The non profit organizations are the scam of choice for former and current presidents. The Bushes, Clintons and now the Obamas (My Brother’s Keeper Alliance which has yet to disclose donations) are using the guise of charity for a bribery machine.
Adam Smith:
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public”
Such artful smear …
As I said, a first step would be to raise the age for high office (to something like 65 or even 70) for the head of state, and cascade it down proportionally to positions below him/her. The media would hate it, but they are the ones who put us in this mess in the first place…
Then you have to look at the civil service and how to stop revolving-door mechanisms. One idea could be to make appointments over a certain level extremely long – i.e. if you become a director of this or that department, someone with real policy responsibility, you will have to serve at least 8 years, plus another 8 somewhere else in the civil service and another 8 of “garden leave” pension after that, if you end the two terms before you’re 65, with no “moonlighting” allowed. At that point, the choice becomes an “end of career” one rather than a stepping stone to greater things, a proper “call to service”.
These are just random ideas, I’m sure we can come up with better ones. The problem is that, in the end, turkeys don’t vote for Christmas: you cannot expect the establishment to dismantle itself. Real change can come only with new ways of mobilizing grassroot voters.
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Fuck. I had just been thinking exactly the same vis-a-vis Socrates, and that the Greeks knew what to do with slippery characters (the socratic method seems to be favoured in teaching PPE).
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Maybe, but only if it was paired with term limits and strict rules on kick backs and bribes.
Exactly, but the grassroots had better have some plans in place that the clear majority agrees on, which might necessitate a sales job. I suspect that raising the age of office might be a tougher sell than clamping down hard on post-office employment.
It might be worthwhile running a straw poll in BBS to see what people here think. What sells with progressives here has a reasonable chance of garnering some support from the centre-right and secular populist right - Sanders in the USA has been selling better with some of these segments than the current crop of Republican loonies.
Ayatollah Khomeini
Hosni Mubarak
T S Eliot: " Do not let me hear Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly" (East Coker). Eliot was in his 60s at the time, as am I, and I wouldn’t trust me with high political office for one moment.
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I like the idea of a 25 year ban on working in or for any industry you were involved in regulating, overseeing, or legislating while in office.
So, if you plan to work for Exxon when you get out of office, you won’t want to serve on any energy committees, and you’ll need to abstain from voting on any fuel economy bills.
This may also have the happy side effect of reducing the number of things that get tacked onto any given bill- If you’re worried one of those amendments might fuck your retirement plan, maybe you’ll take the time to actually READ the bills before voting on them…
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Sophistry!!!
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So everything if you’re president?
Exactly.
Beep: Mubarak took power at 58, same as Brezhnev.
Khomeini was a religious figure in a theocratic movement who argued that God had granted him power, so he’s hardly relevant in this debate.
You can argue that old leaders can get weak (for example, the previous Pope), but the opposite is rather rare. In any case, we are addressing corruption levels, not liberalism.
(EDIT: one of the examples you should have brought is Giorgio Napolitano, recently “king of Italy” – he was elected President, then a largely ceremonial role, at 81 and proceeded to basically take over the political system by exploiting constitutional loopholes, eventually winning an unprecedented re-election and serving a record-breaking 9 years. However, it was on a background of complete collapse of the political and economic system of the country, which sort of begged for it. In any case, by the end he was physically exhausted and served only 30% of his second mandate. That’s the good thing with old leaders: they have to give up sooner rather than later.)
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