I'm certainly far better off then my parents were, [who were not that far above what could be called the poverty line] and my Son is achieving great goals in what he is doing. My Old school boys reunion [around an attendance of 12 now after a couple of them kicked the bucket]are all in the same boat as I...some better off then I, others not, but all agree, better off then our parents were. We have a similar situation in Australia where all politicians are hated. I often ask the question, "where do politicians come from?" Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! It scares me...It scares me as to how a Western super power could ever let such a buffoon so close to the Presidency. Politics in Australia over the last decade or so [remember we have had 5 PM's! in 5 years] highlights the general discontent in our country. Although over the last decade or so, each ruling government has had a hostile senate on near all occasions, with a myriad of minor parties holding the balance of power. Our way I suggest of keeping checks and balances on the House of Rep's Is there any country totally satisfied with their lot? Australia also has its own National debt...is there a government that doesn't? The problem as I see it is the ease with which we are able to obtain information and subsequently propaganda and biased commentary..Then claims, we are all doomed! etc etc and people start feeling uneasy. No one can label me left or right imo. Once as a Delegate/Organizer in the early 70's after a 5 week strike with the firm for which I was working, I helped broker a deal that saw a handsome wage rise, along with conditions that the company accepted, and seeing a return to work. That day after the deal was brokered, I was labelled a dirty rotten bosses man by a group of blokes: That same afternoon, I was labelled a dirty rotten commo left wing arsehole. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! I went home that day, confident I had done a reasonable job for the majority.
This is an interesting thought provoker. I noticed in our own government that what could happen if a Prime Minister/President was truly a leader of people is to ask all parties to, in the first instance, agree on what the Government as a whole needs to achieve. For example: The country has a foreign debt. Of say 10 trillion The President would ask for consensus on the amount owning. consensus on the amount growing ( if nothing changes) consensus on the target amount of reduction ( if any) Once the playing field ( sandpit ) is established it is up to the various parties to propose their own solutions and debate accordingly. To eventually arrive at consensus on the solution and once the bipartisan solution is in place, the leader can say "Job well done" to the entire government and not just his side of it. For the leader to be effective he has to first establish consensus over what the "team (all parties included)" is all about. It seems so often that the Government misses the fundamental areas of collective agreement. That being to collectively, together solve the issues that are of highest concern. But first the Government has to reach consensus on what those priorities need to be. Example: Do we agree that foreign debt is our highest fiscal priority? Do we agree that social welfare needs to be addressed and what targets can we set so that solutions can be debated about? etc. Get the basics sorted out first and then go from there. The leader alone doesn't provide the solutions, as all parties to the debate do instead. Example: Philosophically, Trump of Hillary do not provide solutions but for some reason the community expects them to. They only provide leadership towards the garnering of a solution.
That would be good if that happened here. Lately, nothing happens and each side blames the other. If one side (any side) has a good idea, the other side is automatically against it.
Yes way too adversarial. Adversarial debate is fine but at least gain bipartisan support/consensus as to what exactly the debate is about. ...and all ways keep in mind it is ONLY a debate, a debate towards finding solutions for the greater good etc... At the moment the parties can not even agree on a target let alone a solution. JFK showed IMO true leadership when he: "... looked for a US project that would capture the public imagination. He asked Vice President Lyndon Johnson to make recommendations on a scientific endeavor that would prove US world leadership. The proposals included non-space options such as massive irrigation projects to benefit the Third World. The Soviets, at the time, had more powerful rockets than the United States, which gave them an advantage in some kinds of space mission." ~wiki re: Apollo He garnered bipartisan support, captured the governments and the peoples imagination and they collectively set about finding all the solutions needed to be successful.
That's the thing about people, we are at our core tribal beasts. It's nasty and ugly. I've seen it too. Humans have an ugly side and some exhibit it more than others. Some people tend to think ill of folks in positions of power regardless of the fact and reason. For some, it's just easier to hate, and hate brings out the worst in us and it renders us vulnerable to manipulation. That's how Rome lost its democracy. And that's the trail Republicans, i.e. the American right wing, have been walking down for the last few decades. The good news is Trump is very likely to lose and lose big. Trump has severely damaged the Republican Party. I expect and hope after the election we will see a severely divided Republicans Party. We may even see a new party arise from the ashes. The Republican donor class have no interest in ever seeing another Trump win the party's nomination. After this election we might see a less reckless donor class. At least we can hope. Trump's not going away. He loves the adoration of the crowds too much. But his party will be much smaller and much less effective.
Thanks to the US Supreme Court we will need the court to either reverse Citizens United or a constitutional amendment, but you don't need to change the 1st Amendment. You just need to change the way campaigns are financed.
