PoStorm - aMending America category

Government for the people. Preventing Conflict of Interest

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:06:00 GMT

The people entrust the government and those who act as agents for the government with great powers. Successful practical government requires that the people generally accept decisions made by the government on their behalf. As such, the people have a right to expect that the decisions made by their government are made in their best interests. There will always be disagreements over judgments, but if the people are to accept a government judgment, at least for the time up to the next election, they should have a level of assurance that the disagreement was a difference of judgment and not a conflict of interest.

No person may act as an agent for the Government in any decision or action in which that person has, or reasonably appears to have, a conflict of interest with the people that he or she is elected or appointed to govern.

I believe that the standard of conduct the people should its representatives to is very very high. That’s why it says “reasonably appears to have a conflict of interest”. If a government official takes an action that benefits an organization that gives his wife a job, there should be no doubt that the action violates this clause. The level of gullibility that politicians have expected of the American People is amazing. They expect to get away with “Implausible Deniability”, as in, for example, Tom Delay’s denying knowledge of who paid for his plush golf vacation. Someone paid. Delay benefited. If he were not corrupt he would not accepted the bribe.

In general I believe enthusiastic application of this Conflict Of Interest prohibition is the first step in fixing campaign finance issues. As long as a government position is a ticket to self-enrichment or the enrichment of your friends or co-conspirators, someone is going to be willing to buy the job or buy the job for their puppet. As long as there is a return on the investment, democracy will be for sale, and finance reform will be merely a discussion about the price. We need to make the certainty of being caught and the penalty sufficient great than no one would want “their man” in the job because “their man” will be excluded from any decision that affects them. The best any one could hopeful is that the person who holds a government job is the person best able to make wise decisions on behalf of the people.

This Conflict of Interest prohibition should run from top to bottom of the government. The president should not (as George Bush, Snr, did) be able to sign an executive order that gives billions of dollars of benefits to a mining company, and then join the company as a highly paid executive when he leaves office. Nor should the county inspector of septic fields be able to deem my neighbors land unsuitable for a regular septic fields, and require the much more expensive equipment that his brother sells. Defense contractors should not be able to hire the government officials who gave them their contract, nor should their employee be hired by government.

Conflicts of Interest are as endemic and they are destructive. Some would argue that they are productive. After all, who knew better the abilities of Haliburton to support the US war machine than their recently former CEO, Dick Chenney, as the Vice President. Of course he completely dissociated himself from his former company, that had paid him millions of dollars, and he had nothing to do with arranging a war that demanded the services of his former company, so much so that billions of dollars of cost-plus contracts were given to it without considering any alternative. And how remarkably useful it was that they had hired into their company a former government official who knew exactly what the governments needs – an former Secretary of Defense, no less: Dick Chenney. And he was of course well equipped to understand how commercial contractor could assist the government because he, as Secretary of Defense, had commissioned a consultancy report on exactly that. And how fortunate it was the the company that provided the report was a subsidiary of … Halliburton.

The American People need to be ashamed of themselves for being so gullible. Except of course, they didn’t know it … that’s to the wonderful efforts of the Free Press, guaranteed by the constitution – but we’ll come to that.

Conflicts of Interest involving the democratic process should be high on our vigilance. What would think if some tin-pot dictator claimed that he had personally overseen the fairness of the election and was completely satisfied that he had been elected fairly. Would you accept that the treasurer of your club had personally audited his own actions and found them to be irreproachable? Surely not. There are certain separations of powers that are so obvious that, I guess, the framers felt too obvious to be written down. In the 2000 US Presidential Election the person who was legally responsible for ensuring the fairness of the Florida election was also the head of the committee to elect one of the candidates. She was the person responsible for deciding, as it so crucially turned out, whether a recount was required. “My candidate is currently winning by a few votes, and I decide to stop the count now, but I’m not in anyway biased”. And the American People bought it?

The Adversarial Vice President

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 21:21:00 GMT

Dick Cheney’s legacy is inevitably going to be the powerful vice-presidency. Prior to his administration the VP has been the ultimate-non-job. Cheney made it the most powerful unelected position in the world. I say unelected because there is no real sense in which the American Voters elected him. The elder Bush, in his selection of Dan Qayle as his running mate, pretty much proved that it doesn’t matter who the VP candidate is. The people elect the president, every one else in the administration including the VP comes along on the presidents coattails. One could argue that Cheney made the perfect coup. With a gullible and manipulable president, with good name recognition, and chummy demeanor and the brains of a gnat, Cheney was able to grab and hold on to the actual power without troubling himself with the niceties of democracy.

It seems enormously unlikely that any future VP is going to sit on his hands and watch the president, so I propose that we take advantage of Cheney’s initiative by establishing a real job for the VP, but first I propose an amendment that go backwards. Backwards that is to the original US Constitution

The candidate who is elected Vice President shall be the candidate for President for whom the total number of votes cast by the people is the second highest.

This pretty much guarantees that the VP will be opposed to the president. With our incumbent two-party system, it pretty much guarantees that the VP will come from other party.

So let’s give this adversarial VP a job:

The VP shall have no executive decision making powers but shall be entitled to participate in all communications in which the President participates or is entitled to participate.

What does this do for the people? It guarantees that there is someone who is has all the same information as the president.

One of the problems I felt in the run up to the Iraq war, and which appeared to be the problem that others had, was that we had cause to believe that the President was the best informed person in the world. He had access to information that we did not and could not. He had spent billions of dollars (of our money) on intelligence services to make sure that he has informed, and so when something about Iraq and WMDs we could, and perhaps should, and unfortunately did, assume that he knew better than anyone else, and that the information he had might reasonably and sensibly be necessary kept secret. We had no how to know that the President was clueless, making it up or just lieing.

