Candidate for
Mayor; Proposed City of San Fernando Valley

I'd like to say just a word or two about experience.

I've been a government bureaucrat, in New York City, in Washington, D.C., and even right here in Los Angeles. My bureaucratic experience at the General Accounting Office's Military Claims Division, in Washington, gave me an indelible impression of the triviality, the worship of procedure over accomplishment, laziness, an arrogant disregard for the public and inefficiency that too often characterizes government agencies. I have been trying in the 26 years since I resigned from the GAO to re-cast government as the opposite of what I experienced there.

I've been a teacher, in Connecticut, in Palo Alto, and in Santa Monica, so I know how important it is for the generations to exchange information about their worlds and their hopes for the future.

I've been a reporter, where I've investigated, researched, and written about science, technology, culture, business, and politics and asked candidates, office holders, and others tough questions, then published their answers.

I have experience running for office. Twenty-two years ago, in 1980, I ran for Congress in the 12th District of California, Silicon Valley. Even then and even there traffic jams were already becoming unbearable, so my campaign slogan was, "Compute, don't commute." I called for the use of renewable energy, especially solar, and the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. I was outspent in that Democratic primary election 100-to-1 by my opponent, but, thanks to getting the endorsement of the district's leading newspaper, the Palo Alto Times, I won 40% of the vote in nearly every precinct and in the entire district.

I've been a community organizer, co-founding and building the Cable Communications Cooperative of Palo Alto, Inc. to the point where a rag-tag group of citizens could defeat the best efforts of Pacific Bell, Viacom, and William Hewlett's son and win the cable franchise for the Greater Palo Alto Area, including Stanford University, with a plan that gave ownership and control of the cable system to the residents of the area and the subscribers to the system.

I've started a dot.com, which was actually a dot.net, to commercialize Internet voting.

I worked as Director of New Business Development, Political Jurisdictions, at another Internet voting company, where I was partially responsible for the only legally-sanctioned Internet voting ever to take place in the US, in the Democratic Primary in Arizona in March, 2000.

I've produced and hosted hundreds of interview shows on cable television, interviewing hundreds of authors of new books, conducting discussions about art, the future of television, women in comedy, and wireless communications.

I've been a pioneer in the use of the Internet for the distribution of substantial and worthwhile content, conducting audio interviews with authors at BookRadio in Venice in 1999 and then starting my own author interview website, NewBookChat.com, in 2000.

I'm currently the producer and host of "Talk of the Valley," an online video talk show that covers secession and other Valley topics.

In my role as an Internet consultant, I recently gave a presentation about e-government to a visiting group of Japanese technology executives and engineers from NEC.

I've been working since 1996 to bring the power and speed and distributed participation of the Internet to politics, elections, and government, areas where speed and real participation are often scorned, while power for incumbents is pursued mercilessly. My efforts to do this have brought me into close proximity with lying, scheming, and shameless politicians in both parties. Those experiences have convinced me of the need to re-cast politics, elections and government in a totally different light, one that puts people first and politicians last, one that gives democratic power to every person, not just those who have the money, or the ability to get the money from corporations and the rich.

The danger of money in politics is that it's used to hire professional image manipulation consultants who then shape a campaign based on the purchase of space and time in media outlets, some supposedly licensed to serve the "public convenience and necessity," that will sell candidates all the paid advertising they can afford while only superficially, if at all, using their monopoly platforms to investigate and explain the issues at hand and the ideas and abilities of the candidates to address these issues effectively.

After all these experiences I am wary, informed, and still motivated. I have real ideas for the transformation of the Valley that I am qualified by experience to speak about and qualified by my previous efforts to implement.

Here are some types of experience that I don't have:

1. raising hundreds of thousands of dollars from the big corporations and the rich and earning their continuing support by delivering public positions, legislation, and backdoor maneuvers to repay them for their financial investments in my career
2. speaking political gibberish to hide the truth about issues and actions I take
3. changing my position on issues I say I care deeply about when the political winds shift or my "investors" change their minds
4. treating voters as a means to an end, rather than ends in themselves
5. scheming with other politicians to gerrymander legislative districts to the point that no incumbent ever loses, no one without serious money is ever nominated or elected, and the voters are so disenfranchised that not voting becomes the only way they can "vote" at all

In these areas, I have very little experience.

But in terms of knowledge about the areas that government must deal with, the ability to investigate, analyze, describe, interpret, and educate, being able to create innovative and effective solutions to old and new problems, to communicate with people, to help people organize themselves into groups they can use to solve present, ongoing, and future problems, I think I'm more than sufficiently experienced and ready to apply my experience to transforming the San Fernando Valley into a much more pleasant place to live in for all its inhabitants and into a paragon of progress, civility, culture, and prosperity in the eyes of the rest of the world. I'd sure like a chance to try.