Rob: Why?
RDS: I'm not going to comment on that. Whatever his motivation, whatever his management structure is, Snowden is, as they say in Schindler's List, an absolute good. And I believe that NSA essentially needs to be put out of business. I would move the Office of Signals Intelligence over to CIA, which I would turn into a technical intelligence agency. I've published 9 books on intelligence and many articles and chapters and briefings and lectures, and I've come up with a list of a 12-step program healing national intelligence, which I may publish at phibetaiota in the next few days. But the bottom line here is that NSA needs to go out of business; CIA needs to get back into business of thinking rather than killing people with drones; the Defense Intelligence Agency needs to start providing decision support for strategy, acquisition, operations, and tactics; the FBI needs to get in the business of counterintelligence and actually taking down the religious, ideological, financial and moral traitors that we have across both the government and wall street.
Every aspect of the US intelligence community today is corrupt in one way or the other. Again I stress, 90 percent of the people there, including my wife, are good people trapped in a bad system. But at the leadership level, we have a degree of complacency among the top 9 percent and treason across the top one percent that is a constant, constant disappointment to me.
Rob: I get the impression though that with your open source model, there's no room for any secret spy agencies.
RDS: That's not correct. And the reason that's not correct is that when you are dealing with absolute evil, for example, trade in women and children -- I mean this is true crime. Drug crime today is sanctioned crime. In fact trade in women and children is actually sanctioned crime. But when you get to be mostly absolute good, there are going to be absolute evils that have to be confronted, and those absolute evils are going to need clandestine case officers and FBI officers under deep cover, which is one of the most dangerous jobs -- it's actually more dangerous than a clandestine case officer overseas. We are going to need to be able to operate in secrecy to penetrate absolute evil so as to take it down, but I would surely say that we will need no more than ten percent of the budget that we have now and no more than two percent of the secret documents that we have now. In the United States of America, secrecy has become a pork pie that is out of control and completely unaccountable to Congress or the public.
Rob: Okay, getting...talking about absolute evils, I've done a lot of interviews and writing about psychopaths and sociopaths and their roles in our culture and humanity. You have any thoughts on them?
RDS: It's interesting that you ask because back when I was running the conference, before my business was destroyed by central Office of Hearings and Appeals, which basically took away my clearances when I declared...cheerfully declared 7,500 foreign contacts -- they've cost me $6 million over the last several years. Although I've gotten my clearances restored the damage can't be undone. But the conference that I used to run, which was my life blood before they destroyed me, used to attract some psychologists. And one of the constant recurring themes was that...well let me go back to a book by Lionel Tiger called The Manufacture of Evil, and that sets the stage for what has been a recurrent theme over the last 30 years, which is that the industrial era has disconnected our governance and corporate processes from kinship and trust. And that in turn is an environment that nurtures psychopaths and sociopaths. It is an environment in which you can do great evil under pretensions of doing the right thing for your stockholders or whatever. I mean look at the CIA drone program -- this is a psychopathic program. It's a crime against humanity. Everybody associated with managing that program should be, at a minimum, indicted before the international tribunal and ideally convicted and lose their pension.
I was very inspired by Daniel Ellsberg speaking at Hackers on Planet Earth. And one of the things he talked about was how real treason is standing idly by while your government commits treason and commits crimes against humanity. Everybody at CIA that is employed in the drone program should seriously consider becoming a public whistleblower...or asking for reassignment. How they can live with themselves, managing a program that has a 98% collateral damage rate and that is far beyond the pale of law is a puzzlement to me.
Rob: Okay. Getting back to healing and your opposition to punishment of the one percent, you say, "The one percent has to want to labor with us to create a world that works for all. Only public intelligence in the public interest can create such a compelling force for the common good as to succeed in the face of heretofore entreated and powerful opposition and dominance." That's a mouthful.
RDS: The worst nightmare for the one percent is that people will start taking pot shots at leadership as they're landing or taking off. And that people with pitchforks will start burning down mansions. Now a lot of these people have retreated to Dubai and Switzerland, but the reality is...if the public ever gets completely aroused, then Lear jets and jaguars and mansions are going to become prime targets for public anger. I don't want to go there, nor do we need to go there, nor should we go there. Now I wrote what you just quoted long before the recent conference funded by the Rothschilds in the city of London -- Conference on Inclusive Capitalism. And I'm quite fascinated to find that the extreme wealthy are starting to realize that they've killed the golden goose, and that if they don't resuscitate this goose, then all of their fictitious money is not going to be worth much. And I would remind you that public health was created by the wealthy in New York when they realized that disease does not play favorites. The extreme wealthy are just as vulnerable to pandemics as the rest of us. And what they have done with their looting of the economy and their sanctioning of Goldman Sachs's misbehavior in relation to the US economy and Greece and Portugal and Spain and Ireland and Iceland -- which is the only country with the brains to get it right in the aftermath of this disaster. What they have done essentially is they have crapped in our own...in our water bowl.
So, from where I sit, intelligence with integrity is getting to the point where even the obscenely wealthy will begin to get it. And when they get it, they will begin to understand that setting aside ten percent of their wealth to accelerate the creation of wealth for the rest of us -- this is not confiscation and this is not philanthropy. Most philanthropy is a joke. Most philanthropy is a tax dodge -- less than ten percent of the assigned funds actually reach the intended end-user or purpose. Most philanthropy, in my view, is a way of keeping thinking people busy so they don't actually do real good. So I believe that there is an opening here. And the inclusive capitalism conference struck me as extraordinarily malinformed, but well-intentioned. Then a good starting point for a conversation about what would a world look like in which we applied open source everything and holistic analytics and true cost economics in order to design a world that works for all....a Buckminster Fuller, Robert Carkhuff kind of world. I know how to do that. I don't have anyone that's ready to fund me yet. And so if we can get to the point where funding can be found for creating an open source everything model that can be rapidly promulgated by universities and then rapidly from universities as hubs begin to benefit local communities and local businesses and inspire enormous innovation and entrepreneurship, then I believe that we're at the beginning of a renaissance for humanity. If on the other hand the extreme wealthy decide they want to continue business as usual from now until 2020, then they're going to make it harder for their children and grandchildren to survive.
Rob: Now you say that we shouldn't take money from the wealthy. What about their children? What about what I call the dynasties that are created? I think there should be a dynasty tax...
RDS: Well there's an estate tax and I am absolutely inclined to let communities and the national voting blocs...this is certainly something that should be on the ballot for the total public to judge. I mean, the amount of money that is being handed down in this book that's out on capitalism that talks about how most money today is inherited wealth rather than earned wealth, that has intellectual and moral implications. And part of the problem is that these individuals that are inheriting this wealth are inheriting an infrastructure that is out of touch with reality, and they are making investment decisions and they are making decisions having an impact on the public that are uninformed and immoral when looked at in the larger context of what can be known and what the larger public would decide for itself if it had that opportunity. So I would say that an estate tax is not something I would impose, but it is something that I would absolutely put on the ballot for the nation at large to decide if it wanted to impose it. And oh, by the way, I love to learn from many people that one of the problems is that this is something that tends to drive wealth away, and so there needs to be some combination of rendition of wealth -- once that decision has been made -- and some combination of publics around the world coming together to set some red lines with respect to inherited wealth.
Rob: Alright, let me read another quote from you. You say...
1. The country has been run into the ground--the bottom 98% have had their seed corn stolen and eaten by the top 2%. There is no going back, neither revenge nor expropriation will do. What has been done is done, get over it.
2. There isn't a leader or leadership team or party or "elite" network on the planet that can put the USA back together again [except perhaps We the People Reform Coalition].
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