Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts

Thursday, September 28, 2017

Trumpier than Trump

With our nation's president going on the offensive with everyone from foreign allies, dictators, media, to professional sports and more; we have become accustomed, if not completely numb, to some of the things he says that are deprived of any intelligence whatsoever.

Fast forward to this past week in Alabama, where a firebrand conservative Roy Moore won a Senate seat by igniting the flames of the intellectually less fortunate. We should be concerned with this development, if we are ever to progress our country out of the educational and intellectual decline, or else we risk tumbling ever further into the phenomenon known as Idiocracy.

Roy Moore is a more audacious version of Trump - a Trumpier Trump, if you will. He doesn't do Public Relations remediation of anything he does that is viewed as a negative, because he doesn't believe anything of the kind exists. This is a man who has conviction that all of society's ills boil down to the people forgetting about God. He believes that God incurs wrath on all of us, because of those among us who have strayed from the almighty.

He also believes that homosexuality is illegal, all law comes from God himself, evolution is a hoax, Obama is not an American, reds and yellows are fighting, and Islam is a false religion. He even idolizes Vladimir Putin and likens himself to the character of the Russian leader.

But if that wasn't enough, he was fired from his previous job on the Alabama Supreme Court for refusing a Federal order to remove the massive stone Ten Commandments statue from inside the courthouse. While he believes all law comes from God, it is evident that he picks and chooses which laws to follow on a case by case basis.

While the media and the people here on the East Coast may chuckle and laugh at his election, it is not a reason to laugh. It is a rather sad event that we have to tolerate such people representing any community as elected officials. He is by far not the only one present in the Senate or the House of Representatives. Various representative degrees of the intellectually challenged sit and preside over laws that impact us nationally.

We all are responsible for this. We must take our education system back, enforce separation of church and state, communicate with our representatives, keep aware of legislative news, and vote intelligently. If we brush off the election of the Moores with a chuckle and a laugh, it won't be long before Idiocracy is realized.

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Absentee Congressman

We are living in an era when the leaders we elect do not uphold the rights and interest of the citizens at large. Instead, they pursue a path of self-enrichment and corruption at taxpayer expense. Nowhere is this deficiency more evident than the Congress. Here we see elected officials consistently miss votes that are inconvenient for them to participate in.

When we elect a politician, we expect that person to vote against legislation that will harm us and vote for legislation that will benefit us. However, that very politician received money from their party, private donors, corporate donors, lobbies, etc. It is those monetary contributors to their campaign (and back pocket) that they owe their Congressional votes to first, before any of us.

There is a very useful, but severely underused, tool that the government provides us with, which allows an average citizen to track the Congressional votes (or lack thereof) of their Senators and Representatives. Here is the website: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes

Based on a 2015 study, our Congress was rife with Senators and Representatives that missed a significant portion of their votes. To be fair, those dutiful elected officials that cast every single vote they are called upon drive the average absenteeism down to a palatable 4%. However, there are some that reach as high as 30% absenteeism and over 20 officials consistently miss more than 10% of their expected votes. Imagine if you don't show up for work 10% of the time? That's right - the Senators and Representatives play by a different set of rules.

But absenteeism is only a part of the problem. A lot of the time, the Senators and Representatives are present for the vote, but abstain from voting on an issue that may be problematic for them.

Let's suppose you're a Senator in North Dakota and you are asked to vote on the Dakota Access Pipeline regulation. Your voting population does not want the pipeline approved for environmental reasons. But your big money donors have a financial stake in the project and want your vote for approval. You are not going to deny your sponsor, but you will also not want to upset your voters. So you chose neither - you abstain from voting, citing the legislating is lacking, incomplete or some other irrelevant excuse. That way, you remain safe with the donors and most of the voting public.

In order for us to clean up the Washington landscape, we have to turn our votes into weapons. We must fight Congressional Absenteeism and legislative vote abstinence. Your elected officials have an important job - to vote for or against legislation on your behalf.

Take a look at your elected officials' voting record here  https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes
And if they're not doing their job, we must fire them. Don't sit on the sidelines - weaponize your votes!

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Refreshing Congress

Get this, Donald Trump was actually right about one thing - in order to make Washington DC work for the people, those elected by the people cannot spend their careers in Washington.

The elected officials were never supposed to become career politicians according to the founding fathers of our nations. They were supposed to serve for a certain amount of time and return to their prior career afterwards. This way the government would stay connected with the people it served, because the decisions they made while in office would also affect them after they have completed their terms.

In addition, the added benefit of changing elected officials more often is that the special interest lobbies will be unable to depend on career politicians remaining in their pockets for the long term. They will need to court each and every newcomer, which won't be as easy since being bought for the short term will have potential dire consequences for their long term careers.

It is a very simple thing to say that term limits should become law, but it is incredibly difficult to make this a reality. The elected officials who enjoy unlimited benefits at taxpayer expense will not turn off their cash flow willingly. But besides Trump being right about it and promoting the idea, Senator Ted Cruz and Representative Ron DeSantis have introduced legislation this past January 3rd.

Unfortunately, politicians like Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer want the American people to forget about this proposal. Even politicians I used to have respect for, will not return phone calls or emails about the matter. Yes, the cash flow that being a career politician is quite a powerful force over serving the people that have elected you - it is a drug addiction. Well, I say it is time for an intervention.

