 there is just no way that you can be represented in secret. The very concept of secrecy and what an agent does is denial of representation. In this lesson we will be addressing the subject of privilege in a new and very personal way. We will be presenting that very human concept of alternative purposes. It starts with Daryl Jones telling his wife Mary that he will be working late at the office over the next week. When he comes home he seems distant. She thinks he might be tired from what he's putting into his job. But when she does his laundry there are some smudges on his shirt that are unusual. It doesn't rub off and she sniffs to find what it is. It is makeup, it is scented and it isn't hers. On his return again late in the evening she confronts him and asks him what is going on at work. He gives her a half answer about a project that is underway. I tell you that their marriage is in serious trouble because he has accepted a second purpose. One, he is unwilling to share with Mary. This sort of thing goes far beyond Mary and Daryl. If Daryl continues in secrecy it will corrupt their marriage. It will threaten more than just their performance as a working team. It will impact any children that they have. It will damage them too. But even beyond that it is a cause of loss. Shared purpose is something that people value. Something in which they can claim ownership. When it is stolen by one party the reaction can easily lead to violence. Remember that this is a purpose outside the family and resulting violence can spill over. Corruption of the marriage is more than just damaging to the parties to that marriage. Becoming ineffective is just one aspect of the damages that can follow. This is the nature of human relations. You can only team where the parties trust one another. The potency of teaming is lost when people have openly different purposes. Consider that not every personal purpose is worthy of support. Entering into intimate relations outside the marriage will establish a you versus me conflict within the marriage. It is that alternative purpose that will threaten the marriage, threaten the teaming relation that makes the family potent, threaten the welfare of any children who rely upon Daryl and Mary as parents. It is potential as a source for public violence. What is our trust relationship with members of Congress? This is an immediate problem in political government where the purpose of the elected leader is getting reelected. It is a purpose not shared with the voting public. People put leaders in place to represent them. What they do to get reelected will not be done as representing the people who elect them. The amazing answer is that congressional approval rating has been below 20% for a lengthy time. The idea that it is somehow a representative body of elected leaders is in discord with the reality. We the people have no trust in this body. It is not currently addressing our purpose in electing people into office. In that sense, it is continuing in a state of abject failure. We can address this in terms of issue-based activities, trying to represent some of the people in their conflicts with other people. To put this into our marriage example, it is dividing into some representatives who will support Daryl in continuing his hidden behavior with some other woman and representatives who will support Mary in her attempts to discover what is really going on in their marriage. Congress is dividing itself and everyone who they can get to follow in taking opposing sides on every issue. They are heightening the pain. They are taking sides of some citizens and overcoming their neighbors. How do we address this for correction? The answer is that not every cause justifies taking sides. There is no need to take one side or the other when neither is going to represent we the people. If it is a private dispute between citizens, having a government take sides to declare winners and losers is political disaster. Trying to assume leadership of one side or the other is intentional misrepresentation. We the people are the only party in interest. There are no different sides in what we decide. There are no public purposes unless they are our purposes. The last thing we need is for our own political government to try to tear us apart as a people. One of the challenges of privilege is that it functions on the isolation of leaders from the people they represent. The acceptance of privilege destroys the potency of the leader as well as the people they lead. Trying to lead based on issues just heightens the damages. Secrecy is just a symptom of the spiritual challenge. We have elected officials who feel they have to keep things secret from the people they were elected to represent. There is no such thing as secret representation. We have unelected federal leaders who claim the privilege of secrecy from our congressional representatives. Our representatives have put themselves into such a weak position relative to we the people that they accept the privilege of those who have not been elected but hired by the government to see to the business of the public that pays for their efforts. We have had public employees who refused to testify before representatives concerning their official actions. We have public employees who would step away from their employment to claim right as a private citizen to refuse what our representatives asked based on potential for criminal prosecution if they did. We elect people to run our government. If a public officer refuses open communication, it is refusing to work for the public. It is immediate cause to cease any and all payments and benefits for being a public employee. Employee secrecy from those who run the government in our name is wholly and completely wrong. It is criminal to accept pay for work that an employee refuses to do. There is still more that we have yet to address. That is the value of the work that is being done by those who work in secret. The only thing that government produces is what we both receive and value. Now this is the real definition of government performance. It has value only as what it produces gets delivered to us for us to value. It has no other performance purpose than serving we the people. Wherever it is doing something else, it is waste and it should be subject to elimination. We have already addressed this in terms of management and management is the constitutional purpose for which we elected leaders into positions of leadership. If they are not managing, then they are not doing the jobs for which they are accepting pay. When it comes to privilege leadership, there is nothing gentle about the owner's taking authority and directing leaders to do what they are to do. The public owns this nation. We own our government. If it is not saying to our needs and our wants, it is engaged in wasteful