It is time to restructure the U.S. federal government

Let’s start this discussion with the assumption that something is obviously, and dreadfully, wrong with the character, substance and structure of the U.S. Federal Government, specifically in the way it functions. Also, in many cases, this same assumption can be made for the majority of State and local governments, but for these purposes, let’s just stick to the Feds for now.

In a phrase, what is wrong is that the outcomes of most governmental decisions at the federal level are rarely, if ever, designed to benefit the general population. Most often, these decisions benefit only those few who have developed an influence over the decision-makers themselves, either through behind-the-scenes deals or more commonly, the simple exchange of money and wealth. Never mind that these decision-makers are supposedly committed to represent those individual voters who elected them to the position they hold. Instead, the decision-makers quickly fall prey to those whose wealth and influence guarantees the decision-maker’s continued position within the structure. In this day and age under this perverted structure, money buys the votes that determines leadership which is a concept the Founding Fathers never dreamed possible nor would they have ever endorsed.

And therein, we find the root of the problem: money most certainly corrupts politics, plain and simple, at all levels, top to bottom, regardless of the individuals involved. Therefore, the solution to the problem, logically, is to better control the money involved in politics. The current structure allows for unlimited corruption without any concern for accountability, in absolute secrecy, for an unlimited period of time. This all needs to change.

For starters, both House of Representative members and Senators must be confined to term limits. They imposed this provision on the presidency after FDR was elected four consecutive times but have failed to impose anything similar upon themselves. I propose that House Representatives, who are currently elected to two year terms be increased to four year terms, but limited to two terms for a total of eight years. Same with Senators – four year terms, maximum of two, total of eight. These figures are certainly negotiable.  

I propose that they be paid well because of the importance associated with what is to be expected of them and to discourage any temptations brought forward by outside influences. The amount and expense allowance is open to discussion but for starters, let’s say a million per year, another half million for expenses. However, acceptance of these funds should carry the condition that no other funds from any other sources other than carefully selected and approved investments will result in graft prosecution, punishable by 20 years in prison, no exceptions. Violation of the public trust should be, and will be, dealt with harshly.

Lobbying can certainly continue but no money or gratuities of any kind can change hands. Lobbyists can submit their ideas and requests to any and all elected officials, as can any citizen, for consideration and review. To offer a bribe to a public servant should, and will, result in a 20 year prison term, no exceptions.

Any and all legislation passed will apply to all citizens, including the elected officials who passed the legislation. The idea that elected officials are either exempt or privileged is unacceptable. Citizens elect public servants, not royalty.

I believe it is necessary to return to the ‘Fairness Doctrine’ begun by Truman in the late ‘40’s but discontinued by Reagan in 1987. By doing so, much of the money wasted on political campaigns can be directed toward other, more worthy, endeavors such as feeding the hungry and securing housing for homeless veterans. In order to function properly and effectively within the American society, all media should be willing participants in the electoral process by donating equal time to all candidates in an open forum structure as a service to the voting population. Failure to do so should result in cancellation of the offending party’s FCC license. This may require important and necessary legislation – long overdue -- to break up media monopolies.  Paid advertising should have limits and should require only direct information pertaining to the candidate’s policy positions. There should be no mention of the opposition in any political advertising. The infamous legislation known as “Citizens United” must be declared null and void.

Elected officials should “put in the time” in the same manner that any other worker does. The basic standard is a 40-hour week with 2-4 weeks of vacation. Current legislators have granted themselves vacation time equal to over 50% of the year. This is unacceptable. Both the elected official and his/her staff will be held accountable to report their activities to their constituents at a periodically agreed upon interval (Daily?Weekly?Monthly?). They will also be required to file comprehensive expense reports relating to their activities. The days of legislators voting themselves raises and exclusive benefits is over.

Legislative business needs to be done for public view and certainly without secrecy. Citizens deserve to know what type of activities and actions their employees are engaged in. A working knowledge of the U.S. Constitution is essential. Prime consideration must be given to economic affairs and proper and effective use of public funds. 

There are probably many other planks that could be discussed/added/deleted to this proposed political platform but the big question remains:  How does one make such a platform, radical as it admittingly is, viable to voters?

The answer to that is actually rather simple, if one gives thought to it. It merely requires one person in each of the 435 legislative districts and two persons per each state to step forward and declare themselves to be proponents of this afore mentioned legislative platform and be willing to sign an oath of allegiance in support of it.