She's Not Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! I think it has to do with who you ask and how you measure it. Last week I conceded a context↱, that the problem with saying "We don't have 'two historically unpopular candidates'" is that the formulation is somehow awry. It's a bullshit concession. Paul Rosenberg↱ is correct: There are at least three main problems with this meme. First, it's a recent snapshot view, which clearly reverses cause and effect. Running for president has severely eroded Hillary Clinton's popularity, due to the combination of intense political polarization and partisanship. On the other hand, becoming first the Republican front-runner and then the nominee has elevated Trump, bringing him in early September to his highest-ever level of national popularity. Second, it ignores how popular Clinton was as secretary of state―much more popular than Vice President Joe Biden, her only “credible” competitor in elite circles at the time. Third, Clinton is not unpopular with nonwhite voters: African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans all have favorable views of her, at least in broad strokes. The meme thus obscures the racialized nature of Trump's and Clinton's respective popularity problems .... .... There’s another way that the “unpopular candidates” meme gets things wrong and that’s when it comes to race and ethnicity. As reported by Becky Hofstein Grady, a SurveyMonkey election tracking poll of more than 91,000 registered voters in August clearly showed that Clinton was not unpopular with nonwhite voters .... .... In short, Clinton is only unpopular with whites, more unpopular than Trump by a good margin, in fact. So the meme is also a way of cloaking unacknowledged racial animus, a sentiment that Bill Clinton famously co-opted with his “Sister Souljah moment,” but that Hillary apparently can’t avoid. One of the strangest challenges facing American society has to do with the asymmetrical decay of our political discourse insofar as when we compare the shortcomings of our politicians against the basic shared values of honesty and decency, we are constantly spotting one side of our general dualism all manner of points in order to pretend there is some aspect of equivalence. Hillary Clinton is not the second most hated person in America. Only in the Republican American nightmare. And the rest? Well, right, media equivocation. Because it wouldn't be fair not to, you know. ____________________ Notes: Rosenberg, Paul. "We don't have 'two historically unpopular candidates': What the media gets wrong about candidate popularity". Salon. 6 October 2016. Salon.com. 23 October 2016. http://bit.ly/2e19pGd
The Good Faith Amendment: • All persons within the jurisdiction of this Constitution are entitled to an expectation of Good Faith in all dealings of the Public Trust, and in the Public Square. That's it. All you do is put a functional limit on how much people can lie to you before a sales pitch becomes attempted fraud: Politicians and private interests alike should only stretch reality so far. In the end, we cannot contain human beings entirely; we will compete, we will stretch, massage, reshape, even deconstruct and rebuild. But there is a threshold at which no element of the truth remains. We see this in big business and politics, police departments, juristics, and pretty much anywhere important, affecting decisions are made. If I'm a car salesman, maybe you'll be annoyed at me for not mentioning the forthcoming safety report rating our brakes as worst in class. But if I make up a lie and tell you that is true about the lower-cost competitor? Most of us recognize and loathe deception by omission when we suffer its stupidity; there are, however, a striking number of people who seem to assert the difference as if not only is it not so bad as lying to you outright, it isn't even dishonest to attempt to deceive you by omission. I actually know an entire family that lives and works this way, and, as you might expect, it would be a Sennet farce except it's real so it's something of a disaster and tragedy. I don't know just where the people at large come down on the question of deception by omission because it does seem a tension between something we don't like and something we accept in the world because we might need it someday. To the other, though, it does seem that functionally, while it is deception, it is a different form of deception than outright lying. One of the great social research experiments could take place: Watch the States pass the Amendment, watch the People try to bleed it to death. I think that's actually the reason we don't try. If we try, and we fail, then we don't get to complain as loudly about the politicians because we have formally proven what "everyone already knows", as such, which is that we complain about lying politicians all the time but won't stop electing them. (In a TTBO year, the functional attitude is, "Throw the Bums Out, but I'll vote for my member of Congress, anyway." And consider this year. All of four Congressional incumbents have lost in primaries; the Democrat [Chaka Fattah, PA-02] resigned after conviction, a Republican [Randy Forbes, VA-04] got redistricted to where he can't win, a Republican woman [Renee Ellmers, NC-02] got punished for not being misogynistic enough, and a Republican [Tim Huelskamp, KS-01] lost for apparently being too much of an idiot. Despite rumblings about voter dissatisfaction and an insurgency year, and all that, it would seem incumbency still has value.)
Here is what I would do. Each year at tax time, every person and/or corporation, paying federal taxes, will be given a blank pie chart and a second pie chart that is filled in with the previous year's government expenditures. Each tax payer will fill in their blank pie chart, distributing the amount of tax dollars that will pay, that year. For example, if you expect to pay $1000 in taxes, you can apply $200 to military, $50 to education, etc., until you use up your $1000. The previous year's federal budget pie chart is there as a guideline, so one can see where it is needed. The IRS will then add up all the pie charts up, and this will given to Congress, whose job is to make it happen. This approach will provide Congress a balance budget and will insulate the Federal budget from partisan politics, and special interest lobbyists. It will also give all tax payers a direct say concerning their taxes, even if you only pay $1 in taxes. I would also allow the children to participate, starting in the 1st grade. The 1st grade students will given a $1 tax budget, by parents or donations, to apply to their own pie chart. This would be interesting data analysis. With each advancing grade, their contributed tax allotment can go up a modest amount, as right of passage. The idea is to teach the children civics, so the system can be made more effective for their future. This approach does to preclude groups appealing to the people, before tax time, to support various parts of the budget. Nor does it preclude partisan approaches toward lobbying for the budget. For example if a Republican tax payer put all their taxes into military, and a Democrats puts it all their taxes into social programs we end up supporting two important things, with both people feeling represented. Tax season is a long period from New Years to April 15, so one can publish a running total so people, can respond to need, over the months, to make the final balanced budget fair across the board.
I don't know what to say. You think this makes sense. Do we get crayons too? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! The budget is much to serious for an annual collective pie chart coloring exercise. The average Joe and Jane aren't qualified to put together the federal budget, and most don't have the time nor the will to learn. That's why we have a republican form of government.
that is a monumentally idiotic idea. first off it makes people who have zero clue about how much minimum is needed to fund certain thing in charge of deciding that. secondly you would have thing grossly over and under funded., anything that was a sexy department would get no funding. quite frankly the idea is just childish claptrap.
Whilst the idea put forward is a tad... uhmm unworkable the underlying intention to increase citizen participation is a good one. For example in today's age of web based tax returns there is no reason at all why a quick citizen's participation section couldn't be established where the 'individual' ( non-corporate) tax payer, as part of his "membership of nation' responsibilities is surveyed on what they believe should be the policy priorities of the government. It would provide valuable insight for the government and most importantly inspire a greater sense of participation, empowerment and self esteem of the tax payer. ... and cost very little to implement.