practices. The internal group or organization that delivers no value is to be unfunded immediately. If it is not delivering value, its very existence is waste. We the people have no purposes that we keep secret from ourselves. Performance is inherent in a symbiotic relationship between the government and ourselves as both owners and customers of governance. We are the only party in interest. We already addressed this in terms of economic management. The cure for the current lack of management by our representatives is to establish that management. It is to assure that their funding decisions are based on what has value that gets returned to from each authorized expenditure. It is basic management applied to the internal workings of the U.S. government. The only thing that should get funded are efforts that yield value. If that value is not delivered to our representatives or to us, it is without value. The expense can and should be terminated as a waste of taxpayer contributions. It is we the people who put representative leaders into positions that represent us and operate our government. It is we the people who effectively hire people into positions of representation for the sole purpose of representing us. No, they do not represent our interests. They represent us. We are the owner, not beneficiaries of what leaders decide to do in our name. That should have changed with a revolution from English authority. The idea that some hired help is going to deny our representation is little more than a denial of their purpose. Do these hired representatives speak for us like parents speaking on behalf of a child? That is not my understanding and neither is it in accord with our hiring them. Even with a parent speaking for a child, the child can reverse much of what the parent decides when they reach their own adulthood. What is now being presented to us as somehow normal is denial of us as citizen owners of the nation. It is embezzlement. It is criminal behavior that has become institutionalized by our government application of legality. Secrecy from the public is a witness to parents whispering their plans to each other about what their children will do for them. Secrecy from our public leaders is a witness to how utterly ineffective they have been running our nation. The law does not belong to those who govern any more than it does to judges and lawyers. It is part of our nation, a product of governance. It comes to us or it has no value. We are the only ones who can value these laws. If they are not valued by us, they have no value. These laws would be waste subject to elimination without any effect on us. For us, waste is an opportunity. Seeing that waste opens the opportunity. Communicating that vision of waste provides empowerment to those who come to see it as they can agree upon corrective action to eliminate that waste. In order to protect the privilege of leaders, we have one corrupt decision after another. We have a long history of abusive governance presented as the right things to do. We have leaders taking pride in wasteful and abusive behavior toward those who elect them. And to justify their behavior, we are fed half truths and platitudes. Are we really served by a government of checks and balances? In just asking the question, the sense of privilege and leadership is laid bare and open for all who can bear to look upon it. Read the Constitution. It does not contain any mention of separate but equal branches of government to hold one another in check. The only challenges presented between the three branches of governance address the act of impeachment, trials for public abuse, and official crimes. What it does promote is teaming of the three branches of government addressing how they are to work together, each doing their assigned part, to fulfill the purpose of the Constitution as stated in the preamble. How much simpler could it be? The purpose is to promote the unity of the nation. Its assigned products are justice and welfare of we the people, checks and balances. There is no less effective way to do anything than to divide into opposing sides, each trying to keep the others from succeeding. That is the direction of a performance disaster, a great effort that accomplishes little if any value. It is the opposite of unity even as it is unjust and destructive of the welfare of the people. I read the Constitution as a contract, and its purpose is inherent in how the branches are to work together, each doing its appropriate part of the public management of our nation. Like most contracts, our constitutional document states the parties to that contract right up front, and it is we the people. A contract sets the relationship between those who sign, only signatories have duties and responsibilities under a contract, and it is duties and responsibility to others who sign. The federal government is not even a party to this citizen agreement, it has no rights, privileges, or anything else under its provisions. What it has is a description of what we the people agree upon. Those who would lead as rulers, as those who have only limited responsibility for what they do in the name of the people, are not justified to make decisions that we do not accept. We do not have a sovereign government in the sense of a ruler. What we have is a sovereign people who have authorized the government to act in our name. What we have is not any agreement among privileged leaders that they together become sovereignty that rules over this nation in the name of the people. The opportunity for us is fairly obvious and something on which we can find agreement. We can accept our constitutional agreement to be what it presents itself to be. When we come together as a self-governing people, our direction to our representatives will be to serve us as their employer. The current public approach under guidance of privileged leaders has been to replace the study of how government is to serve the public with lessons in how the people are to serve as their public duty. The reins of government lie idle at our feet. Are we willing to pick them up? Our challenge is the obvious one. How do we come to have a government that will serve we the people as both owner and customer of our nation? How is it that we are constantly presented as truth with how we already have this special government that we are the beneficiaries of the best and most representative government that ever existed with less than 20 percent of us favoring what they do? For performance perspective the flag goes up immediately. Is this a matter of us and them where we can only define ourselves as better than others? What about our sense of value in what we receive? What about ownership and how government is to serve us? This is not measured as better than others. We have the reality that what we have done as a