Dear New Leaders,
I congratulate you on your election.
As a former astronaut, Eagle Scout,
Ivy League professor, frontier scientist, futurist, advisor to
presidential candidates, and international author and speaker, I
can identify with your feeling of significant motivation and
achievement.
But in my later years, as I now
approach the age of seventy-two, many of those perks of
recognition pale before a sense of urgency with which I feel we
must approach our task of transforming humanity and our
relationship with nature so that we can have an environmentally,
socially and morally sustainable future.
I honestly don't know whether we'll make it through these times.
You're in the driver's seat now, and your task is daunting. You
will have to stand up to some very powerful interests who will
not want to accept some of the decisions that you must make if
we are to survive these critical times.
I am sure that you understand this
most basic conflict of interest in your position. But are you
sufficiently aware of what is really happening to us all? Do you
truly know the depth of the crisis and the breadth of
opportunities before us?
I must admit that during my days of relative fame, I was largely
oblivious to the deeper issues and the potential solutions that
lie outside the box of conventional thinking. The spotlight
itself has a way of distorting our perceptions of reality.
In today's world there is enormous suffering, ignorance, neglect
and corruption. Leaders nowadays prey on this condition.
By supporting some of the most
criminal actions of wanton genocide and ecocide, the powerful
elite have created an atmosphere of mass obedience in a fearful
and helpless populace. We are destroying ourselves, each other,
and the natural world through the selfishness and greed of the
few. As a result, unrest is brewing in response to monumental
military, economic and political tyranny.
You must know that true knowledge, wisdom and compassion are
threats to the status quo.
As George Orwell said,
"In a time of universal deceit,
telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act,"
...and Isaac Asimov wrote,
"When stupidity is considered
patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent."
I believe we now live in precisely
such a time, and this situation is particularly poignant for us
Americans now paying for the expense of expanding empire while
feeling the pinch of economic collapse.
You come into office on the wings of
conflict between an unaccountable private power that has given
the orders and set the policies and a public clamoring for
authentic change which so many of us have entrusted you with.
You stand in the middle of an enormous gulf of interests, and I
am sure that you struggle with this conflict in your deepest
heart.
Those of us who take the road less traveled towards a greater
truth always have been, and still are, founder-martyrs placed on
the altar of change.
These true heroes, often
unrecognized in their own time, can become objects of adulation
by religions or nation-states, which frequently turn into
self-aggrandizing dogmatic institutions that have nothing to do
with the original intentions and spirit of the founders - who
must be rolling in their graves about how their contributions
have become so distorted.
For effective leadership of these United States during this
critical time, continuity and bipartisanship cannot be nearly as
important as returning to the basic principles of integrity,
civility and public trust. You'll need to expose the lies that
have been sold to the American people in our recent past if you
hope to have any chance of re-establishing trust in government.
Sacred myths that have been repeated
over and over by the media - such as the official account of
what happened during the JFK assassination, and the official
story about what happened on
9/11/2001 - become enshrined in
a fog of false patriotism that forbids open questioning and even
rational discourse.
You must know the truth of all this. It's too obvious for you or
any other intelligent and sentient being not to be able to
recognize. You must know that we live on an imperiled planet
that cannot endure the continued exploitation and neglect of
humanity. You must know that we cannot rely on half-measures
such as a slow withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, miniscule
reductions in the defense budget, insignificant nuclear arms
reductions, continuous bank and Wall Street bailouts.
It will not serve the needs of the
planet to advocate nuclear power, "clean coal," drilling oil in
sensitive ecosystems and carbon cap-and-trading as lasting
remedies to climate change.
You must know that such minutiae
cannot solve these problems. You must know, at some level, about
Einstein's dictum that no problem can be solved at the level at
which it was created.
Our species has invaded our home planet with such greedy
violence and with so little conscious awareness or
acknowledgement of the depth of our dilemma that it is hard to
imagine how we can get out of this deadly matrix. But get out we
must. It is much too late to fulfill Obama's mandate to "change," considering the advisors he immediately surrounded
himself with and the destructive policies he proceeded to
implement.
You must know that these individuals
and actions are throwbacks to prior administrations who
epitomize an outworn ideological paradigm that cannot work in
these times. Obama is only paying back those elite individuals
and groups that paved and paid his way towards where he sits
now.
Have they so threatened him to
conform-or-else that he can't act differently?
For you to succeed, you may have to bite some old-paradigm hands
that fed you and helped to get you to where you are now. You
will have to feint your way as in a basketball offensive around
and through the broken field of defending opponents, who include
those who may have supported you financially. You will have to
stand up in your courage and "betray" them (from their point of
view), while being true to your oath of office to preserve
and defend our country and the Constitution.
Are you up to the task? Are you willing to risk life and
limb to lead us into creating a viable system of governance? Are
you motivated enough to join the ranks of our brothers Martin
Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi and John F. Kennedy to take bold
actions toward a peaceful, just and sustainable future for
humankind? Are you willing to evict the money-changers and
militarists from our national temple?
