Bring back the item veto

One of the huge issues that Republican's and Democrats beat each other over the head with is earmarks.  Earmarks, those dollops of Federal dollars that members of Congress hand out to their districts to curry favor are made possible by the budget process where the President, when he gets a budget from Congress, faces an all or nothing choice.  He can either veto the entire budget, or swallow any objections and sign it.

Some states, including California, provide the chief executive with the power to veto individual expenditures while still approving the overall budget.  It is called the line item veto here in California.  Item veto's are not a cure for all government fiscal impropriety, but they are a useful tool, particularly in the sense that they give taxpayers one person to hold accountable for funding programs that really don't deserve taxpayer dollars.

Back in the early 1990's, Republicans trying to get back into power in Washington by hammering Democrats on the deficit, pushed through a bill giving the President a line item veto.  A year or two later the Supreme Court held it was unconstitutional.  One would think the Republicans, who by that time controlled both houses of Congress, would have proposed and pushed a constitutional amendment to allow the line item veto.  But, since they were now the ones handing out earmarks to curry favor with voters, they evidently lost interest - probably in part because Bill Clinton was President and they didn't want to give him the power to veto their pet projects.  The notion of a line item veto sank into oblivion.

It should be revived.  Whats happening in Europe is an object lesson on how hard it is to control government expenditures.  An item veto would be a useful tool.

On leadership

I heard often as I was growing up that God "puts up over men the basest of men" (Daniel 4:17).

While calling leaders "the basest of men" is pretty harsh and judgmental, I think there is some truth to the basic idea that the people that seek leadership are a little bit different than the rest of us.  They are prone to believe they are exempt from the rules that apply to other folks, and prone to mistake their own self interest for the interest of the enterprise.

We see a couple of examples in the news currently here in the Bay Area.  The recently elected Sheriff in San Francisco has just been convicted of spousal abuse, while here in Berkeley, after folks in town got pretty upset when an older fellow was beaten to death in his yard while the police were occupied elsewhere, the Berkeley police chief sent a uniformed officer to knock on the door of a local reporter about midnight to try to get a story in the newspaper shaped more to his liking.

In my experience the people that become leaders aren't necessarily smarter than others, but they are more ambitious.  They are good at focusing on their own self interest, and how to achieve their goals but often a little bit insensitive or downright oblivious to whats in the interest of the enterprise of which they are a part.

I think this is especially true in the public sector, where productivity is often hard to measure.  People that are verbal and social and focused on their own advancement can climb the ladder faster than people that are more focused on what is good for the enterprise.

In the private sector, although the politicians and the media often use the terms " entrepreneur " and "businessman" interchangable, to me they are usually completely different personalities.  It seems to me many Corporate CEO's are more notable for their ambition than for their management skill.  There are currently many in business that wrap themselves in the mantle of the entrepreneur to use the good will we all hold toward entrepreneur's that create new ideas and enterprises as leverage to gain advantages from Government that to not benefit the wider economy. 

Wish list - deleting electronic spam from my life

I waste a lot of time, and incur a significant amount of aggravation with unsolicited phone calls, emails and text messages from people trying to sell me something.

This blog is to throw out an idea in the hope some tech genius will pick it up and run with it.

Why can't some company provide phone, email and text services that provide that anyone who wants to contact me has to pay me a nickel.  I can create exceptions for family, friends, business associates or other people who I want to be able to contact me for free, but everyone else pays me a nickel.  Maybe my provider takes a $.01 commission from my nickel for providing the service.

I think the volume of phone, email and text spam would drop hugely if it cost spammers a nickel for each spam message then sent.  Life would be significantly less aggravating and I would be more efficient if I wasn't regularly interrupting what I am doing to respond to what turns out to be someone trying to sell me something I am not interested it.

When the guys you hired to fix the problem find new problems

One of the classic stereotypes of our age is the auto mechanic, or the plumber, or other skilled tradesman, that you hire to do a small job for you, then all of a sudden the mechanic "finds" something that will be a big, expensive job that the mechanic stands ready to fix.

