Saturday, November 28, 2015
Taking a week off.
Stupidly....I injured my back and cannot sit for very long to type. In fact I herniated a disk moving furniture for some family, and needless to say, this type of injury really sucks (avoid it if you can). Hopefully I'll be able to write soon, otherwise I will post what I manage to type when and where I can. Hope to be back to normal soon. See you hopefully in a week with the usual five posts a week.
Friday, November 27, 2015
Black Friday
Post Thanksgiving post! Hope you all enjoyed your time with family and friends, but there is no reason to stop the festivities the day after. Yea, it may be black friday, but I am not going shopping, I am going to spend some more time with family and friends. Hard to believe a day that once represented the stock market crash now represents sales and people losing their mind about buying stuff (I'll stick to buying from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Think Geek). So stay home and be with your family some more. Enjoy your long weekend and see you next week where we pick up where we left off on The Jormungand.
Thursday, November 26, 2015
Happy Thanksgiving
Happy Thanksgiving everyone.
I'm taking a break from the usual to say how glad and thankful I am to have you all as readers. Without you all reading then I would not have the courage (or stamina) to write as much as I do.
With the world in turmoil and opinions a dime a dozen, thank you for being there to listen to mine. I hope you all have a happy and healthy Thanksgiving.
Wednesday, November 25, 2015
Issue 729 Fixing democracy 6 November 25, 2015
The Supreme Court is becoming a problem. How you ask, well
let us get started.
Supreme Court problem: The issue at hand is that they are
more and more legislating from the bench. Basically for those that do not
know, they are making laws without respecting the separations of power in our
government. The Supreme Court is supposed to say if something is legal or not
with respect to if something is constitutional and nothing else. But they
are ignoring this by ruling that the penalties in Obama care are a tax, or that
the government has power to define marriage and what constitutes being married.
As such, rules I believe should be put in place to limit how they rule on
issues and laws. They first should look to see if the issue is a federal
government responsibility with respect to the powers outlined in the United
States Constitution. If it is, then fine, they can rule on it, but if not
they then determine if the level of responsibility lies with the State
governments, local government or if it lays with the people. Basically a
checklist on whose level of authority is this under. In this respect,
they can even determine when they deem it a State responsibility which States
can make or ignore laws based on those particular States Constitutions, or
similarly local governments’ charters. However, as a check and a balance
if rights are being violated and the Supreme Court says that something
ultimately lies with the power of the individual people, then no government may
usurp the people's power. So if it violates people's rights, like
government deciding who can get married, or people's right to contract, then
the Supreme Court can overturn any law. So the checklist will look as
follows:
1) is it in the United States Constitution
and is it a federal government responsibility or power?
2) If not 1, then is it a State
responsibility or power as per their Constitution(s), and if so is it
indicative to that State's Constitution or is it broader to be a responsibility
of all States?
3) If not 1 or 2, is it a local
government's responsibility or power, and is it indicative to just that
particular local government or all the local governments in the country?
4) If it is not a responsibility or power
of 1, 2 or 3, then it belongs to the people as per the ninth and tenth
Amendments of the United States Constitution and the law or act is to be
immediately overturned.
5) If at any time the law or act in
question is determined to be an issue of rights, privileges and immunities as
held by the people and or as listed in any level of government Constitution or
charter, and that law or act is in violation of those at any level of
government, then the power and responsibilities in question will be placed with
the people as per the ninth and tenth amendments and the law or act will be
immediately, overturned.
6) If the law or act is not clear in
purpose, ambiguous and/or is not easily understood, then the law or act is
overturned in keeping with the principle that if the people do not understand
the law, then the law is unenforceable and open to abuse.
7) If the law or act attempts to clarify
or protect a right, privilege or immunity, then the Court is to determine if
said right, privilege or immunity in question needs to be clarified, and if
said law or act actually adequately defines, protects or hinders those rights
privileges or immunities in question. If the clarification or protection
would hinder the expression of a person's rights in any way that law or act is
to be overturned.
Simple Checklist right? If you will
notice, both 4 and 5 make it so that if the issue is not any government's
responsibility or power, or if it is a question of rights, privileges and
immunities, then the laws are overturned. These insure that laws and acts
made by legislative bodies and agencies and departments are always inferior to
the Federal, and State(s) Constitutions, and local charters. Additionally, if
the right, privilege and immunity is listed at any level of government or
simply determined to be a power or right held by the people, then automatically
the law is overturned if deemed in violation even if the law or act in question
comes from a higher level of government. For the sake of example a local
government's charter says that anyone can marry anyone as per their religious
right to marry, then a federal law may be overturned which say was attempting
to define marriage to just a man or a women. Get it. Rights of the
people would trump laws and acts by government.