We need to call, email, and show up at our elected officials offices. We need to let them know that if they do not support the term limits legislation proposal that should become law, this will be the last term they will ever serve.

Sunday, February 19, 2017

Breaking Up Parties

Now is the time and a chance to become a more civilized functioning country with a government that more closely represents each and every one of you - American citizens.

As long we have the two-party stranglehold over the USA government, the average American citizen will never be truly represented by the politicians we elect. Let me explain this in several simple points.

1) When only two parties control the political landscape, you have polarizing black and white views on each side. This makes it nearly impossible to make a nuanced choice of whom to support and for whom to cast a vote, as neither side will ever represent the vast majority of the American population. As a result, most American citizens do not participate in the election process. The majority that do wind up voting are left with a terribly choice - which candidate do I dislike less? When the candidates for any office are not even close to representing your views and values, there is no meaningful choice even when you have the right to choose.

2) When either party has the majority of Senate and House of Representatives, while also having the Presidential seat, the opposing sides don't have to negotiate. The controlling party can simply pass legislation and push through its policy without any regard for the other side. In the majority of other democracies in the civilized world, there are multiple parties that more closely represent the differing views of their population. In these cases, a party may win an election with a 25% percent of the vote, sometimes as high as 35%. But it almost never results in a flat out majority. This means that the winning party needs to negotiate with other parties, form a coalition, discuss and amend their proposals to fit the desires of the majority of their population. It is a much more true to form representative democracy than what we currently have to endure.

3) It is incredibly easy for big money interest groups to control the political landscape. There are big money lobbyists that play a heavy hand in influencing our government's policies via monetary contributions to the two major political parties and their candidates. Pharmacy, Insurance, Banking, Tobacco, Gun and various other lobbies have our American government in their back pockets. It is really easy to do - just donate money to both parties. Whoever wins the controlling seats in our government, the big money contributors are guaranteed that their interests are protected no matter what. If there are multiple parties that have to negotiate with each other and be held accountable to the actual views of the people who elect them, the lobbyists will not have as much sway over the legislation.

I believe that we are living in an extraordinary time of unprecedented opportunity, on which we owe it to ourselves and future generations to capitalize. The 2016 election has exposed and opened up the fault lines in both the Democrat and Republican parties. The Democrats screwed up big league by internal collusion in favoring one candidate in the primaries over another, while the Republicans were fighting among themselves and rolling down the hill into disarray, until they miraculously emerged on top of the orange mountain.

As a result, the Democrats have internal battles that are pulling the party into Progressives, Traditional Democrats, and those who now identify as Independents. The Republicans have an even more fierce battle among them between Traditional Republicans, Tea Party, Evangelicals, Reformers and Hardcore Conservatives.

We, as American citizens, must force these political fault-lines to crack these parties apart into smaller more specific ones. How do we do this? Through putting pressure on our elected officials with our votes. We need to make each and every politician recognize that we will, from this point on, hold them accountable for their action (or inaction) as our representatives. After enough politicians realize that the status quo no longer suits their office, the polarizing methodologies of the two-party stranglehold will be left in the rear-view mirror of history.  Make your vote count in every single election, no matter how small, from this point on.

Sunday, December 11, 2016

Will The People Speak?

I hate to break it to all of you, but it's over! The people of the United States have spoken in our imperfect, geographically weighed, electorate driven system of Democracy we have accepted to be legitimate and teach the rest of the world about. The winner is Donald Trump and there is nothing you can do about that anymore.

However, that does not mean that you should limit your responses to outrage and witty posts of opposition for the next four years. It is time to take action, because this election cycle has reduced our election process into the reality television show that is viewed as a circus around the world.

What we need to do is begin to hold our politicians up to their stated agenda, opposing them where it is unconscionable and unethical. But also, supporting them where it is reasonable and beneficial. What any responsible American should do is learn what your President, Senator and Representative have on their agenda. And do not take it second-hand from the lens of polarizing media, but from the politician's own complete statements.

Let's take our president-elect as an example. One of the things he has promised to do is to curtail freedom of the press through promoting specific libel laws, which would make it very dangerous to publish any editorials and effectively silence opposition. Clearly, this is a serious violation of our nation's constitutional principles. With this kind of agenda, the citizens should fervently oppose his administration through their regional representatives in Washington.

Another item he has promised is the establishment of term limits for elected, as well as appointed, government officials. This would prevent the career politician in Congress, which is currently a person who remains in his or her post until they die, making them a consistent steady target for special interest groups and their lobbyists. Reasonably set term limits would allow these elected officials to be closer in touch with their electorate and with the reality of modern times.

We need to start seeing our politicians the same way they see us (their voters) - what can this person do for us and what should this person not do to us? What the American people can no longer afford to do is oppose a politician's entire agenda, because of certain items that we deem to be unconscionable or unethical. We have done that with George Bush Jr. and Barack Obama for the past sixteen years with the result being a Congress that can hardly get any legislation passed and a bitterly divided nation over a silly ideological boundary. Every politician has points that are good and others that are bad.

So speak to your regional Washington representative. Voice your opposition to the politician's terrible ideas, voice your support for the politician's good ideas, discuss the details of each - you may learn something. But don't sit out the next four years because you are unhappy with the result, do not oppose 100% of any political agenda and do not support 100% of any political agenda. In my experience, almost every politician is a mix of bad ideas and good ideas.

Remember, only a certain type deals in absolutes.