GOOOH NOW!

GOOOH NOW!
GOOOH Mock Session in Houston, TX

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Virtual Congress, IRV, and GOOOH

I read two excellent articles in our local paper (Oak Ridge Observer, TN) regarding the concept of a "Virtual Congress" promoted by one writer, and the lack of accountability in spending public funds by the second writer. Both of the articles tugged at the strings of my heart, so I had to write a Letter To The Editor. I supported the concept of the Virtual Congress, and elaborated on my own experiences with Return On Investments (ROI) to support the second writer's complaints about unwarranted local spending in our financially strapped town.

But, I could not resist putting in a plug for GOOOH! GOOOH is all about "true" representation, as is the "Virtual Congress". GOOOH is all about "less spending". So, I took the opportunity in the last paragraph to pull it all together, combining it all with another favorite idea regarding election reforms, Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), and including GOOOH as the final addition to the theme.

The entire letter follows for your review. Perhaps you will have ideas on how to bring up GOOOH as the solution to problems in your area. Give that some thought.
More Freedom---Less Government!
Robert Humphries, Tennessee Liberty Alliance
_____________________________________________________________
Tax Abatements--Virtual Congress

I take this opportunity to commend Mr. Stephens and Mr. Cook for their excellent articles in your paper on 13 January. Both of them were right on target with their comments.

All the questions that Mr. Stephens asks in his article relate to what businesses experience as "ROI" or "Payback Period". There is a big difference in the "calculated risks" that a business takes hoping for a return, versus the "nebulous" ROI expressed by governments, particularly our local governments, supported only by vague comments about "the jobs we'll get". There is another huge difference in business and government investments-----ACCOUNTABILITY!!!!

If the business investment fails, the business suffers a LOSS. You know, part of Profit & Loss statement. It is not always "profit" as many naysayers of free enterprise like to criticize. If the government investment does not pay-off, who is accountable? Hmmm? The taxpayers, that's who! But, did "we" make the decision? Hey, maybe that's the ticket. We should pass a law that if the government investment does not pay-off, then we'll have legal access to the bank accounts of the politicians/bureaucrats until the investment is paid back.

It's always easier to invest with another person's money.

Mr. Cook has described very well an excellent idea that has been floating around in various groups for some time now....Virtual Congress....with the idea being that Congressmen would reside in their home districts, and do their jobs from there electronically. Citizens would then have ready access to them, instead of hearing, "Sure, I'll meet with you. Just have my secretary make an appointment with me.....in DC!"

I like his idea of increasing the total number of Congressmen to 1800. Some will say, "But how can they ever get anything done with that many?" My answer would be: "They can't! Halleluiah!" The alternative is to pay the current 435 their salaries........to stay home and do nothing (1st, do no harm). Cynicism aside, the real problem he is addressing is that they no longer represent "We The People". We want them in our court, as was intended by our founding fathers.

To this idea, I would add two more to make the concept "perfect". (1) Reform the election process to include IRV (Instant Runoff Voting). This would force winners to have 50% + 1 vote to take the office. All candidates, not just the current 2-party system folks would have a decent chance, and would change the way the voters would consider the old saw "I don't want to waste my vote". (2) Encourage citizens to participate in the GOOOH (www.goooh.com) process, which is a non-partisan method for a large number of voters in a District to "pick their own candidate to run" instead of waiting around to see what "lesser of two evils" the Party Primaries produce. Serious investigation of the process displayed on their web site reveals this is a method that will help greatly in Mr. Cook's efforts to get "true representatives".

Monday, January 10, 2011

Date: January 06, 2010

To: Concerned American Patriots

From: Ed Stanley – GOOOH – Georgia’s 7th District

Re: Every Other Thursday Memo Issue #10 – Happy New Year! Get ORGANIZED, get HELP, and get WITH IT!!

Happy New Year! As many of you know already, Get Out Of Our House moved beyond the beta phase into a true reality last week. WE ARE GOING LIVE FOR THE 2012 ELECTIONS. This is not a drill. This IS happening. And it is bound to change our priorities making us busier than ever! The priorities are now ORGANIZATION, MEMBERSHIP, and PLANNING! Here are the highlights:

LET’S GET ORGANIZED – There is a marked difference in organizing ourselves around gaining membership for a process that might take place at some time in the future versus organizing the members we have to implement the plan that WILL occur in LESS THAN EIGHTEEN MONTHS! We must meet religiously, spread the word, make plans and get `er done! Getting organized will necessarily require everyone who is close to the GOOOH organization to step up and contribute to the effort now set for Spring of 2012. How will YOU help? There will be no commitment wasted; no matter how large or how small. Think about what you can do and let’s hear from you. Commit to come to the meetings to begin with to find out what your role will be in this historic effort. Let’s get ORGANIZED

