COMMENTARY

Dear Dylan

Thank you for what you do ... and the energy you put into it. I would like to be part of The Alliance' and help to tell 'Truth to Power'.

I get hundreds of political e-mails asking me to contribute money ... often just a small amount but urgently before some deadline that is usually only hours away. I don't have much money so these merely annoy me and get junked.

By contrast, I rarely get a request to be helpful in a way that fits with my background, experience and interest ... and would be way more useful than the puny amount of money that I have available.

Early in my career I was a corporate CFO working for a US based company that had smallish operations in 26 different countries. It was an education. Subsequently I did consulting assignments for the World Bank, the UN and others in the relief and development arena. I learned a lot about the dysfunction of the global economy and the disconnect between the wealth of leadership and the poverty of people.

I have lived in the USA since 1966. I trained as a Chartered Accountant in London after doing engineering and economics at Cambridge. I still think about issues from these multiple perspectives, and incorporate ideas from the three disciplines in my work. The bad news is that I graduated more than 50 years ago. The good news is that technology is now a million or a billion times more powerful than when I started my career. Unfortunately, hardly any of this power is being used to do much more than drive video games and sadly to devise incredible systems for military operations. It is time we put this power to work making opportunities for humanity to improve its quality of life, whether they are located in the United States, in Greece or China or Nepal or Patagonia or Syria.

I am disgusted at the lack of transparency and accountability in our society and the economy, and at the way misinformation flows around to promote all sorts of self-serving interests. There are better ways. If the productivity of our technology is so much better than it was in the past, how come there is so much poverty, misery and hopelessness.

I have concluded that the capitalist market system is fatally flawed because it only allocates resources to economic activities that are profitable, and not to activities that are critically needed. The implosion of the Soviet Union suggests that a capitalist market economy is 'better' than totalitarian communism. Yes ... but in my view, that is not good enough. The bar is too low and in the (not so) long run the capitalist market based system will implode because of its inherent instability and the way it systemically excludes most of humanity.

I have done assignments in more than 50 countries. I was in the Horn of Africa during the famine of the 1980s. Somalia is having another famine now. Why? It is because there is a systemic problem and local, regional and international organizations and leadership are not doing their jobs ... more precisely, they are unable to do the jobs that are needed.

I argue that the capitalist market economic system with its money profit accounting must be supplemented by complementing valuadd accounting and markets. In this environment valuadd gets accounted for as rigorously as money profit. With a better way of quantifying valuadd, the investment community can start to look at the valuadd metric as well as profits, stock prices and GDP growth. In a valuadd market the priorities for the allocation of resources will change. In this regime every single organization of the modern economic infrastructure will start to rethink its purpose and how it goes about its business.

Simply put ... in the prevailing system, profits matter and needs are ignored. Good people rarely succeed because the system facilitates a greedy evil high profile elite grabbing all the goodies.

In my experience, most people on the planet are nice good folk. Rather few are impossible, evil and greedy. The system should favor the nice majority and not the evil, powerful minority. Rich or poor is not the issue. It is much more about good or evil.

I would like to be a part of the Alliance. What might I do to help?

Peter Burgess

Dear Friend,

For the past few years, in response to the topics I speak about on my television show and write about on The Huffington Post, people have asked me how they could contribute to help fight for what I call 'Truth to Power.' Previously there has been no mechanism to allow people to participate in this, but it is clear that we need to form an Alliance - a formation of like-minded individuals fighting for the same ideals.

With that, let me invite you to join The Alliance to help us all fight for the truth. It is clear that our country is divided in two - not left and right, but those who wish to change the status quo for better, and those who wish to keep it to protect their interests.

The problem is that the Democratic and Republican parties have lost their focus. Instead of fighting to empower the people, they are now only fighting to keep their own power. Only through the full engagement of the people can we change this.

Our values are based on the simple belief that opaque systems reward exploitation and that transparent ones reward altruism. That monopolies reward manipulation and exploitation - while fair, open, rules-based competition - rewards greatness.

We are not here to throw rocks at the system, but we are here, as a group, to face that truth together with an eye towards solving it, not exploiting it. We are here to force the politicians and leaders to face the truth with us.

In forming an Alliance, we are seeking to bring individuals together in effort to organize ourselves to make these changes and create a coalition with the strength to gird ourselves for the opposition any reformer faces.

Many of the problems that plague our country are not new, but the information we can gather and distribute is far greater than at any point in the history of the world. We are uniquely positioned to change these problems, with the help of technological advancements and the many tools of communication at our disposal.

'Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.' - Thomas Paine

We have the tools - freedom of speech, the right to vote and the choice of how we spend our money after taxes, combined with our individual resources of time and talent, to give us a path forward to solve these problems. I hope this Alliance will start a free flow of information and ideas to that end.

Thank you for your considering investing your time and talent, and I look forward to hearing from you in the months ahead.

All my best,

Dylan Ratigan

30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10112. USA