working across the US intelligence community, followed by 20 more years in commercial intelligence and training, Steele’s exemplary career has spanned almost all areas of both the clandestine world.
Steele started off as a Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer. After four years on active duty, he joined the CIA for about a decade before co-founding the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, where he was deputy director. Widely recognised as the leader of the Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) paradigm, Steele went on to write the handbooks on OSINT for NATO, the US Defense Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Special Operations Forces. In passing, he personally trained 7,500 officers from over 66 countries.
In 1992, despite opposition from the CIA, he obtained Marine Corps permission to organise a landmark international conference on open source intelligence – the paradigm of deriving information to support policy decisions not through secret activities, but from open public sources available to all. The conference was such a success it brought in over 620 attendees from the intelligence world.
But the CIA wasn’t happy, and ensured that Steele was prohibited from running a second conference. The clash prompted him to resign from his position as second-ranking civilian in Marine Corps intelligence, and pursue the open source paradigm elsewhere. He went on to found and head up the Open Source Solutions Network Inc. and later the non-profit Earth Intelligence Network which runs the Public Intelligence Blog.
According to Steele, it’s not just that radical change is necessary, it’s inevitable.
“We are at the end of a five-thousand-year-plus historical process during which human society grew in scale while it abandoned the early indigenous wisdom councils and communal decision-making,” he writes in The Open Source Everything Manifesto. “Power was centralised in the hands of increasingly specialised ‘elites’ and ‘experts’ who not only failed to achieve all they promised but used secrecy and the control of information to deceive the public into allowing them to retain power over community resources that they ultimately looted.”
Open source everything offers the unique chance to build on what we’ve learned through industrialisation, to learn from our mistakes, and catalyse the re-opening of the commons:
“Sharing, not secrecy, is the means by which we realise such a lofty destiny as well as create infinite wealth. The wealth of networks, the wealth of knowledge, revolutionary wealth – all can create a nonzero win-win Earth that works for one hundred percent of humanity. This is the ‘utopia’ that Buckminster Fuller foresaw, now within our reach.”
RIELPOLITIK 