At some level, you must be aware that President Obama's
definition of "change" in no way resembles the kind of change
any sensible and knowledgeable person not beholden to vested
interests would feel is truly necessary for our survival.
New leaders, we're all in great trouble if you are unwilling or
feel unable to address the pleas of the vast majority of the
people of our nation and of the world. They cry out for peace,
sustainability and justice. You must also address the fact that
nature, too, has rights. Reforming the voracious appetites of
the moneyed interests and of the military-industrial complex
will not be enough.
Look all around you at the degraded
environment, at the suffering of the peoples of the world
longing for food in their mouths and for the kind of leadership
that could relieve their pain and give us all a reasonable
chance to move forward.
The crisis of America is first and foremost a moral crisis, but
we also are confronted with a physical situation that demands
physical solutions if we are to have even the possibility of
peace, sustainability and justice. We must immediately stop the
wars, the torture, the criminal corruption and lies, the theft
of the commonwealth, the surveillance of the innocent, the
polluting of the planet, and the suppressions of true
innovation. You must courageously lead us into a state of truth
and reconciliation.
Mr. Obama continues to say that
authentic change is what he intends to create, but that isn't
what he's doing. Like virtually all his predecessors, he has
fallen prey to the life-destroying oligarchies of corporate
power.
You cannot repeat the atrocities committed by Mr. Obama and his
associates in the name of "change."
I suggest to you that we need to define what is meant by change.
The change Mr. Obama has so often promoted is what we might call
incremental change. These are the small rhetorical feel-good
kinds of changes that separate Democrats from Republicans, the
liberals from the conservatives, the Tweedledees from the
Tweedledums, all inhabiting a narrow spectrum of ineffective "centrism" and holding on to power for dear life as Rome burns.
These are the kinds of changes that
got Mr. Obama elected as he navigated through the narrow passage
between special interests and the appearance of a public
interest.
In contrast to Obama's superficial change, we need to also
consider progressive structural change, such as eliminating
electoral fraud, serving justice upon past criminality in high
places, re-regulating Wall Street, restoring the Constitution
and the rule of law, re-establishing the "real economy" based on
productivity rather than gambling away and squandering the
public treasury, controlling the excesses of the Pentagon and an
imperial aggressive foreign policy, restoring to Congress the
power to print money and declare and fund wars, and allocating
more resources to health, the environment, education and
infrastructure.
Many progressives are desperate to restore this kind of common
sense at the structural level and to create another New Deal for
the economic crisis.
The liberals would be grateful if
that were to happen, just to get us out of the deep hole we now
find ourselves in. They would be satisfied to go back to the
Clinton and Roosevelt years, to regain just a bit more common
sense in a world-gone-mad. Even some degree of neoliberalism, or
economic globalization (i.e., exploitation and biocide by other
means), might seem mildly OK, in this view.
Yet we know these measures are not
OK legally or morally; they are only the actions of economic
imperialism.
In today's world, it is obvious that even structural changes, in
and of themselves, will produce too little too late, and may
even be counterproductive in the long run as we become lulled
into a false sense of security and buy a little more time before
the inevitable collapse.
Whereas incremental changes address
mild corrections that really don't amount to much, structural
changes look at how the current system can be modified to bring
things back to where they were in somewhat better times. These
approaches only serve to provide a frame of reference to launch
authentic change.
What we must have is a systemic
change to an entirely new paradigm of governance in the public
interest that truly addresses the challenges of our times at the
level they need to be met.
Structural changes cannot truly answer grievous violations of
the public trust, nor can they resolve today's deepest issues.
Only systemic change can do that.
Whereas structural change can
relieve the stress of a crisis in the short term, it cannot
survive the test of time. Structural change can restore some
sort of sanity to our systems; it cannot address the inherent
problems with the systems themselves. We must now challenge the
precepts upon which our political, economic and military systems
are based. We must deeply question the "isms" upon which we
depend - such as militarism, neoconservatism, neoliberalism,
centrism, monetary socialism, unrestrained capitalism, economic
globalism, and Zionism.
These various "isms" have dominated
the modern world for decades and have shown themselves to be not
only incapable of solving global problems, but morally bankrupt
as well. We need the dawning of a new era - a new set of systems
must be put into place in the near future if we are to survive.
Can you in your heart agree with
what I suggest here? Or, like Mr. Obama, do you deny the gravity
of these problems from your high and removed perch? Like Mr.
Obama, will you rely on misinformed and outdated advice from
entrenched corporate hacks?
For you to advocate and map out
systemic change, you will need all the help you can get from
other quarters.
What would positive systemic change look like?
In general, it would require the
following initiatives, in all of which you would need to take
the lead:
-
Restore the letter and spirit of
the Constitution and Bill of Rights. This is the most major
structural change, which we should do immediately.
-
Fearlessly initiate a program of
truth and reconciliation, overseen by a jury of citizens
without vested interests in the current system.
