The USA was designed, but there were huge omissions in the design. This doesn’t reflect poorly on the founders. They were humans, limited, fallible. They did something new and novel and did a good job. But they were human- the Constitution is not perfect. Continue reading
On Facebook, someone said, about “Trump bashing”: “It’s our America. When you put down our President, you dishonor our country.. Stand behind our elected leader. What you are doing is un-American. In some countries, it would be treason.
I replied: When Republicans put down Obama, it seemed to me that they dishonored our country. They dishonored America for years. Fox News and Breitbart, the champions of fake news, dishonest media, lies and distortions, they dishonored America, too. A king of sin, Breitbart executive Stephen Bannon is Trump’s chief strategist.
The devil shames people into standing behind an evil leader. You seem to be doing that, too. In some countries it would be considered treason. But in most, opposing evil is heroic and virtuous.”
A third person replied: “Well said. But labeling Trump as “evil” seems a bit much, don’t you think?”
Then Bush lied to get us into war with Iraq. The naive decision to fire the Iraqi police and army plunged Iraq into civil war. It killed, injured and displaced millions. Arresting and torturing Iraqis sprouted the seeds of ISIS and created willing followers. Bush spent trillions of US dollars on a dishonest war and destabilized the Middle East.
Some people in his administration saw the seeds of the financial collapse. Bush put almost no energy into it.
Was Bush the Devil? No. Did he intend to do evil? He intended to lie. Bush chose to empower idiots and not seek wise council. He chose pride, to trust himself and his cohorts. He practiced presumptuousness, like “Mission Accomplished” instead of humility.
His actions brought a lot of evil in the world. Did he want those results? I’m sure not. Is he responsible for all that evil? In a real sense, he was evil’s pawn.
What about Trump? He doesn’t value his word, or truth. When asked about his promises, he shows no accountability. He has no problem making promises and breaking them. He doesn’t remember his word, much less honor it. His words are full of the utmost pride. He dismissed everything US intelligence said about Russia. In his boastful arrogance, he grudgingly admitted that maybe Russia did try, but they didn’t effect the result. He pretends to know– that’s pride. Pride is usually recognized as the worst of the seven deadly sins.
Plus there’s his greed- his willingness to violate agreements, defraud people and sue them. From his win/loss record, there’s no evidence that he has decent judgement or concern about the merits of a case. He seems naive about kindness, even ignorant. Niceness or civility only appear when it’s good for his publicity. He seems to have no respect for the best practices either of a president or of American government. Not revealing his taxes is dishonest. Having his vast network of conflicts of interest is simply wrong and bad- it’s an invitation for corruption. These are many vices balanced by a thorough lack of virtue.
He’s rich. If he was ethical, he’d sell all his holdings and perhaps buy out the co-owners of Trump Tower. He’d put the rest in a blind trust and make America is first and only responsibility. That’s what a good person would do.
Look at his level of truth-telling in the campaign. He’s completely wedded to “the ends justify the means.” A good person would be committed to ethics as well as good results. That’s not Trump.
Trump may well want wonderful things for America. But he’s not on track to deliver them. Is Trump evil? He’s on track to serve evil.
(Quotes from Facebook were edited for readability.)
If you want moral politicians, avoid those who are self-righteous.
Remember all those Republican men who called for Bill Clinton’s impeachment on the grounds of his marital indiscretion? Those same men were hiding very similar secrets of their own.
Newt Gingrich led the impeachment, then resigned because he was having an affair. He was cheating on his wife. Then Bob Livingston led the impeachment. He later resigned because he had had lots of affairs. Then Dennis Hastert took over. In April of 2015, Hastert was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison for illegally structuring payments to cover up his molestation of two high school boys.
Are these the people we want in Congress? Newt Gingrich is still a major influence of the Republican party. Republicans have been following his advice for decades. His motto seems to be: “If lying doesn’t work, keep repeating them till it does.” Is that the kind of person we want steering a major party?
I have nothing against conservatives, except for who they’ve chosen as their leaders.
McCain was a good man. Ron Paul seems good. Mitt Romney, too, although he got rich by stripping US companies of their value and didn’t come clean about it.
But now Trump is the Republican presidential candidate. In 2012, it was reported he didn’t run for president because his businesses were shady. And not only did he cheat on his first two wives, but he’s proud of making married women cheat on their husbands. This article says:
In The Art of the Deal, Trump boasted about bedding other men’s wives:
“If I told the real stories of my experiences with women, often seemingly very happily married and important women, this book would be a guaranteed best-seller.”
And now, he’s been accused of rape, and child-molestation. He’s proud of leading people to sin, and he’s leading the Republican party.
And, Trump is the most self-righteous major candidate we’ve ever seen. He behaves like a child. He bullies. He calls people names. He makes fun of disabled people. He insults people’s heritage. The very conservative David Brooks wrote:
Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president … His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. … Trump is perhaps the most dishonest person to run for high office in our lifetimes. All politicians stretch the truth, but Trump has a steady obliviousness to accuracy. … He is a childish man running for a job that requires maturity.