Conclusion: A simple checklist like this will
do wonders in defining what can and can't be done, especially if the Supreme
Court wishes to continue to determine what is constitutional or not. So
expanding and limiting their power at the same time would work which this
checklist does. However, determining the obviously wrongful acts like
murder, theft and the similar will be necessary to prevent changes in attitudes
and maintaining the idea that the ninth and tenth amendment provide for
unwritten rights will also be necessary as well. For let us face it, we
are a forgetful people and defining what can and cannot be done is absolutely
necessary to maintain our Republic.
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
Issue 728 Fixing Democracy 5 November 24, 2015
In this issue we will talk about reallocating responsibility of
which level of government does what. Let us start.
Changes of responsibility: So the federal government is
supposed to do one set of things, State governments another and local another.
Basically, we just make sure each one sticks to its own responsibilities.
For example the federal government has a forestry service. They
basically stop forest fires, preserve the forest and act to aid in conservation
efforts. But some of these things run counter to each other due to
fighting fires in forests meaning that parts of the forest needs to be removed
to act as a fire break. The reason being is that again interest groups
get in the way as conservation groups, in their effort to preserve the forests,
help to enact laws that may hinder firefighters from going in and stopping the
fires. As such the National Guard, primarily a State level institution,
should get the role of fighting forest fires. The conservation role will
be separated as well and turned over to the forest ministries and their
equivalents in their respective States. By doing simple things like this
it eliminates competing doctrines in agencies which can paralyze them and cause
our tax dollars to go to waste. Another example would be the jobs that
homeland security does. The air national guard can do airport security,
the FBI already does counter terrorism, and the Army national guard already
coordinates with fire, police and other rescue personnel in disasters. As
such, the entire apparatus of homeland security is redundant as all their jobs
are done by other bodies in and at all levels of government. New York
City has its own counter terror group and shares info and receive info from the
FBI and CIA. So we can have major cities protect themselves from
terrorists, coordinate with other bodies for broader national defense and areas
that do not have the counter terror teams set up like NYC does can have that
placed in the national guard or FBI branch offices, or simply placed in SWAT
teams run by the States.
Another example would be national
monuments. No one wants them to go away and they are deemed national
treasures. But why is the federal government in charge of them.
States already do a good job with their State parks and monuments, so why
not turn over the national ones to the States who are more than equipped to
handle their upkeep. It is not the federal government's job to maintain
monuments, so why is it doing so? Why is it wasting taxpayer dollars
which can be better spent elsewhere and the States can get the revenue from
those people visiting those monuments as well? Well, lobbying is partly
to blame for all of this. The federal level departments and agencies who
handle monuments also lobby congress. Yes, government even lobbies
itself. And thus sending it to the States makes sense as now the
government lobby is broken up and no longer has an influence. How about
Fannie and Freddie, the mortgage loan giants. They were created and supported
by the federal government to back loans, but that is not the federal
government's responsibility, it is the private sector, so break it up and
privatize it. Welfare is a local government responsibility, and thus
should be turned back over to them. Education and environmental
protection are both State and local government jobs, the federal government
really should not have a say there either. However, environmentalists,
industries, advocacy groups and even the government all lobby for power and control.
But if the jobs were placed where they belong, we may not be having as
many problems as we have now with respect to corruption.
Conclusion: We are centralizing political power
in the higher echelons of government and that causes problems with competing
doctrines, lobbying and of course power struggles that can paralyze our
government. It is time to fix that by giving power back to where it
belongs and doing it smartly.
Monday, November 23, 2015
Issue 727 Fixing Democracy 4 November 23, 2015
Continuing with this series, we get to ways to end Gerrymandering.
What Gerrymandering is, for those who do not know, is when politicians
divide up electoral districts to make them have an overwhelming majority of
people from one political party to ensure that that particular party gets
elected into office. Basically it makes it easier for one politician from
one party to get elected over the other. However, this is a form of
corrupting influence upon our nation and it must be stopped.
Fixing it: Obviously this is a bad practice as
it ensures little to no compromise with respect to politicians as they have to
appeal to only their political party and the voters in that group. Also
it causes the politicians to become more extreme as without the need to appeal
to the other side, the views of their ideologically pure constituents can
become more and more radical. As such, they become more radical too so as to
not be replaced by more ideologically pure politicians. So a better method must
be developed and enforced by law to prevent gerrymandering and its influence on
the nation.
One method already in use is a committee
of non-elected/non electable officials which are selected in the same way a
courtroom chooses a jury. This committee then distributes the districts
up as equally in population size as possible without looking at things like
race, ideology or other factors. California already does this (note:
States make the congressional districts, not the federal government).
However, this has a weakness. It does not account for regional
needs such as urban, to suburban to rural. It only takes into account
population density. As such there is an additional alternative people may
or may not like.
The alternative is to have the States,
when making electoral districts, divided into regions. In this case, a
city will be its own electoral district and rural areas, wilderness areas and
the like will have each their own districts as well. In the case that there is
only two representatives for a particular State, then one representative will
represent all the urban areas and some suburban areas, and the other will
represent all the rural, wilderness and other sparsely populated areas.
