Are you familiar with the Convention of States project? They are using Article V of the Constitution to have a discussion of three topics at a convention for proposing amendments. One topic is term limits for federal officials. (This could include congress, bureaucrats, and federal judges.) The second topic is limits on federal spending, and the third is limits on the exercise of federal power. (Back to the doctrine of enumerated powers only?) I see you are a skeptic of term limits (for good reason). Would you support the project as a package with the other two topics?
Yes, I am familiar with the convention of states concept, and wrote an article on the topic here at Stark Realities. (link below). I'm something of a fatalist on the United States, and think the best thing for Americans and the world would be a wave of peaceful secessions that split the USA into smaller independent states.
However, I do support the Article V convention of states as a last-gasp attempt to set things right, and am particularly enthused about ideas like giving states, by a three-fifths vote, the power to negate any federal law, regulation or executive order.
As you probably know, there's heated debate about the convention idea, with some fearing it may go off the rails and leave us worse off (addressed in my article.) However, in my mind, that worst-case scenario would only accelerate secessionism, so I don't see that much downside.
Interesting article. I always knew plum congressional committee assignments were contingent upon playing ball with your own party and how mavericks like Ron Paul, Jim Traficant, Larry McDonald, George Hansen, to name a few were denied these assignments and stuck on less substantial committees. But I did not realize how much time legislators had to spend fundraising for their party. As for term limits, at least Congress is duly elected, that is, if you believe in the integrity of the computerized voting machines and the other election policies initiated by the Democratic Party. I don't. First, however, we need term limits on the unelected, the millions of bureaucrats in the executive branch. This is the administrative state that stay entrenched in power decade after decade, and who are now sabotaging the current Trump regime, that is, if you want to give the president the benefit of the doubt.
Wow, that’s really depressing! At the very least we should stop politicians from becoming fabulously wealthy through their graft although recent evidence seems to indicate that this goal now only takes a couple terms in congress to achieve. In the end our biggest problem is the debt. That single issue will collapse the country and all the rioting and chaos only serves to make the debt fade into the background. Even president Trump has no real incentive to address that fatal problem
And imagine the rioting and chaos that will ensue from the US government's financial collapse. You're right about Trump having "no real incentive to address that fatal problem." The same can be said of all politicians. As Friedrich Hayek wrote, "The politician act[s] on a modified Keynesian maxim that, in the long run, we are all out of office."
By the way, I just recently came across that quote in a book, "Hayek for the 21st Century." The Mises Institute is giving 100,000 copies of that book away for free: https://mises.org/hayek21
Your description of how moving up in the Party is predicated on how much money you offer up to the party big wigs, sounds an awful lot like how the Mafia operates. So instead of shaking down shop owners for 'protection' money, our legislators are shaking down business interests for 'legal' protection money. So either way we are describing crime syndicates, except one of them is 'legal.'
Thanks for reminding us how corrupt Washington politics is and the only cure is to get rid of government period. And even though you pointed out that term limits won’t fix the problem, particularly because the legislation exempts long term incumbents, I’m still tired of seeing Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
I’ll admit that the idea of sweeping many of those “same old” congressional faces out of view gives the concept some real appeal.
Term limits aside, there’s the question of whether age limits might be appropriate. Watching the last few years of an increasingly incapacitated Dianne Feinstein was pretty rough. Down the stretch, her chief of staff was a de facto senator.