I believe that America’s biggest breakthrough in politics will be to create ways for politicians to be accountable to citizens and ways for citizens to hold politicians accountable. We shouldn’t be so dependent on politicians’ personalities.
But until that day comes: Please America, don’t vote for evil politicians.
Citizens United did not cause money to influence politics. Personally, I think we should overturn Citizens United. Money is not speech. But money influencing politics existed before Citizens United.
People should have the right to spend money on whatever they want. But politicians shouldn’t have the right to accept it. That’s a conflict of interest.
And we had this conflict of interest long before Citizens United. Someone who wants to sponsor Mrs Bigshot’s campaign can hire her for a few years and give her a lavish salary before she runs for office. Or he can promise Mrs Bigshot a great career afterwards. Plus he can contribute to a PAC that opposes her opponent. And he can do favors for her relatives and friends. Citizens United just made it easier.
In the years before Citizens United, money already determined elections. The problem isn’t the court case.
All Citizens United did was make it easier for money to influence elections. And it gave anti-corruption organizations a new target to waste their time on instead of making progress on the real issues.
The power of money in politics is a fortified castle. It’s fortified by the power of its money. Citizens United just added a moat. Yes, a moat makes it harder to storm a castle. But it’s still a fortified castle, fully capable of defending itself. And it has done that for many years.
If people could hold Congress accountable and communicate with each other effectively about issues, lots of campaign finance and anti-corruption legislation would pass very quickly. People want it.
The problem is obvious. People can’t hold Congress accountable. And they can’t communicate effectively with each other about issues.
The solution? Put your email address on our mailing list and we’ll tell you when we’re ready. Coming this Spring…
Someone on Quora asked me (and others): Does the Citizens United case threaten democracy? My answer was no. In the last post, I showed that a main killer of democracy was not the Citizens United decision, but the candidates’ need for money. In this one, I’ll focus on the second major killer, the distance between Congress and citizens.
Some say that the problem is that the parties have become ideologically more extreme, and this contributes to gridlock. This is true, sort of.
I say the problem is really the cause of this. This happened because our politicians are not in communication with the people. Politicians often talk about the “need for political capital”, the support of the people. But they’re not actually in touch with what people want, so they listen to the media. If the media aren’t saying the people are for something, it doesn’t stand a chance, unless the parties want it.
Not being in touch with people, the only people that stay with the party are the diehard ideologues. The rest want some sort of compromise. In fact, most people in America would like an alternate party:
Americans do not feel that “the American people” are represented by either of the existing parties.
Almost nothing happens in Washington DC without party support. The gridlock happens not only because the parties are widely divided, but also because the parties have the power. The power of the people has been stolen by the parties as much as it has been by the money in elections.
The silent majority is silent. “Most Americans do not have uniformly conservative or liberal views, and want their representatives to meet one another halfway.” But the parties don’t listen. One more bit of evidence, 97% of Americans would support stronger anti-corruption legislation, but Congress doesn’t act because this benefits Congress and the parties.
Further, “gridlock in the U.S. political system benefits the rich and has significantly contributed to rising inequality.” Clearly, the problem is money in politics. But the solution needed is two-fold. The first is to reduce the amount of money needed in politics. But this still leaves the parties in control.
The second is to make politicians directly accountable to people instead of to parties. This means both empowering people to say what they want as well as empowering politicians to answer them. And it means all politicians, not just incumbents. We need politicians to directly compete with each other to do what the people want.
This is what PeopleCount.org can deliver, with your participation.
Do you want politicians to be directly accountable to you, instead of to the parties? Do you want politicians to be focused on running the country, instead of raising funds from the wealthy?
If you do, please support us. Please add your name to our announcement list.
Someone on Quora asked me (and others): Does the Citizens United case threaten democracy?
No. The need for money and the distance between Congress and citizens has killed democracy.
Didn’t you read about the 2014 study at Princeton that showed America is an oligarchy? There’s no correlation between legislation that is passed and what the people want and . But there’s a strong correlation with what the wealthy want. Democracy is dead.
And it was dead or dying long before Citizens United. Citizens United was merely burying the casket. Declaring the corpse would not rise again.
There are two things that killed democracy in America.
Yes, money corrupts. Today, politicians spend several hours every day fundraising. Democrats recommend new representatives spend five hours a day at it! Most try not to sell out to special interests. They try to listen and assure that the policies they already support are in the best interests of the lobbyists. And maybe they’ll bend them a little, sweeten them just a little.
But it’s a straightforward conflict of interest and the above study shows the results.
The candidates that raise and spend the most money win 95% of elections. If you want to win, raise more money.
The problem isn’t the Citizen’s United. The problem is that money is essential to win elections. That’s what needs to change. That’s why PeopleCount.org has the only solution to this problem- put our politicians in direct communication with citizens, controlled by citizens.
You ask for reports on the issues you say are important. You read them and you grade them. And this costs the politicians pennies. With PeopleCount, Congressional and Senate campaigns can cost 1/10th as much as they do now, or less.
