phoneymouse

I feel like if you want to hold government office you should 1. Give up all your wealth. 2. In exchange for this, you get a rock solid $500,000 salary. This isn’t because you are an elite, this is because paying you well makes it harder to bribe you. 3. When you lose your seat or step down, you can never work again in your life. This is to prevent you from ever taking on a lobbying job or otherwise using your power to enrich yourself and influence government for special interests. In exchange for this, you can take 80% of your salary that you had while in office until you die.

These changes hopefully would give office holders enough personal financial security to focus on making decisions without being influenced by external money.

Well, more of a long term solution is needed than a temporary cease fire.

Now there is a name I haven’t heard in awhile.

I noticed they needed to approve my account or something. Took a few days to get the email.

It’s a wake up call, but it’s not really going to change anything. You want universal healthcare? We need a general strike. Shut everything down for a month and demand it.

Yeah — pretty much this. Most people answering phones are interns. They’re given instructions to listen and be non-confrontational. They also won’t tell you what the congressperson’s view on the matter is. Ultimately, they have no power and just try to summarize what you said and put it in a computer program with your address so the office can mail you a letter from the Congressperson about the issue. These letters are generic to the topic you called about and generally try to say nothing controversial.

On rare occasions for really contentious issues, I saw them split the topic buckets into pro and con and send letters for each depending on whether you were for or against the thing you called about.

Mostly, I didn’t get the impression that Congress people pay much attention to phone calls. If the issue is contentious enough to divide the caller pool into pro/con, they might check a tally of the totals in each pool. But, for 99% of topics, they just send you a generic letter.

Also, a lot of these letters are full of bs. Congress people will often propose nice sounding bill names or cosponsor others that they can cite in these letters as evidence that they care. However, 99% of these bills go no where and often the congresspeople don’t even want them to. You’re upset about airplane noise over your city? “Well, I agree, that’s why I cosponsored the airplane noise reduction act.” Meanwhile, if that bill ever picked up steam the airline lobby would crush it and your congressperson would help them.

So, I don’t call my congressperson because I don’t really get the sense that it makes a difference. One thing I did see make a difference though was lobbyists. You see, they live right in Washington DC and rather than call, they schedule meetings with the actual paid staff or congressperson, not interns. They go right in their office and sit down and have a long chat. And, the staff have a big incentive to listen to them.

Most congressional staff are paid peanuts. They try to live off $25-45k/year in an expensive city and have 2 or 3 roommates. Some of them are often overqualified, holding law degrees and masters in their interest areas. So, once they get some experience and burn out of this life of poverty, guess who is happy to scoop them up? Yep, they go running right into the arms of those lobbyists and gladly take that $200k salary to go about fighting insulin price caps or defeating environmental regulations. It doesn’t even matter if they came into Washington, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed ready to take on these big corporate interests. By the time they’re 3-4 years in, realize they’re sick of eating ramen noodles, and the easiest way out is to call up some of those lobbyists and ask for a job, they do it. Oh you have a masters in agricultural policy with a specialization in organic farming? McDonald’s federal affairs office will hire you. I’ve seen it happen.

Under New York law, such a charge can be brought when an alleged crime is “intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policies of a unit of government by intimidation or coercion and affect the conduct of a unit of government by murder, assassination or kidnapping.”

I don’t think the civilian population feels coerced. I think they were pretty ecstatic. Also, the intimidation was probably more directed at private companies than units of government.

It is kind of nuts how they’re trying so hard to make an example of this guy.

You can choke out a homeless guy and go about your life. Kill a CEO and you’re not just a murderer, you’re a terrorist!

Really? I don’t see them represented

Just in time to be overruled by the Trump admin

Watch the US abandon them too, after basically using them to squash ISIS. A concern though, is Turkey won’t want to hold territory, so it’ll end up creating the same power vacuum that spawned ISIS after it drives the Kurds out. A better solution would be for the US to just broker a deal between all parties.

Do Putin next

Didn’t know about Luigi being blocked. Is there a post about that?

As for parenthood, I’m guessing it is on some blocklist of words related CSAM. Parenthood is associated with children after all. It’s obviously a blunt instrument to block things this way and results in “false positives.”