Interesting that you and TheLastBattleStation mentioned only Dems as examples. As deserving as the Dems are for that criticism, it's not a partisan issue, both parties are at fault. Both trump and biden are poster-children for what happens when you've exceeded your sell-by date. I agree there are many other problems (the legalized bribery being the biggest one), but we have to start chipping away. And which party appointed the morons on the Supreme Court that ruled that money is speech and corporations are people? And which party nominated the 4 idiots on the court who perjured themselves during their confirmation hearings? On the whole I think term limits at least won't make things very much worse and it could improve things a bit but you're right, it doesn't solve the root cause. But that Dem example bias damages your credibility. Look at the Montana Plan as a start to getting money out of politics because we can't rely on Congress. See: https://transparentelection.org/
Respectfully, I think you're quick on the trigger to accuse me of "Dem example bias." I mentioned Dianne Feinstein in my brief comment because, over my lifetime, she is far and away the most egregious example of a clearly-incapacitated legislator lingering on Capitol Hill. (Two examples: After a months-long absence battling an illness, she chided a reporter who asked her about her return, and seemed unaware that she'd been convalescing in California from February to May, insisting "I've been here...I've been voting!" In a hearing, she also appeared totally disoriented from the proceedings, and a staffer was heard whispering to her "Just say aye." She eventually died one day after casting her last vote.)
Even more importantly, though, note that my article emphasizes that the ills of the Capitol Hill status quo are bipartisan. (E.g. "It’s the same on both sides of the aisle.") I also took care to include quotes from both a Republican and a Democrat decrying the quid pro quo of the fundraising machine, and the image of a call center for reps to use is from a GOP call center.
Thank you for the link to the Montana Plan, I'll have a look.
If you're bipartisan that's great. The only data I had was what you posted and my post is a result of that. Use both sides in examples. No need to defend criticism of Feinstein. I agree about her. In fact, I'm proud that in the mid 1990s I personally gave her an apoplectic fit in a Q&A session with constituents when she didn't like a question I asked her about accepting PAC funds buying access to her. Mitch is also a posterchild for who shouldn't still be there. And I'm going to be pushing the Montana plan here in NM with the legislators. It's an end-run around Congress that won't stop rich people, but at least will stop corporations from bribery. Lots more needed, no insider trading, etc. but that requires Congress. The Montana plan doesn't. States can do it on their own. Just like Canada got universal health care similarly, started in one Province. And there's an effort here in NM to have a type of universal health care here which could spread. Check out www.NMHealthSecurity.org
Term Limits is a completely obsolete solution to the current situation America find itself in. Things are so far gone now that the world needs to go through a catharsis which results in extreme decentralization.
We have a piper to pay. However, that soon to be $40 trillion debt has nested in the American subconscious in one of the worst iterations possible, i.e., "familiarity breeding contempt." SHTF now has grown into an inevitability. The price ultimately paid will be determined by "How much and for how long?"
Speculating on those two reactionary phenomena isn't really conducive to generating solutions however. We're just going to have to truly toughen up for the duration, a thing perhaps/likely of multiple generational scope of 'character-building.' The gold index to hyper-inflation charts from Weimar Germany in the early 1920s are eerily similar to today's trends, essentially paralleling for the 100 + year anniversary trends.
Yes, I can’t conceive of a scenario where that much-needed decentralization of power (whether in one country or the world) comes about without an enormous crisis.
That said, since frightened populations seem eager to centralize power even more when emergencies arise (and governments are ever eager to exploit crises in that way), it seems the decisive catharsis might come in a one-two punch, with an initial calamity driving one last cycle of increased centralization, followed by a grand finale where everything splinters a few years later.
I think we are seeing what you described unfold right now. At least the first part, the last desperate cycle of increased centralization. The backlash to that is already growing though, so much so that we are seeing cracks in various areas. I know I am going to enjoy watching the unfolding collapse of the centralized institutions when they begin to implode en masse.
The problem is that we even have a government. It will always be the master-slave relationship with ALL governments. We have never experienced a government where the citizen held all the power. Never in the US where it was supposed to be accomplished. It is a fallacy.
Thanks for this article. In spite of it distracting from real issues, I had always reflexively favored term limits, but now I see it in a new light. One of several things you mentioned that I didn’t know was about committee assignments being tied to fund-raising for the party.