Plus, you vote on issues so we can all see what we want and know what kind of legislation is reasonable to pass. And the candidates will no longer need to spend lots of money to pollsters interrupting you at dinner.
Remember the drug war? No matter what we’ve done, the demand for drugs keeps them flowing in. None of the campaign finance laws proposes a real solution, to lessen the demand.
Plus, if America uses PeopleCount, atop lessening the need for money in campaigns, we’ll be able to pass campaign finance reform and anti-corruption legislation easily.
In the next post, we’ll see the other killer of Democracy. Join us- add your email address to our announcement list.
In the last article, we saw how parties corrupt Congress. Political Parties are primarily about the dominance of their points of view, their platform. Their primary purpose is not delivering what the people want. In this article, we’ll see how members of Congress are dependent on parties and influenced by them. And how PeopleCount frees our officials from that dependency and thus lessens party influence.
There are two main forces that keep parties in power. The first is our two-party system, which we’ll discuss elsewhere. The second is the inability of members of Congress to communicate with their constituents.
A member of Congress really has two questions, on an issue:
If a politician had real communication with constituents, she’d know what her constituents wanted. Constituents would communicate it. And she knows what’s best for America, or at least, it’s part of her job to find out, to read research and talk to others in Congress and with experts.
She would then either agree with constituents or disagree. If she agreed, she’d know what to do. If she disagreed, she’d communicate that to voters and work it out. If she had the communication tools, she could have a conversation with voters, a back-and-forth.
Ideally, a politician serves the voters. She’s the employee and you are her boss. If she disagrees with what you want, she’d discuss why with you and you’d either agree or not and then direct her.
Unable to do this kind of communicating, the politician is left in the dark. She doesn’t want to anger voters so she adopts the party position. There’s safety in numbers. If she does her own research and disagrees with the party, she’ll try to influence the party’s position. But in the end, she’ll adopt the party position to avoid being responsible for an unpopular stand. Lack of communication with voters makes our officials rely on the party for safety.
PeopleCount.org simply provides the communication channel to voters. She communicates with voters via her reports on an issue and voters reply with grades and by changing their votes on the issue if they agree. While we have some other kinds of communication planned as well, this simple system will provide the communication necessary for politicians to confidently represent their constituents and be free from party positions.
PeopleCount will free congress from the corruption of parties. There’ll be two more articles on this, one about the two-party system and one about the proper role of parties.
Parties corrupt democracy. George Washington warned us. To him, parties put their own interests above those of the country. And their chief interest is to dominate, to control government.
So the parties split voters into two groups based on an issue. Not all members of Congress care about the issue, so they then embrace other issues to win over others. They end up splitting on a bunch of issues.
Then they argue just to make themselves look right and the make the other side wrong.
On the other issues, the voters don’t split the same, so people have to choose whether to stay in one party that represents them poorly in some ways, or join the other side which represents them poorly in other ways. This article reports: “Once you get out of Washington ‘conservative’ can mean all sorts of different things. Voters are often left of center on some issues and right of center on others.”
On some issues, the party doesn’t even represent the people. On the question of whether to close gun background-check loopholes, 93% of Americans want it. But the Republican party represents the NRA position, which is against it. And while the Democrats could easily pass a bill closing it, they’d rather leave it open to help make a future gun-control bill more attractive, sacrificing what the American people want to cater to their zealots.
On some issues, neither party represents the people. Depending on which poll you look at, 75% (in 2012), 71% (in 2011), 75% (in 2015) of Americans support term limits for Congress. Also 63% would abolish the electoral college. And over 90% would support anti-corruption legislation such as the American Anti-Corruption Act. Despite these issues having been around for years, neither party is taking a stand on them, much less championing legislation.
The bottom line is that the parties don’t represent the people. As Washington said, “They [political parties] serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community.”
Let’s free Congress from the dictates of parties. In the next article, we’ll see how PeopleCount.org accomplishes this.
Until then, please register, if you haven’t yet, and vote on term limits (questions 10 and 11).
This article in Politico says Google could rig the election by changing its search engine parameters.
I don’t buy it. It’s one thing to change the search engine parameters, it’s another thing to shape them to favor one candidate or another. Even more challenging would be to do it secretly. While it might be technically possible, there’s no evidence that Google can muster this kind of immorality. Google has much more to lose by influencing an election than it has to gain.
My guess is that the authors are inciting a bit of fear to get publicity for their research about how search results can influence an election.
Missing from the article is information about how many people actually use a search engine for finding information about candidates. While they’re research showed that 20% or more of people who search for information about the candidates can be swayed by the results, they didn’t say how many people actually inform themselves using such results.
Plus, they seem to have used a canned set of search results that had a mix of persuasive articles in them. While it’s believable that if people see one set of persuasive articles vs another, many of them can be swayed, it’s doubtful that a set of search results would contain such persuasive articles.
Let’s let the researchers monitor Google’s search results, and not add this worry to our mythology about “what’s wrong”.