And so when you come back to open source intelligence, which is where you started, what you're really talking about is public intelligence in the public interest, and that's what my second book was about -- The New Craft of Intelligence. What intelligence is -- is decision support. It's a process. It's a way of saying 'Okay, what do we need to know?' 'Who knows what we need to know?' 'Where can we go get all of the different pieces of information in 183 languages the CIA does not speak...or NSA?' 'How do we machine process and human process all of this stuff?' 'How do we create compelling visualization to show us all of this information in time and space?' We still do geospatially-rooted analysis across all topics. And then finally, 'How do we deliver a compelling case for a decision-maker or a group of decision-makers who have to make a decision?' And what I found when I was the second ranking civilian at headquarters Marine Corps is I found my Generals couldn't read. They were so busy with so many different things, they literally could not read and I was getting no attention at all through my various memoranda sounding an alarm, until one day in a stroke of must be inspired genius from God, I started putting what I call now stoplight charts -- red, yellow and green bubbles or dots. And so I would open my memo and on the front page would have a stoplight chart, which says, 'This is how your program looks today.' And within 5 minutes they would be screaming, 'What's this red dot? What's this red dot? Make this red dot go away.' So I finally found out general officers understand three colors -- red, yellow and green. And once you have their attention it gets easier to deal with.
Rob: You referred to the two-party tyranny.
RDS: I would give credit for that term to Theresa Amato, whose wonderful book called Grand Illusion basically makes the point that the United States of America is not a democracy, it's a two-party tyranny, as are many other governments that have two party systems in place. Electorally, Ron Paul and others have been introducing legislation. Congress has the power to mandate that all states must include all parties on all federal ballots. And that would include Independents. Nine times Congress has refused to pass this law because Congress is very, very happy blocking the Independents and all the small parties from any possible access to being elected.
I had to run for President in 2012 and I did that for a couple of reasons, including the fact that I was unemployed and had nothing better to do. But I did it to get all the good ideas put in one place -- bigbatusa.org. And I did it to be able to write to all of the presidential candidates, including Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, for them to come together on the one thing that all of us should agree is absolutely essential, which is electoral reform. If we don't restore the integrity of our electoral process and our governance process then we will continue to be no better, no more than a third-world dictatorship by Wall Street. Now I had to run for President in order to learn that we actually have 8 accredited political parties in the United States of America -- parties that have satisfied the percentage requirements of the electoral commission such that they qualify for matching federal funds and could -- if Congress were to find its integrity -- have all of their candidates on every ballot for federal office at the state and local level.
Those 8 parties -- and I want to list them because it's very important and most Americans do not seem to know this -- and from the independents that may comprise a substantial majority of the...or a substantial proportion of the electorate today. Those 8 parties are the Constitution Party; the Green Party; the Libertarian Party (which is the 3rd largest in America after the two-party tyranny); the Natural Law Party, which is moribund, the Reform Party, which I ran for; and the Socialist Party, which is also moribund. So the bottom line here is that no decision being made in Washington today, whether by Congress or the Executive, is actually being made on the basis of an electoral system and a governance process that is replete with integrity.
Rob: And what kind of reforms would you like to see?
RDS: Please go to bigbatusa.org for all of the details, but I'll list four very specifically. Number one -- electoral reform. If we don't achieve electoral reform -- and that's the difference between me and any other presidential candidate. All the other presidential candidates are simply lying, telling different lies to different audiences so that each audience will think that that president is just like them and believes what they believe, and that's just absolute crap. What I stand for is getting everybody's voice and vote to count again. And that's all. What I believe in, other than that I love the republic and believe in the Constitution, does not matter. Because if I have one political goal in my life it's to restore the integrity of the electoral process and the governance process in the United States of America. So electoral reform is number one.
Number two is -- I don't believe that a President should be allowed to reach Election Day without having nominated their cabinet in advance, and without having published a balanced budget in advance. Anybody who cannot do that prior to election is not a serious candidate for President of the United States of America.
And finally I would combine full employment with an elimination of all taxes, substituting for all taxes the automated payment transaction tax. And its inventor, not me, is fully discussed at bigbatusa.org. What the APT tax does, apart from eliminating all individual/corporate income taxes where individuals get screwed and corporations learn how to play the books, it eliminates all the state taxes...all forms of taxes -- but what it does is absolutely brilliant, is it widens the tax base pie to include stock and currency transactions that essentially allow you to charge a tiny, tiny little fraction of the transaction on the order of 0.0006...on every transaction. And by doing that, you end up easily, meeting the full needs of the state, local and federal government for approved programs being fully funded without debt. The other thing that I like about the APT tax is that it helps control government. If you want to go to war...
Rob: Say that again, you broke up. The other thing you like about the APT tax....
RDS: Is that the rate is set by the public, not by the government. It's a national ballot issue. And what this means is that if you have a rate set for a peacetime economy and all of a sudden you want to go to war, two things have to happen. The first is, you have to get a congressional declaration of war, which we haven't had one for Iraq or Afghanistan or any of the other wars that we're running right now, including the covert war in the Ukraine, which is absolutely outrageous. But the other thing you have to do is get the public to agree to raise the rate in order to fund the war. No more unfunded wars based on lies. Paul Wolfowitz lied to Congress when he said that the Iraq war would pay for itself. So all of my ideas that I have embraced from others...I really...as the number one Amazon reviewer for non-fiction -- I read in 98 categories -- and obviously my mind is rooted in the ideas of those thousands of people whose books I have read. So all of that is at bigbatusa.org, and to sum it up, electoral reform, coalition cabinet, balanced budget announced in advance of Election Day, and finally eliminate all taxes substituting the automated payment transaction and combine that with an absolute commitment to full employment for every US citizen.
Rob: How do you get full employment for every US citizen?
RDS: That's a good question. And one of the things that I've looked at is the Reagan Proposal, that would have used the military bases as modernization training centers. We have a lot of underutilized capacity in the United States, and we also have a lot of people like Bill Gates lying to Congress. When Bill Gates goes to Congress and tells them that he needs H1 Visas so he can import people from India and others to do jobs that he claims Americans can't do, that is a flat out lie. What Bill Gates is actually lying about is the fact that, number one, there are Americans that can do those jobs that expect an American-level of worthy wage, not an India-level of slave wage. And second, part of the reason why we are, in fact, short in some areas is that we have failed to retrain our population. We are still imposing on people an 18-year educational program that was designed to create stupid factory workers -- or rather, factory workers that are not stupid, but they're not educated -- they're not able to innovate and create wealth on their own...they're simply there to keep the assembly line going and do what they're told.
Rob: The Austro-Prussian model of education.
RDS: Well, I don't know about that but I do know that the education system does not work, and it is a problem for our country. Home schooling and Montessori have certainly set some very fine examples for what you can get when you really pay attention.
And I would also emphasize that the reason I wanted a coalition cabinet is because I find that republicans and democrats have become stupid. They don't actually think, they just pontificate. And what you need, and I've pointed to individuals to occupy each of these positons, including Jim Hightower...and others that I admire. The bottom line here is we actually have to govern ourselves. We can't allow some corrupt party hack in Washington who are only the take, on the payroll of wall street, to make decisions based on who pays to be heard.
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