We need to realize that there is ONE "Party", this is the UNI-PARTY. There are two sides or branches of the party, the "Red" side, and the "Blue" side, they occasionally and mostly symbolically swap power back and forth, but they maintain complete control over the $$$, how wealth is extracted from the people and how it is redistributed. These funds are overwhelmingly spent to maintain the politico's power, benefit their patrons and enrich themselves, the "people" get the crumbs from their masters tables. These are the facts. Term limits will do nothing to fix the problem.
You seem to use that Pew as a sort of crutch when there are plenty of explanations for it such as people moving from House to Senate, people moving to lobbyist positions & Redistricting.
And you even acknowledge the problem with gerrymandering. If people don't want $ in politics then we need to stop all the mechanisms that redirect public dollars back to politicians & parties via kickbacks and people receiving grants and subsidies that include portions just redirected back via campaigns & PACs. We pay for this system that uses our money to keep us from ever changing it.
Brian, a call for untiy from the mountains high, to the wave crashed coast, in memory of Martin Luther King Jr:
"We must learn to live together as brothers, or we will perish togetherbas fools."
"The person down the street who votes differently than you is not your enemy. They are your neighbor. They worry about the same things you worry about. They want their kids to be safe and their bills to be paid and their country to be a place worth living in. They have been manipulated just like you have been manipulated, fed a different flavor of the same poison, sorted into a different tribe by the same algorithm, pointed at you as the enemy by the same people who point you at them.
The working class Republican and the working class Democrat have more in common with each other than either of them has with the billionaire class that funds both parties.
You share the same struggles. You face the same rigged systems. You are being crushed by the same economic forces that have transferred more wealth upward in the last fifty years than at any point in human history. And instead of uniting against the people doing this to you, you are screaming at each other on the internet about pronouns and flags and whatever fresh outrage the algorithm served up this morning.
This is exactly what they want. A nation at war with itself cannot resist a takeover. A people consumed by mutual hatred will accept any authority that promises to protect them from the manufactured enemy. Every empire that fell was divided before it was conquered. Every free people who lost their freedom were set against each other first.
The red versus blue war is not real. It is a show put on by people who own both teams. It is professional wrestling and you think it is a real fight. The wrestlers go backstage after the match and laugh together while you are still screaming at the guy in the other section who was rooting for the wrong character.
This Is Our Country Not Theirs
This nation belongs to the people who live here and work here and raise families here and will be buried here. It does not belong to billionaires who hold citizenship in three countries and will flee to their bunkers the moment things get bad. It does not belong to tech oligarchs who view democracy as an obstacle to efficiency. It does not belong to foreign interests who have purchased so much influence that they might as well be writing our laws themselves.
We have to stop letting them divide us. We have to start seeing each other as fellow Americans again instead of enemy combatants in a culture war that was manufactured to keep us weak. We have to remember that the person screaming at us online is also a victim of the same manipulation, and maybe if we stopped screaming back and started talking, we might realize we have been fighting the wrong enemy this entire time.
Turn off the television. It is not informing you. It is programming you. Question everything, including the sources you trust, especially the sources you trust. Talk to people who disagree with you and do it without trying to win. Listen to why they believe what they believe. You might discover that the monster you have been told to hate is actually just another person trying to make sense of a confusing world with imperfect information, exactly like you.
Remember who you are.
You are an American. Your ancestors came to this land or were brought to this land or were already on this land, and regardless of how they got here, they built something together that was supposed to be different from the old world’s tyrannies and aristocracies. That project is not finished. Every generation has to fight to keep it alive against the forces that want to drag us back to a world where a handful of rulers own everything and everyone else serves at their pleasure.
Stop letting them divide you. Your enemies are not your neighbors. Your enemies are the people who profit from your division and are building machines to replace you the moment you are no longer useful.
Start acting like it before it is too late". —The Wise Wolf
Bibi is bad but there are 100 more from all the industries like energy food healthcare govt unions defense etc who all get $ from the pie & fund the campaigns to keep it coming as long as they give a little back.