MORE GOOOH MEMBERS, PLEASE! – Before the announcement, we were asking people to buy into the idea of GOOOH. NOW we are asking people to become involved in the GOOOH process that WILL occur. The bandwagon is loading up and headed for the “parade” of the 2012 elections. By the way… NOTHING HAS CHANGED in Washington. The “newbies” (Tea Partiers included) sent to D.C. are up to the old “Inside the Beltway” behavior by hiring lobbyists to run their offices and lining up with the established mechanisms of “business as usual” evidenced in an article from the L.A. Times. The new arrivals do not seem interested in term limits (want to “hold our seats”). They bow to lobbyists and special interest (New Majority PAC). They already are clinging to one of the real problems in Washington - money – with their $2500/seat entry fee to their Party party. YIKES! But GOOD NEWS! This puts our “pitch” on entirely different footing! The approach WAS: “Come join us as we put together an organization designed to solve these problems (IF we get 500,000 members nationwide).” It is NOW: “Come join us in your district as we select a candidate to send to Washington in 2012 to FIX THE PROBLEMS.” Woo Hoo! As this rolls out, the more members we can get, the better! Don’t forget to tell the world. The more members we have, the better off we will be for obvious reasons. Let’s get HELP

WE MUST PLAN NOW – The time frame is simple. We must have our act together by early 2012 (by February) to run the Candidate Selection Sessions before the primaries. This is true of every state. Our primaries in Georgia are in July, so we need to have the GOOOH candidates chosen way before then to allow for organizing the “campaign.” Our plan right now is to get the members together that we have and set the agenda for the next 12 to 14 months and get after it! Here is what anyone interested can do (if you haven’t already): 1.) Sign up on http://www.goooh.com/, go to the “ACT” tab and complete all the steps there. That is first. Then, 2.) Go to Meetup.com and/or Facebook and search for a group in your area to see when and where the next meeting is being held. Then, 3.) GO to the meeting! This next 12-14 month period will be an enormous task. We need all the help that we can get. Don’t be left in the dust! Help us plan for success. And the time to plan this whole thing is RIGHT NOW! Let’s get WITH IT!

These are exciting times for all those who have been committed to GOOOH running up to the historic 2010 mid-term election, have ever had an interest in GOOOH, or those who haven’t even heard of GOOOH yet but realize that SOMETHING must be done. This is it. This is our time. What we do now will set the tone for the election in 2012. It is history in the making. Please come, get involved, and commit to being a part of this historic “changing of the guard.” We are now what we have never been before; ready to go forward with a mechanism to offer up candidates NOT beholding to Special Interest money, NOT obliged to toe the Party line, NOT allowed to campaign one way and vote another way, and obligated to serve no more than two terms in The House. It doesn’t get any better than this. What part are YOU going to play? Hmm? WOW! Let’s get ORGANIZED, get HELP, and get ‘ER DONE!!!

Saturday, January 8, 2011

New Year, New Reform, New Voice?

2011 is here. 

A brand new year, a brand new new Congress that is now controlled by Republicans...

... a brand new Senate under new leadership…

Well, no, that didn’t happen.

There were not enough seats up for reelection in the Senate to make a dramatic change there. Yet the lack of improvement in the Senate can not be merely attributed to the smaller fraction of seats up for election this past November. Some personalities that should have been given the boot were not booted out at all. In fact, in spite of all the horrific press he garnered for himself, Nevada could not shake Harry Reid out of his Senate seat. And there Harry remains, much more than a mere Senator, but the Majority Leader still. And of course the executive branch remains the same – nothing changed there – and it reliably continues on in a fixed socialist state of mind.

The Tea Party deserves credit where credit is due: they have managed to shine a light on the notion that core American ideology is diametrically opposed to socialism and progressivism. The general popularity of the Tea Party movement has helped to galvanize a great number of people to get a little more aware of politics, maybe attend some energy-charged rallies, and to get out the vote. A number of new fresh faces ran for various offices at the state and federal level. If these fresh faces were lucky and kingmakers Karl Rove, Glenn Beck and the rest of the “non-journalist” news entertainers did not seek to lampoon their low-funded campaigns, then these candidates who fought solely on love-of-country and a desire to engage their government have the distinct pleasure of knowing they ran good races for the right reasons, and not because they were ever “to the manor born.” Some of these scrappy reformers even managed to get elected, but only one here and one there. Meanwhile, Tea Party people are thrilled that they have helped to cause a shift to the right, or so they think.

At final analysis, however, the question begs to be answered: is the fundamental problem a conservative/liberal problem, or something else?

How I observe, filter, and then process the political issues I see on cable news (or what I read in blogs) is quite similar to how I handle the issues and dysfunction I see in smaller group dynamics. Dysfunction is nothing more than a system of people engaging each other in ways that are not functional, after all, and that concept can certainly apply to both the macro level of social structure as easily as it can the micro level of family units, since people are people wherever they go. Another constant we can count on is this: People make choices and are solely responsible for them. At the same time, however, choices are never made in a vacuum. The environment will support, encourage, or nourish a choice, or it will shun, discourage, or react with unfavorable consequences.

