A woman is eating at a cafe when she drops her spoon. Before she can call the waiter over, the waiter is already there with a fresh clean spoon. “That was quick,” she said.
“Thanks,” replied the waiter. “Arthur Anderson is giving us efficiency tips, and I really think we’ve improved a lot.”
“So you carry utensils in your apron now?”
“No, not all the utensils, that would be inefficient. Because the spoon is the most dropped utensil, we only carry spoons.”
She enjoys her soup and calls the waiter over to settle her bill. “Um, sir?” She says. “There’s a loose string hanging from your fly”
“Oh no, it’s not loose. Us waiters waste a lot of time washing our hands after using the bathroom. So, Arthur Anderson says to tie a string around our, well, around it, so we don’t touch it. If we don’t touch it, we have no reason to wash our hands.”
She thinks about this awhile, and the waiter goes off and returns with her change. “Sir, you can’t push a string.”
“Huh?”
“You can’t push a string, so how do you get it back in there once you’re done peeing?”
“It’s a very dirty business when these prosecutors, with their unchecked power and no oversight at all, can go after any politician,” Patricia Blagojevich argued.
Obviously, any investigation of a politician should be overseen by that same politician, for fairness’ sake.
This is Patricia Mell Blagojevich, after all, of Chicago’s Mell political family. If prosecutors went after corrupt politicians, most of her family and friends would be in jail.
Or just make anyone running for public office forfeit any family assets to the government, and provide them savings, residence, and salary, equal to the median wealth, home value, and annual income, respectively, of the area they represent.
Yes, if only there were a provision in the constitution requiring people who take the presidency to let go of all of their private ownership of companies.
I think what we really need is a law that absolutely prohibits (as in “felony offence”) politicians *and* civil servants from working, or otherwise deriving income, in the areas they regulated once they retire from public office. Add that to strict election finance laws, and a lot of what we are facing these days would start clearing up. We already have laws regarding bribery and emoluments, so what happens while they are in office is already covered. I’m more concerned with tacit understandings that lead to things like Chris Dodd running the MPAA after leaving the Senate, or the constant Goldman Sachs shuttle into the Treasury and the SEC. The power of the relevant regulations and regulatory agencies has been gutted because there is considerable personal incentive for politicians and agency heads to do so.
Unlike most, I don’t bitch about their “padded pensions”: if they worked for us, they should be well-paid. Good pensions can offset the measures I propose, and they’re a drop in the bucket anyway. I have nothing against divesting assets to family members either, provided those family members don’t arrange an “allowance” after retirement.
And vice versa: you also need to prohibit anyone who has derived income from a regulated area from regulating those areas if they ever run for office or are hired as a civil servant.
Not sure. People within the industry often have the best understanding of the industry, and expertise is not to be sneezed at. What does happen is that you get, say, someone leaving Goldman Sachs to become the SEC chair, and then being hired on again at GS after retiring from the SEC. This person may well know just how divergent the interests of GS are from those of the country, but he (predominantly “he”) also knows that he’ll receive a warm homecoming if he represents GS’s interests while in the SEC. There is currently nothing stopping him.
It’s that leg of the shuttle that constitutes the weak link of the chain. If the person is genuinely interested in national policy, he’ll accept the financial hit and will probably do a good job. If not, well there is nothing in the job for him if he can’t get his reward on retirement. Besides, if the job starts opening up outside the old boys/oligarchs network, we might even get a chance to use other personal pronouns. Bonus!
Expert testimony is not to be sneezed at. However, people whose point of view that [field of expertise] exists only to be made money off of, and to hell with consumers (the dominant point of view within most industries) should not be placed in a position to deregulate [field of expertise]. In addition, that person has a built-in network of people within the industry who will already have their ear, where consumer advocate groups will not.
For instance: Betsy DeVos. Scott Pruitt. Tom Price. Andrew Puzder.
Not arguing, but do you see people like these taking up government posts if they can’t go back to their respective industries to reap the fruits of their “public service”?
Absolutely. Some of them are Free Market Objectivists and believe that things actually work better when deregulated, all of them have friends in the industry, many of them have stocks within the industry they worked in, not to mention any family connections…
Plus, the (already existent) bribery and corruption laws that you referenced are, for the most part, only winked at, unless someone is extremely blatant about their abuse of power.
The best way to prevent a revolving door of corruption between government and private sector is to shut it in both directions.
People have asked me, “Didn’t you listen to Trump when he said that he would build a wall?” I didn’t take the idea seriously during the campaign. I knew he couldn’t get Mexico to pay it — that’d be like asking Hurricane Harvey to foot the bill for rebuilding Houston — and thought it was just talk: another candidate making big promises he couldn’t keep. I never thought it would actually happen.
By backing the wall, my party has abandoned the conservative principles I treasure: less government, less spending, and respect for the law and private property. The wall is expected to cost between $8 billion and $67 billion to build, and its rushed construction requires the waiver of 28 federal laws meant to protect clean air and water, wildlife habitat and historical artifacts.
He still hasn’t clued in. The “less government” that he wanted? He’s getting it: less government protecting his water, wildlife, and history.
If he thought he was getting anything else by voting Republican, he’s the one who has been living in an alternate reality.
But it’s the more government that he voted for that’s building the wall and destroying wildlife sanctuaries. More powerful, more aggressive, more intrusive.
It’s positively Orwellian that people keep calling stronger police states, to enforce racism, “less government”.
He even says that he wanted stronger immigration enforcement, just not a wall. He doesn’t seem to be raising a hue and cry against the human rights abuses against people; the only living things being hurt by Trump and his administration that he cares about are his butterflies.