In your mind the question comes up - did the mechanic screw it up intentionally or negligently and now seeks to make lemons into lemonade?

When I hear Republicans talking economics today I hear that mechanic, only in my mind there is no doubt the problem was caused by the mechanic that now wants to be hired to fix it.

The deficit?  Its easy to document that the biggest explosions in the deficit since WW II have always been directly traceable to Republican tax cuts and military spending, with one exception.  That exception is the deficit caused by the emergency bailouts that kept the world financial system afloat after Republican policies blew it up in 2008.

The jobless rate?  Republicans controlled the government from 1995 to 2007 and managed to blow the economy up more thoroughly than at any time since the Great Depression.  It took 25 years after the great depression before the economy got back to normal, and they are ripping Obama for only making modest progress in 3 years, even though they have been dragging their feet in every way possible to prevent Obama from making any progress.

Republican economic solutions?  More of the same policies that caused the problems.  They are like a guy who drove a car of a cliff who now wants to take the wheel of the tow truck trying to pull the car out  of the canyon.

In an ideal world voters would give the Republican's a reality check in this coming election.  But the one thing Republicans are really good at is wrapping their sows ear ideas up like a silk purse and finding a way to sell them to the voters.

A candidate for the most meaningless/wrong political rhetoric

"Regulations like this are killing business, making us uncompetitive in the world market and killing jobs."

We all hear this constantly in current political rhetoric, but it is also one of the most overused and durable political glittering generalities in our history.  I suspect you can pick up almost any copy of the Congressional Record for the last 100 years, find discussion addressing legislation attempting to regulate business conduct and within a few pages find some member of Congress espousing some version of the above statement.  (A statement in the 1931 Congressional Record sparked this blog).

Yet somehow, despite the constant lamenting of the Congressional defenders of all things business we managed over the last 100 years to build the most dynamic and dominant economy in the world, and enjoy the most comfortable and secure lifestyle in the history of the world.  (Although admittedly our position has slipped somewhat since those same Republicans who most commonly espouse this cliche got a majorities in Congress from 1995 to 2007 and managed to undermine the economic stability of much of the developed world)

I've heard thousands of politicians making statements like this in my lifetime, but never really thought about how they have been contradicted by history until recently.  I was reading the Congressional Record about a Republican bill in 1995-96 to gut the Truth in Savings Act.  The Truth in Savings Act (12 USC 4301 et seq) had been enacted by a Democratic Congress in 1991 in response to widespread consumer complaints following the Savings and Loan debacle of the 1980's that banks and other savings institutions were using misleading or false information about how much interest a saver would get if they deposited their money with that institution.  Sure enough the above phrase came up regularly in the discussions of the Truth in Savings Act.  If I picked out the words and quoted it here and attributed to almost any current Republican as something they said today, no one would doubt it was a current statement for a second.

One of the primary lubricants that makes free markets work is honesty, allowing dishonesty into the market is like throwing sand into the ball bearings on a wheel.  The Truth in Savings Act set up rules to make sure that institutions were honest about how much interest a consumer could expect if they put their money in that institution.  Yet here, before the Truth in Saving's Act was even dry behind the ears, Republicans were out to gut it to protect financial institutions from having to provide some evidence they were being truthful about the interest they were paying.  Luckily, between Democratic opposition, and Republicans hearing from lots of consumers about how they had been ripped off, in the end the Act only had its teeth pulled, it wasn't deleted.  Oddly enough, given Republicans constant denigration of regulators and regulation, the part that got eliminated was the part that allowed the people injured by the misrepresentation to sue for damages.  The regulatory scheme remained in place.

This is not to say regulations can't be needlessly burdensome, or outdated or counterproductive. But this tired cliche usually serves as an substitute for thought about how to balance the legitimate need for regulation against the potential for over regulation.   My eyes glaze over and my opinion of a speaker sinks anytime I hear someone falling back on this poor excuse for political dialogue.