nation has not accomplished what it claims and it is our place to search out how we have failed to have a government that truly serves we the people. Our constitutional instructions seem clear enough. What we have is not what was planned and does not fulfill the purpose we set upon our government. What has changed? But when we go back and look it is clear that the purpose of our leaders was, from the beginning of our nation, bent to running government for our benefit. It was running things a benevolent rule accomplished through granting privileges to leaders who were then authorized to see to our best interests. It was another vision, another purpose. It was establishing a sovereign government to the benefit of the people. There never has been any political interest in creating a truly representative government, only one where the people would be able to choose who was granted the privilege of rule. Indeed, it was another hundred years before we even had a fledgling performance science come on the scene. Our forefathers did what they could. They arranged a government where commoners were elected to rule over the nation. Performance is in a different direction. One that draws people together to gain a valued result and we are looking to a truly representative government as that valued result. We look to how we are able to call those who governed, those who are indeed also citizens just like us, to become our agents for the purpose of governance. Our key is the black box, our tool for performance. As owners, what is it that we provide to our government so that it will accept services to us as its product? And there it is for all to see. As owners, we are the ones who can set purpose upon our leaders. When and where we are agreed as to the value it produces for us, we can assume authority to direct our leaders. We are the natural managers who can, on finding what we agree has value, set responsibility upon those who are elected to see to what we direct for their accomplishment. As owners, we can demand performance. For vision, privilege has done in our government what it has always done. It has arranged things so that authorized individual leaders cannot be held responsible for much of anything. They have so arranged government that the pieces are isolated working together only as they must. They have divided the authorities and set one part of government against another until they have become ineffective. They have promoted internal divisions and contests within each part of government to assure that there is no central action to interfere with privilege. The good news is that we have a cure for this. It was realized in the production environment when Frederick Taylor set responsibility to manage upon the foreman so that he serviced those who were accomplishing performance. This is our model for action. It is we the people setting management responsibility on those who would rule in our name. It is we the people arranging for the parts of our government to function to purposes that serve us. It is we the people setting our various elements of government to work together based on the purpose we can agree to set upon our government. It is we the people arranging performance management for government. What we have learned in our culture will haunt us if we let it. I'm not calling for people to run things. That is a return to privilege to having us be the boss of government. We the people are volunteers in this with such purpose as can bring us together to set performance responsibility upon our leaders. We are the exception. The exception managers, those who can observe and review what our government does in our name, stepping in whenever and wherever it becomes important to us. What we miss is an established approach to do this. Government has been arranged to rule over the people, not to accept them as some sort of sovereign authority and not as a source of our leaders performance purpose. What we do have as a matter of convenience is the grand jury. It is a representative sampling of citizens who can directly represent the people. This is one available means to step into management over those who try to operate by privilege. What we have already covered is that there can be no secrecy from the owner of the nation. It is an open and hostile opposition to the very concept of representative government. The grand jury is a working tool to address matters that are not to be disclosed to the wider public. The grand jury is a representative body that is citizens and the jury acting as a representative body can authorize the securing of information from wider distribution. The rules are obvious. Secrecy is always an exception to representative government. There can be no authorized secrecy unless we the people authorize it. Elected government has no basis, none whatever, for secreting information from those in whose name they have authority. One way to manage a level of secrecy is through the grand jury that authorizes the further restrictions of information or action. The grand jury is a sampling of the people. It is people representing themselves and others who are also citizens. They can authorize retention of information, documents, and other public actions. The authority is already theirs. One opportunity for us is to agree that our public employees submit what they would refuse to the public, then a sampling of people can restrict further access. This is one way to provide citizen management services to those who would govern in our name, that they must answer agents to the public that employs them. With the expansion of our grand jury involvement, we have a potential to provide that missing senior management authority to those who now try to run things without it. We provide the vision that our leaders need to come together to get things done that we value. Part of the public appeal is that the use of grand juries is recognized in the Constitution. It is also notable that the courts regularly deny citizen initiated actions. Privileged leaders support the privilege of leaders. This is part of the stability of that privilege creates. The challenge is assuming management over our nation. There is no authority in government to resist what we the people come to agree. One immediate agreement potential is that our elected congressmen are authorized to perform direct management over the operation of our government. It just starts with a direct and immediate refusal to accept secrecy from our leaders. There is potential for agreement that secrecy is holy and completely anti-public. Our challenge is presenting this in a way that enlists we the people and our leaders to set it in place. This is the basis for seeking our higher owner authority, which is only available from us as a basis for authorizing secrecy. We have a potential for expansion of the grand jury