The adversarial VP becomes the peoples’ check and balance in the executive branch. We should be able to know that he knows exactly the same as the president. We know that the adversarial VP can, and presumably will, maintain a secret that the country’s security depends on, but will not maintain a secret whose purpose is to convert up corruption or incompetence or willful lying from the White House.

The adversarial VP will be trusted by most Americans who don’t trust the President and so force the White House to be trustworthy.

Curiously if the constitution forces full disclosure of all information shared with the President it takes the President out of party politics. The president’s party could scheme to get him re-elected but it would be extremely hard for the president to be involved. Personally I think that would be a good thing. I’d prefer to the see president involved with running the country and get re-elected on the basis of how well he does it, but then I feel that politic parties are, in general, the greatest danger there is to government by the people.

The Election of the President of the United States by the People

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 21:17:00 GMT

It is hard to believe that the American People tolerate a process for electing a president were the one with the most votes does not necessarily win. If we wanted one single justification of the ridicule that the rest of the world holds the US, that would be it. There is no democratic justification for baroque electoral process that makes the outcome of the election little more than a geographic accident. A system where a huge proportion of the voters’ choices can have no practical effect on the result, but a few hundred votes in a geographically fortuitous location can change the result.

I am sure that those who see benefit to themselves from the current system will find arguments to explain why the election of the US president cannot obey the most obvious and most simple rule of a democratic election, but I can’t see how the country can hold its head up in the world and claim to be a democracy unless it fixes this.

The most stupid counter argument I have heard (a crown that is hard fought for) is that in a close election might require a recount of the entire countries votes. While there are better ways to handle a close election, and indeed better processes for the election entirely, which I will get to later, a commitment to democracy pretty much comes hand-in-hand with the burden of counting votes. If we consider that burden to great to bear, we should skip the whole idea of democracy and have the president chosen by committee. We could call it the Supreme Court (although we tried that already). Even then, it would appear that according the way we currently elect presidents we would be sure when the court votes 4 to 5 whether it’s the ‘4’ or the ‘5’ that wins. May be we should just have one person choose the president; I’m sure Dick Cheney would be happy to do the picking, and I’m pretty sure I know who he’d pick. (For those readers who find this allusion too subtle, I remind you that the Republican party committee charged with selecting a running mate for GW Bush and that selected Dick Cheney was chaired by Dick Cheney.)

The candidate who is elected President shall be the candidate for whom the total number of votes cast by the people shall be the greatest.

A Constitutional bias in favor of The People

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 21:11:00 GMT

A zoo keeper who observes the wild animal in his charge testing, straining, and poking at the fence that is intended to contain the animal knows for certain that the animal is going to escape. An animal that spends its life challenging a fence will find a way through it eventually. The zookeeper’s solution is a mechanism that keeps the animal well clear of the fence. An electric wire or a moat, for example, that prevents the animal getting close enough to the fence to challenge it.

I believe that the people need a mechanism that keeps its government and the occasional wild animal that becomes part of the government, well clear of the fence that the constitution defines. The idea that it is acceptable for the government to right up the limitations set by the constitution, so close that it is a fine legal distinction, whether they are inside or outside of the fence, is absurd.

In spite of the way it is played, government is not a game. It should not be a case of stretching the limits of what is allowed up to the point that the limits would break.

I propose that the test for constitutional should be ‘clearly within’, and to that end suggest that if three or more supreme court judges are not satisfied that a government action is clearly within the limits and powers of the constitution, then the government is required to change its action.

Government for the people. Preventing Conflict of Interest

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:57:00 GMT

The Constitution should be Enforceable by Citizens

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:46:00 GMT

My vision of the constitution of a democratic country is a contract. It is firstly a contract between the citizens of that country to grant to each other certain rights in return for surrendering certain of what might be considered rights. It is secondly a contract between the citizens of the country, on the one hand, and the government of that country, and those persons who make up the government. The first contract is even-handed and symmetric; each citizens gives to every other citizen what he gets back from every other citizen. The second part is asymmetric; it is an employment contract in which the people as a whole chose to employ a much smaller number of people as their government. The government has no rights and no power except that which the people choose to give it and only for as long as the people choose to give it.

Therefore the paramount requirement, without which nothing else in the constitution has any value, is that the contract is enforceable. Always and without exception. And it enforceable by the people who agreed to it – the people.

In the past decade, legal tricks have been used to prevent citizens from holding the government accountable to the constitution. For example, even though everyone knew that the government were holding people without trial, you cannot bring suit against the government because, according current jurisprudence, you don’t have standing. You don’t have the right to prevent the government from unconstitutionally harming other citizens. Another example was unconstitutional warrantless wire-tapping. Even though it has (eventually) openly admitted that it was happening, nobody had standing to complain as long as the government kept it secret exactly who was being wire. The government can spy upon everyone in the country, but no one can bring action in court unless they can prove that they are being spied upon. Unlike normal civil cases where a plaintiff can engage in discovery to establish proof of what they suspect to be true, the plaintiff against the government in this particular was required to prove before discovery that they were the target of illegal government spying. These are end-runs around the enforceability of the constitution. I believe it should be the right, and possibly the duty, of citizens to hold the government accountability even if, and perhaps, especially if it is other persons being harmed.

Because each and every citizen is harmed and government for the people endangered when the government or anyone acting as an agent for the government fails to act in accordance with the constitution, each citizen of the United States shall have the right to sue the government for failure to act clearly within the limitations and powers granted by the constitution, without regard to their personal injury or otherwise as a result of the unconstitutional action or inaction.