Voters can look at this thoroughly different option and decide for themselves whether it merits consideration or they can continue to live within a two-party system of government that has been corrupted beyond reason.

Politics aside for the moment, I’d like to take a moment to mention what the past month has been like. My son Chris left the USAF last fall after six years of service and finally made it down here to Nicaragua in March. Carol and I hadn’t seen Chris in over five years up until then.

                I have to admit, I was certainly impressed with the boy. He’s 30 now and has developed an incredible amount of good sense evidenced by the fact that he’s become a diehard Cubs fan, just like his ‘ol man. He even signed up with MLBTV so we can watch every game on the computer.

                He’s also got this awesome beard!

 

Opening observations of the 2016 POTUS campaigns

Now that we’ve gotten all the history of my personal presidential elections out of the way, we can begin to examine the current travesty known as the 2016 GOP and Democratic Party primary campaigns.

Starting on the GOP side, we were initially witness to the most bizarre clown car of applicants ever assembled for the amusement of the American public. There were over a dozen at one point, none of whom were even qualified to serve as dogcatcher, let alone POTUS, but there they were just the same. There was a fat guy, a raving bitch, a deranged doctor, and a Cuban robot, to name just a few, but attrition, along with a mega dose of stupidity, has whittled it down to a measly pair who barely qualify as human. On the one hand, we have the narcissistic, money hungry, Mexican hating, women abuser, wall builder wannabe Donald Trump who wants to “Make America Great Again” which infers that it once was at some point in the past but doesn’t explain exactly when that was. The other survivor is the Canadian born son of a Cuban religious zealot, a slimy weasel of a man sent to the U.S. Senate by a bunch of other slimy weasels from a state full of slimy weasels, who nobody who ever met and spent time with him seems to like, even his own wife and children, -- the darling of the Tea Party, or American Taliban as it is rapidly becoming known, Rafael Eduardo Cruz, Anglicized to Ted, because the other sounds too ….. well ….. Mexican …. or Cuban …….

The fact that these two pathetic examples of diseased DNA have evolved into the front runners of what was once a viable and worthy political party -- the party once headed by Abraham Lincoln, for chrisakes – is a clear indication that a large segment of the populous of the United States of America has been reduced to mindless blithering idiots, mostly incapable of logical thought, barely able to dress themselves and all possessors of very limited skills beyond how to load a gun. To support either Trump or Cruz is to publically state loudly to the world as a whole, “I am stupid, I know I’m stupid, and I’m happy to be stupid because all my friends are stupid, too. Hell, my dog’s even stupid. Let’s make ‘Murika great again!”

So many of these imbeciles exist in my Motherland that I feel much safer and, indeed much freer in this little war-torn nation where I am allowed to reside that merits such little attention from the rest of the world. Just as well …….

On the other side of the aisle, we have the potential for the first female POTUS, a beltway insider and spouse to a former POTUS whose most famous claim to fame was having received the blowjob “heard ‘round the world” from a young, but enthusiastic, intern. Bill Clinton, rightly so it was said, bent to the left. Hillary Clinton has been picked and prodded over the years by her opponents in the GOP more often than anyone in recent history, allowing of course for the GOP’s attitude toward the current POTUS, Barack Obama, that ….. well, ……. don’t you understand, he ain’t an old white man, see?. ….

The other noteworthy finalist is an old Jewish dude from Brooklyn, a social activist going all the way back to his college days, a former city Mayor and current Senator from Vermont, technically an Independent but running as a Democrat because running as an independent against the two major political parties is tantamount to political suicide in the U.S.

As it stands now, Bernie Sanders has both my support and my vote. More on all this later ……                      

Okay, We're Done With The History .......

               Thanks to a half black man from Hawaii who had ties to my old stomping grounds in Chicago, I managed to put a pair of wins on the board in 2008 and 2012, pushing my overall record to a passable 5-7 in Presidential elections.

                Barack Obama had a name that was virtually impossible to elect at that point in history in the United States of America. It just sounded too much like Osama bin Laden, the most hated man in the country because of his involvement as mastermind in the deadly 9/11 attacks in 2001. But miracle of miracles, it turned out that the USA was sick and tired of Republican bullshit after eight years of Bush/Cheney criminal activity and so the voters turned their collective backs on the new GOP candidate, former Vietnam War hero and POW John McCain and his dingbat running mate, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

                Obama surprised us all with his intelligence, sense of humor and overall general bearing. Face it, this guy was really cool. He could sing, he could dance, he had a beautiful wife and a pair of lovely daughters. This was the guy you wanted to have the ball at the end of the game, down by one, ten second left, because you just knew he’d make the shot.