Truth-telling about national crimes cannot any longer be
dismissed as conspiracy theory.
The greatest conspirators are
now holding all the political and economic cards, and their
crimes must be exposed, whether it be electoral fraud,
excessive private campaign financing, illegal surveillance,
torture, illegal wars, false flag operations, pollution or
the embezzlement of the public treasury.
All these things, and many more,
will need to come to the light of public scrutiny.
The process of reconciliation
seeks to return us to the rule of law and to serve justice
upon those who have violated it, with fairness and
compassion for all.
-
Dissolve or stop funding those
influential institutions with agendas that are blocking
change toward global peace, justice and sustainability.
Start over.
Replace the leaders of most of
our public institutions and build new ones from the ground
up. Stop funding those private institutions that dip into
the public treasury in ways that are clearly immoral and
unproductive.
It will require courage to
dissolve elements of the current federal bureaucracy as it
is (DoD, CIA, NSA, the current treasury, the FBI, Department
of Justice (sic), Department of Energy, etc.).
Expose nefarious elements within
international institutions such as,
...and other central banks, big
oil,
Big Pharma,
Big Agriculture, weapons
manufacturers, and other groups representing elite moneyed
interests.
The current priorities of the
U.S. federal government and of globalist New World Order
organizations directly fly in the face of what we must do to
survive the crisis of civilization. We need a clean-up like
we've never seen before, and some heads must roll. So be it.
The world can only be thankful
for getting out from under this oppression.
-
Start over the entire systems of
federal and global governance. Yes, we can still have a
Constitutional executive, legislative and judicial system.
We can still have a (much
smaller) military, a justice department, an energy
department, a treasury, publicly funded health care,
environmental protection, quality education, infrastructure
and all the rest.
Yes, we can formulate a
transition strategy to convert institutions and manpower
toward the public interest, free of vested powers.
Yes, we can convert our massive
military, dirty energy and aerospace capabilities toward
innovation in energy, the environment, food, water, health,
education and infrastructure.
Yes, we can create an Earth
corps to clean up the environment instead of having an
aggressive Army, Navy and Air Force. We can do all this
without workers losing their jobs.
Yes, we can begin to wage peace
on the rest of the world through diplomacy and compassion.
The world awaits a restoration
of good will coming from our "rogue nation," which has
outlived its usefulness as long as it has been a
warmongering and fear-mongering empire.
-
Form a global green democracy
whose agenda would be almost diametrically opposed to the
New World Order agenda.
Representatives of all nations must come together to
formulate a system that would ensure peace, sustainability
and justice for all peoples, while encouraging local rule
wherever possible.
In no case should special
interests, money or secrecy determine the agendas of these
governments. At the root of this should be the principles of
life, liberty, equality, justice, peace and sustainability.
-
Fearlessly foster (hitherto
suppressed) innovation, such as free energy.
We must go beyond the rhetoric
of ineffective energy policies that would only slightly
mitigate the effects of global climate change and pollution.
We need to think outside the box and quickly develop energy
sources that are truly cheap, clean, safe and decentralized,
such as vacuum energy, cold fusion and advanced hydrogen
technologies.
Existing technologies such as
solar, wind or biofuels are simply not up to the task of
solving the energy crisis. We need to recognize that
existing public or private institutions that have a vested
interest in energy production will not want to support a
radically new approach, especially if it threatens their
profits.
It will be necessary to dissolve
institutions that are vested in old technologies and start
new ones that can support rather than suppress the deeper
truths and opportunities of our times. The unsung heroes of
innovation will need all the help they can get to team
together in an Apollo program for new energy development,
frontier science and consciousness.
Such research and development
projects will form an essential cornerstone for a whole new
way of life on our planet that can preserve the environment
and restore the best values of our civilization.
You must know we all are entering the gravest crisis the
world has ever experienced and that the situation can be
addressed only by implementing the kinds of systemic changes
listed above. Many of us are willing to support these
efforts in teamwork with you, but it is essential that you
begin to pursue these changes briskly.
Otherwise, the degree of unrest,
fear and repression will be too great to allow us to act
without further violence, totalitarian control and
ecological and economic collapse.
We don't want that kind of
world. We want to have room in which to innovate our way
from the very systems that have become so decadent, so
destructive, and so tyrannical.
Is this an impossible task? Not if we act radically,
decisively and quickly.
We have no choice but to act.
Crisis breeds opportunity. It is time to restore the ideals
upon which our nation was founded. We have grievously lost
our way from the practice of those principles. We are also
rapidly losing a natural environment that can continue to
nurture us on this fragile spaceship we call Earth.
I appeal to your intelligence, wisdom and compassion to
facilitate a dialogue that will allow us to create new
systems that can foster the kind of future we really want
for ourselves, our children and their children.
I in no way mean this critique
to be personal or disrespectful. I wish only to help build a
fire under all of us to begin the journey toward an exciting
and positive new paradigm.
Thank you.
Yours sincerely,
Brian O'Leary, Ph.D.,
www.brianoleary.info