Now the reason why this is controversial even if the representatives are
actually representing regional needs is that the size of the populations in
those districts will be vastly different. Cities can have thousands of
people living in them, but rural areas can have less than a thousand
distributed throughout the entire State. So people see this as unfair
that a few hundred have the same voting power as potentially one million.
The Supreme Court has already ruled on this matter once in favor of
having districts with population sizes that are almost equal irrespective of
the fact of people's needs. To overcome this the Supreme Court ruling
would either have to be overturned or electoral districts would need to stop
being constrained by State borders. This would mean a total loss of power
to the States which would in effect reduce lobbying as well to a degree as
power becomes more distributed. But this may also mean that Congress may
need to be reworked as well. Additional houses of representatives may be
needed so that rural areas and urban areas do not overwhelm each other’s votes.
Even then, Suburban and wilderness areas would need representation.
Basically it gets really complicated and thus making sure cities,
suburban areas, transitional areas, rural, and wilderness all have an equal
number of representatives if we end up not having to rework the very government
itself that is. Again, none of this respects population size and thus will
be seen as unfair.
Conclusion: I wanted to make it clear to you my
reader that there is alternatives out there, but our current system is the
fairest. As such, to reduce the corruption of gerrymandering the committee idea
is the best one with respect to reducing corruption and preventing politicians
from becoming too radical (let alone the districts themselves). In that
respect the committees insure that districts potentially have people who will
disagree and thus play devil's advocate to ensure no ideas get out of hand.
Friday, November 20, 2015
Issue 726 Fixing Democracy 3 November 20, 2015
So we got Congress and the Senate, the Vice President, but what
about the Electoral College. It aids in creating corruption and allows
people more power than they normally would have. So how do we fix this?
Fixing the Electoral College: Our current electoral college works
as follows. Each State chooses a slate of electors, with two for each
electoral vote that State has with half representing one candidate running in
the Presidential election and the other half representing the other. From
there, we the people vote and then the majority vote decides which slate of
electors votes who then vote for their chosen candidate. Somewhat simple
right? Basically it makes the system a winner take all vote as the
candidates need a certain amount of electoral votes to be elected President.
Problems are caused by this however. For one, a person in a Blue
State (Democrat party) like New York State overrides their Republican brethren
with respect representation in that State. Which means that it is almost
pointless for a Republican to vote in New York as they will always be outvoted.
So you lose representation. Additionally, this helps Swing States
like Florida as more attention is going to be paid toward it due to how many
electoral votes they have and how they can go for either candidate. So
Florida gets major benefits from politicians as they want to play nice to
manipulate the voting in their political party’s direction. This also
means that businesses in these swing States gain advantages as well as
explained in Issue 722 with the example of Sugar growers having superior say in
political circles if they originate in a swing State and thus make them able to
manipulate the market in their favor (hello lobbyists).
So what is the solution to our votes
counting more, getting other States to be paid attention to, and to reduce
lobbying? Simple, eliminate the winner take all system. Have it by
electoral district with each district's electoral vote going toward whichever
candidate had the most votes in said district. Then if the majority of
districts in the State vote for a particular candidate, the two electoral votes
representing the number of Senators each State has (electoral votes are
determined by the total number of Representatives in the House and Senate
combined) will go toward the candidate with the most electoral votes in that
State. But if neither candidate gets a majority, then the electoral votes
representing the senatorial representation will be divided between the two.
Actually let us scrap that, and make it so that the total number of
electoral votes is equal just to the number of the members of the House of
Representatives and each candidate must win a simple 50% plus one majority.
No more by winner take all bull crap. Just win half the 435 plus
one electoral votes to win. This makes it simpler and easier to
understand. Every electoral district is equal which means the Candidates
for President will have to visit multiple places to try and win, not just a few
key areas of a State to get all of the votes as with the current system. It
eliminates the power businesses had if they existed in swing States and thus
reduces their political clout and thus their ability to lobby Congress which
hinders crony capitalism. It also means your vote may count more as well
especially as you are not locked into the Republican or Democrat majority State
situation anymore. States also become more equal as Swing States and
States with a lot of electoral votes do not count as much anymore as candidates
are not trying to win a whole State, but instead a majority of the people by
electoral district. Truly much better than the current situation.
Conclusion: This will be hard to pull off because we
are basically removing a lot of power from a lot of people. It does not
eliminate key businesses like banks, international and domestic trade ports and
the like, but it removes as many businesses as possible who gained say
(lobbying power) artificially through our imperfect system. Basically it
is better than the status quo. However, I will not go toward a pure
democracy with the direct election of the President just yet, as I still fear
mob rule. Until we can counteract that, this solution I present to you
here is as far as I am willing to go while fixing the system.
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