The Decline of our Democracy?

The Supreme Court removed any restraints on Corporate political funding a couple years ago.   The Republican appointed Supreme Court majority that wrote the opinion were certainly aware that business tends to lean Republican, but I doubt that even they anticipated what a bad decision it was going to turn out to be, and how quickly things would turn bad.


That decision immediately gave nameless, faceless Corporations enormous political power.  A political consultant can now create a lobbying organization with some bland name, go out and solicit donations from people and corporations with lots of money and the desire to influence public policy, then use the money to fund propaganda campaigns to achieve their goals.


The immediate effect has been the unprecedented barrage of negative ads that flood the airwaves in support of some candidate or proposition.  The ads can be outright lies, but if they use the principles of propaganda Hitler relied on, they will probably be successful.  (see postscript at the end of this blog).


Consider what became possible after this decision.  Suppose China wants to undermine our resolve to defend Taiwan.  Or North Korea or Iran want more accommodating US policies.  Or what if Iran, or other oil producing states, want to protect their business by influencing our energy policy by undermining green energy?  They find some political consultant who can form a PAC, identify candidates they believe will be more to their liking, and start funneling money into the PAC.  There is no way to trace the source of the money.


We all know about the flood of earmarks and tax breaks for business that bloated the Federal budget in the last decade.  A recent study found one of the most profitable investments a business can make is to make political contributions.  The companies that made the most political contributions saw an average 250% return on on their investment in the form of profits directly linked to laws favorable to their business.  Now we won't even know what Corporations are buying a particular politican's support for their pet projects.


Around the developing world Democracy's are struggling to get beyond being democracies in name only, where elections are encouraged but manipulated to produce the right result for the powerful.  We seem to be moving the other directions, unwittingly ceding power to the financially powerful.


Only people should be allowed to participate in politics.  The people involved in corporations have a basic right to participate as individuals, they should not be able to multiply their influence through smoke-screen corporations.


Postscript - What Adolph Hitler taught modern political campaigns-


Adolph Hitler was not a guy who seized power, he was elected by a the German people in 1933 because he was a master of political propaganda.  Here are some statements attributed to him about propaganda:


What luck for the rulers that men do not think.


Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.


Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.


It also gives us a very special, secret pleasure to see how unaware the people around us are of what is really happening to them.


"Education is dangerous, every educated person is a future enemy".

Is Religions Role as a Gude? Or a gatekeeper?

There is no other type of human organization that has done as much good for humanity, nor caused so much grief for humanity, as religion.  Over the scope of history probably billions of people have organized successful, productive, and happy lives around religious principles.  Whether they be Jews, Christian's, Muslims, Buddhist's, Hindu's, or many other religious beliefs, all seem to have the capacity to provide organizing principles to help people enjoy a healthy and productive life.

At the same time religion is one of the two primary justifications for war, genocide and other forms of human discrimination and aggression against others.  (The other justification is just pure naked greed and hunger for personal power).

How can religion be simultaneously so beneficial yet so destructive?  I believe it is because religious folk are not careful about the roles they allow religion to assume in the name of religion.

Religion/s strength is as a guide helping people chose paths in life that lead to health, peace and contentment.  In this role religion suggests options that people can chose to follow - or not.  A Religion becomes popular because it works for people in organizing their lives. 

Religions begin to undermine their ability to be a good guide when ambitious people appoint or sell themselves as the gatekeeper for the religion.  They claim the power to control access to God to enhance their own influence and power.  Since they are human they do not have the capability of absolute understanding, but their ambition tends to make them ignore or forget that fact.  What seems right to them, based on their personality and life experience, becomes the only path authorized by God.  

Religions really go wrong is when the gatekeepers begin to align themselves with government to control not only access to god, but to enforce what they perceive to be god's law.

A goal of all people who respect religion should be limit religions roll to that of a guide - to recognize that different paths to God work for different people.  All people who respect religion should reject those who would set themselves up as gatekeepers controlling access to God.