For example, an obese man who can no longer get out of bed because he weighs half a ton is responsible for what he has done to himself, but he did not do it all by himself. There had to be someone else in the house willing to bring him lots of food every day. Someone is always supporting the drug addict’s ability to sustain his addiction. In this realm of family dysfunction, food is not the primary evil; drugs are not the primary evil. Human behavior and the desire to sustain self-indulgent activities is the primary evil.

Likewise, I see a country that is mortified by the largesse of government. I see the country trying to put new people into the system to make better decisions in that system – but the system itself is the same. Fundamentally, the prognosis for the new freshmen in congress this year should be no different than that of the freshmen class of 1994: full of resolve, will likely lead to initial positive results. But look at what the 1994 class had turned into by 2004. No surprise: they simply entered a system and an environment that supported favoritism, elitism and an ultimate lack of consistent accountability. They go in lean and come out fat.

Do we expect that our current lean machines will remain so when they walk into a house where they will be fed every temptation you can imagine? Remember, the election cycle did not remove one iota of lobby influence, and there are no term limits. Oh, and let us not forget Big Media, who is more than happy to influence our understanding of what goes on in Washington and what relationship we have with our representatives. They are capable of painting stories an infinite number of ways depending on what is good for ratings, advertisers, and ultimately their pocketbooks. Their ability to hold accountable any politician is impeded by their own self-interest. The environment is unchanged, just a few new personalities playing in it. In the macro-political realm, liberalism is not the primary evil; progressivism is not the primary evil. Human behavior and the willingness to abuse power is the primary evil.

Like many concerned citizens in America, I often wonder if anything I do can make that much of a difference. The only influences that seem to have any real push are the larger herds (like political parties with their platforms). While most of us join herds as a means to promote some of our real, personal interests with government, our individual voice seems so very insignificant, and so we tend to overly rely on our identification with party to define who we are. But parties, as we have seen, can abuse power too, Republican and Democrat alike. So how can we assume that this country has come, as a "national family", to a “rock bottom” place where the country is willing to take on truly radical reform to rid itself of its political dysfunction? Is a political party - call it Republican or Tea Party, Democrat or Libertarian - capable of permanently denying its own capacity to abuse power to a degree that it can reliably hold government accountable? Is there anything we can effectively do, as individual citizens, to hold parties and platforms accountable that does not require prior party approval? Do we need to develop of a completely new kind of "herd" to hold the existing herds in check? Well, in fact, GOOOH is a concept that addresses this problem. Interested in learning about it?

I am passionate about GOOOH as a reform solution to the political dysfunction that plagues our system. It remains true to the intention of the framers of our Constitution. It enforces term limits. It is infused with undeniable accountability since GOOOH enforces that representatives are immediately answerable to the very people who selected and elected them.

I occasionally hear naysayers that suggest GOOOH will never go over – there won’t be enough buy-in for it to work. My response is this: naysayers tend to look at GOOOH as if it is the introduction of a new political party. It is not a political party. Moreover, it is an actionable way of selecting true citizen representatives who can be held to exact account for their campaign promises by direct accountability of the very people they represent to a degree similar to what could be done back during the early years of our country, when politicians were very familiar to the people in their hometowns and districts, and a sense of relationship was truly there. And for those who tend to always fear new things: Do valid, enduring movements grow from anything other than small seeds? They do start out small indeed, and they only grow if they continue to prove their own solid merit. Since its inception in 2008, GOOOH has grown quite nicely to well over 86,000 members. GOOOH is growing. It is growing because those who seriously check it out seriously see how much sense it makes. It is not merely a new herd, it is a new way for voters to be able to engage politics and have a clearer voice.

If we collectively continue to not change how our House representatives are elected, we cannot expect that the people we have occupying our House now will ever become any less corrupt than they ever have. If we want to save our country, it is time to quit with half-measures or to bow solely to the cult of personality, which is all we are doing if we only seek to vote for new faces. Honestly, if we don’t do something more substantive to fix the dysfunction than just electing a few new people with new promises, will our country do anything but get worse? It is time for the whole country to consider doing something better: let’s get GOOOHing.

Find out more about the GOOOH process for selecting and electing true citizen representatives at GOOOH.com. You can also:
Do something new for yourself this 2011 by allowing yourself to consider that our political system can be radically improved, and that your time working towards this improvement is not time wasted. Learn about GOOOH, and share it with your friends. GOOOH will be put into operation in 2012; GOOOH is a system that will be tried out. Come and seriously consider this brand new measure to improve and strengthen our country. If you, like so many of us, find yourself completely struck at the simplicity and profound merit of the GOOOH solution, then join us and tell your friends to check it out for themselves. GOOOH wins on its own merit every single time.

I certainly wish the best for our new conservative representatives in Congress. It is my deep hope, and belief, that they will seek to do this country a lot of good in the next few years. But let none of us be afraid to make further reformations to our political selection and election system, especially since doing so will strengthen our country after the current bunch of representatives are long gone.