                He inherited a country in total shambles and when he went to work to right the course, he was met by an obstructionist political party that just couldn’t accept the fact that a majority of voters selected something other than an old white man to be POTUS, something they had done continuously, election after election, for over 200 years.

                GOP Senator and closet racist Mitch McConnell of Kentucky stated point blank that the goal of the Republican party would be to see that Obama was a failure and that he was defeated in the next election. Understand dear reader that their goal was not to find and develop beneficial programs to aid U.S. citizens, their goal was to hinder any and all progress in the recovery of the nation because, …. well, …. Goddammit, look at him, he ain’t white!! He’s a you-know-what!! GOP House of Representative leader John Boehner echoed these sentiments like a good little puppy and anything and everything done by Obama and the Democratic Party to make life better for U.S. citizens was met with a negative response by the GOP from day one. Never in the history of the Republic has a POTUS been treated with such contempt and disrespect by members of the government. At times, it has been both embarrassing and shameful to witness.

                Their efforts failed miserably in 2012 when Obama defeated a famous and revered GOP darling, the fabulously wealthy Mormon Mitt Romney and with that defeat, efforts were renewed tenfold to make America under the Obama administration an abject failure. At times, this reached the point of treason. However, in spite of all the obstructionism, the first seven years under the current leadership has been highly successful and recovery from the disastrous previous administration has made great strides. These last few months in office will, indeed, prove interesting and entertaining because Obama has made it perfectly clear to his critics and opponents at this point that they can just kiss his ass. Get ready for some dandy Executive orders.

                I find that I don’t agree with the guy about everything that he’s done, or not done, but we agree about a lot. In fact, he’s my choice as the best POTUS of my lifetime.

                So, with all this background now in the books, we can begin to spend some time examining the upcoming 2016 election which promises to be among the strangest of all time.

                

Just When You Thought You'd Seen The Worst .....

             The United States of America has a long history of producing vile, contemptible politicians and the year 2000 plagued us with a particularly nasty batch. In an election fraught with near comical and unbelievable voter irregularities, especially in the state of Florida, a despicable piece of shit named George W. Bush somehow came out on top. Naturally, I voted for the other guy, a nice enough fellow that I had once worked with way back in the day at a newspaper in Nashville named Al Gore. This loss dropped my overall record to 3-6.

            Nicknamed “Dubya” or “Bush 2” to differentiate him from his father George H.W. Bush, who had been POTUS a mere eight years earlier, “Dubya” and his VPOTUS Dick Cheney, the Secretary of Defense under Bush 1, did everything imaginable in their eight years at the helm to destroy the U.S.A.

In 1995, Cheney took over the reins as CEO of Halliburton Industries, one of the largest war supporting conglomerates in the world and later, while serving as VPOTUS, used his connections and influence to net billions in profits for Halliburton during the trumped up Iraq war. As the story goes, it went down something like this:

A bunch of crazed Arabs eager for the afterlife under the direction of a disgruntled, and abnormally tall Saudi named Osama bin Laden, very well known to all persons within the international terrorist community, somehow managed to outfox all U.S. intelligence by stealing four commercial airplanes, using two to knock down the twin World Trade towers in New York, another to crash into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. and a fourth that was destined for the White House. This last one was thwarted by the plane’s passengers and crashed instead in rural Pennsylvania.

Everyone aboard all four planes, passengers, crew and hijackers alike, were killed along with thousands and thousands more in both New York and Washington in the most horrendous foreign attack on U.S. soil ever, worse even in loss of life than Pearl Harbor 60 years prior.

The Bush/Cheney answer to this tragedy was to declare war on a guy (and country) that had absolutely nothing to do with it. Having unsuccessfully chased bin Laden all over the planet for over a year, the decision was finally made to go get someone they knew where to find, namely Saddam Hussein, the Iraq strongman who had been chased out of Kuwait earlier by Bush #1.

Whereas bin Laden was a ghost that America’s best alphabet soup (CIA, NSA, FBI) couldn’t find, Saddam was easy to find. He lived in a palace in Baghdad. Eager to get a war going to both improve Halliburton’s current financial picture and save some face for the total failure in the search for bin Laden, Bush/Cheney cooked up a story about some mysterious “weapons of mass destruction” in the hands of the Iraqi, and the game was on. Over 4,000 U.S. troops and an estimated one million Iraqi’s perished in the conflict. No “weapons of mass destruction” were found. Halliburton made billions. Cheney is, and always has been, a major stockholder in that nefarious conglomerate whose primary product is violent death. And rest assured, Bush got his 30 pieces of silver. This activity, this illegal war, has led directly to the terrorist activity the world endures today as Arab survivors of U.S. worldwide aggression fervently seek justice and revenge wherever they can find it.