system to address matters of secrecy. If the people, the real authority behind government, are agreed that their representatives are in authority to actually manage the government, this yanks that door open. It will take a public mandate to do this. Nothing less will even disturb the stability of what now protects the actions of privileged leaders. Without the mandate the leaders elected into congress will almost universally deny any purpose in setting responsibility upon them. Those who feel authorized to keep their activities, work, product, and testimony from the public will seek court protection from we the people. The rule for us people always treat change as a cost. Our benefit has to appear to justify that cost or the change will be refused. The hard part for us will be setting such a change upon congress, empowering them to actually represent us and do the job for which we hired them. I note that this is also empowering our congressional leaders and yet they will try to refuse it. That will be the sticking point. Once that is in place the deeper changes will follow. The first time another privileged leader refuses to testify sits on documents congressmen required to do their job or tries to set their conditions on when and where they will comply. The effect will be set in motion. That person challenging representation is likely to be fired, demoted, or even prosecuted. No matter how righteous they may feel they are, the consequences will be personally disastrous. That is the beginning of change. That is when the security community will come to congress to work out a new understanding of how this will continue. That is when the conflict between management and workers will open the door for grand jury as intermediary. Setting people who work based on privilege into competition with others who claim privilege sets up a situation where change becomes possible. Think with the stuff to the courts when those with conflicting privileges seek to have judicial interference. It is most likely that the courts will find good reason to refuse to even hear such matters. I will tell you the administrative management handling of situations when subordinates bring their conflicts for the leader's decision. The common response is that they are to go back and find their own solution and return to the leader for implementing what they decide. Privilege does not serve those with less privilege. Again, I do not expect you to jump up and initiate this action. You probably have things to accomplish that are both more important to you personally and a far greater priority. If this does become someone's priority, you are then in a position to support their actions or to take part in accord with your own priorities and an expectation of what it will cost you to do so. Our cultural lesson is that someone has to be in charge or nothing ever gets done. The performance reality is that very little gets done when someone is in charge and trying to run things. It is when leadership is part of the effort servicing the effort of those who act that we have a high level of performance. This is basic to human performance. It is how we get things done. In the challenge of governance, we have two conflicting management purposes. The first is running things properly and effectively. The second is performance seeing the symbiotic value relation between people and their government. We have a great deal of experience with the first. We have feudal management that's so stagnated civilization that we named its most influential period to be the Dark Ages. We have its rejection in England in favor of parliamentary governance. We have the revolution of the United States from its effect upon English citizens in America. We have the disturbing witness of the Civil War where public leaders defy to the people against each other. It is not a list of wonderful accomplishment. For performance, we have privileged leadership rejecting it and yet it quickly replaced the authoritative leader in the production environment. We have the science of performance that seems to work anywhere privileged leadership cannot keep it contained. We have a national government that by law is representational but refuses to represent the people where it might interfere with doing the right things. Can you see the conflict brewing the coming conflict that will destroy the nation? Our most challenging answer is that there is no real conflict. When the people are agreed, we are the authority. On our agreement, there is no other authority to raise any real conflict. We the people are the only party in interest. There is no other source of authority. There is no other authorized purpose that would conflict with our owner-based purpose. There is no other nation and no other special people who will see to our interests as the product of their efforts. There is just us. The subject of secrecy is just a flash point. It is just a place where the denial of representation is both obvious and presentable as a basis for agreement. It is a place where government insists that it does not serve the people because it is doing the right things. Insisting that the ones we elect actually represent us is a powerful concept and it can be leveraged into changes that support serving the people of the United States in ways where we can receive and enjoy the result. If that gets in the way of rulers, how sad that might be. Among our opportunities is insisting that our government actually performs as our representative authority. It is supposed to be serving, not ruling. It is authorized to deliver what we value as the result of governance instead of assuming that we approve actions that deliver nothing to the United States of America. That is the key. We the people are the nation, not just the people living here. If we are not to receive what we get to value then it has no value to the nation. It does not matter how valuable those who are part of government feel that security to be. The only ones who get to value what government accomplishes are those who are outside of it. What government produces only has value as we value it. What we do not receive has no value at all. It is waste and we receive just as much after it is eliminated. Of course the security flag goes up. If we do not keep these things secret then foreigners will be able to take advantage of us. The answer is inherent to the question how in the world will they be able to take advantage of knowing more than we do except that you never let us know it? The answer of course is that if we do know about it then they will not be able to take advantage in knowing more than we do. Secrecy from we the people needs to be the exception not the rule. If any organization needs to operate in secrecy then it must be authorized by we the people not by some leader who was elected to represent us.