This dynamic duo of destruction blatantly cheated again in the 2004 election, this time in Ohio with rigged voting machines, and got re-elected, dropping my record to a miserable 3-7.

 The list of the criminal activities committed by these charlatans would fill a large book and I don’t want to go any further into that long list here. Suffice to say that in the end, with time running out, the Bush/Cheney administration managed to cap eight disastrous years of stupidity by totally collapsing the country’s economy, throwing everyone into a recession. The perfect ending to the worst presidency of my lifetime.

Next: The half-black guy.

Hang In There With Me Reader, There Aren't Many More ....

               In 1992 and 1996, I was finally able to put a couple in the win column with William Jefferson (Bill) Clinton, another former governor from a southern state (Arkansas) who came out of nowhere to grab the Democratic nomination in much the same manner as the previous Democratic POTUS, Jimmy Carter. Clinton’s legacy will no doubt include one of the most famous blowjobs in American history which seems to cause incredible moralistic problems for a lot of people, Republicans mostly, as though a bunch of Republican down the line never got a blowjob on Capitol Hill? Really? Seriously?  

                Congress impeached Clinton over the blowjob but it didn’t fly very far; he was in fact acquitted, but answering to his wife Hillary was a whole different matter. History has very little to say as to how that all went down but speculation has it that he was forced to surrender his member, which allegedly bent to the left (of course). Hillary now keeps it safely stashed in her purse and only allows Bill to use it on special occasions.

                The eight years of the Clinton administration were basically peaceful times, other than some minor military participation in Kosovo late in the second term. It has recently been revealed that Al Qaeda, and specifically Osama bin Laden, once tried to kill Clinton when he was in the Philippines by blowing up a bridge while the presidential motorcade was passing by but the attempt was discovered and thwarted. As expected, the incident pissed Bill off to the point that the Arab was removed from the White House Christmas card list.

                The economy flourished under Clinton throughout the ‘90’s largely because Republicans had already stolen anything and everything of any value during the previous 12 years but were unable to continue under a Democratic regime. They would get another opportunity to fleece and pillage the nation later.

                Slick Willie, as he was known in some circles, liked to occasionally show up on late night TV shows and play his saxophone … badly.

                But overall, I kinda liked the guy and still do. He was certainly better than many others, including the guy who came next.

                Next up: Bush the Horrible.

It just keeps on coming .......

George Herbert Walker Bush. You know, I just don’t have much on this guy, I voted for the other guy, Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts mostly because he had the balls and good sense to put a woman on his ticket as Vice President (Geraldine Ferraro), but I lost yet another one in 1988, my fifth out of six tries. Not a very good percentage. 

Bush the Elder, as he is often referred to, was VPOTUS under the popular entertainer Ronald Reagan and pretty much rode his coattails to victory when Reagan was no longer eligible to run. Looking back, we have Bush to thank for putting the entire world in peril by taking on Indiana Senator Dan Quayle as his Vice President thereby potentially placing the massive power of the United States war machine in the hands of a babbling imbecile, only a heartbeat away. It provided the greatest possible incentive imaginable to keeping the POTUS alive.

Under Bush the Elder, I first became acquainted with his Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, a despicable individual who would come back later to haunt us all. I recall a little intrigue down in Panama when the dictator that the CIA had in place, an acne suffering army general and thug named Manuel Noriega, began to spill some beans about the CIA’s trafficking in drugs, mostly cocaine from Colombia, upsetting the POTUS enough that he sent a bunch of U.S. troops to that country, captured the ungrateful little bastard, brought him back Stateside, then promptly stuck him in a Florida prison. The spill of beans was stopped.

Cheney got to flex his muscle later as SecDef along with padding his Halliburton Industries bank account by rescuing the tiny nation of Kuwait from the invading forces of that evil terror from Iraq, Saddam Hussein. This guy would also pop up later.

But overall, not much happened in those four years except that the economy tanked in the end and George Herbert Walker Bush (what the fuck kind of name is that anyhow?) lost his re-election bid in 1992 to a hillbilly with a saxophone.

Next up: William Jefferson Clinton