Are you familiar with the Convention of States project? They are using Article V of the Constitution to have a discussion of three topics at a convention for proposing amendments. One topic is term limits for federal officials. (This could include congress, bureaucrats, and federal judges.) The second topic is limits on federal spending, and the third is limits on the exercise of federal power. (Back to the doctrine of enumerated powers only?) I see you are a skeptic of term limits (for good reason). Would you support the project as a package with the other two topics?
Yes, I am familiar with the convention of states concept, and wrote an article on the topic here at Stark Realities. (link below). I'm something of a fatalist on the United States, and think the best thing for Americans and the world would be a wave of peaceful secessions that split the USA into smaller independent states.
However, I do support the Article V convention of states as a last-gasp attempt to set things right, and am particularly enthused about ideas like giving states, by a three-fifths vote, the power to negate any federal law, regulation or executive order.
As you probably know, there's heated debate about the convention idea, with some fearing it may go off the rails and leave us worse off (addressed in my article.) However, in my mind, that worst-case scenario would only accelerate secessionism, so I don't see that much downside.
https://starkrealities.substack.com/p/activists-more-than-halfway-to-forcing
Interesting article. I always knew plum congressional committee assignments were contingent upon playing ball with your own party and how mavericks like Ron Paul, Jim Traficant, Larry McDonald, George Hansen, to name a few were denied these assignments and stuck on less substantial committees. But I did not realize how much time legislators had to spend fundraising for their party. As for term limits, at least Congress is duly elected, that is, if you believe in the integrity of the computerized voting machines and the other election policies initiated by the Democratic Party. I don't. First, however, we need term limits on the unelected, the millions of bureaucrats in the executive branch. This is the administrative state that stay entrenched in power decade after decade, and who are now sabotaging the current Trump regime, that is, if you want to give the president the benefit of the doubt.
Wow, that’s really depressing! At the very least we should stop politicians from becoming fabulously wealthy through their graft although recent evidence seems to indicate that this goal now only takes a couple terms in congress to achieve. In the end our biggest problem is the debt. That single issue will collapse the country and all the rioting and chaos only serves to make the debt fade into the background. Even president Trump has no real incentive to address that fatal problem
And imagine the rioting and chaos that will ensue from the US government's financial collapse. You're right about Trump having "no real incentive to address that fatal problem." The same can be said of all politicians. As Friedrich Hayek wrote, "The politician act[s] on a modified Keynesian maxim that, in the long run, we are all out of office."
By the way, I just recently came across that quote in a book, "Hayek for the 21st Century." The Mises Institute is giving 100,000 copies of that book away for free: https://mises.org/hayek21
Frank, you may like this article on the extent to which America's march to insolvency is hardwired: https://starkrealities.substack.com/p/americas-insolvency-is-mandatory
Your description of how moving up in the Party is predicated on how much money you offer up to the party big wigs, sounds an awful lot like how the Mafia operates. So instead of shaking down shop owners for 'protection' money, our legislators are shaking down business interests for 'legal' protection money. So either way we are describing crime syndicates, except one of them is 'legal.'
Thanks for reminding us how corrupt Washington politics is and the only cure is to get rid of government period. And even though you pointed out that term limits won’t fix the problem, particularly because the legislation exempts long term incumbents, I’m still tired of seeing Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
I’ll admit that the idea of sweeping many of those “same old” congressional faces out of view gives the concept some real appeal.
Term limits aside, there’s the question of whether age limits might be appropriate. Watching the last few years of an increasingly incapacitated Dianne Feinstein was pretty rough. Down the stretch, her chief of staff was a de facto senator.
Interesting that you and TheLastBattleStation mentioned only Dems as examples. As deserving as the Dems are for that criticism, it's not a partisan issue, both parties are at fault. Both trump and biden are poster-children for what happens when you've exceeded your sell-by date. I agree there are many other problems (the legalized bribery being the biggest one), but we have to start chipping away. And which party appointed the morons on the Supreme Court that ruled that money is speech and corporations are people? And which party nominated the 4 idiots on the court who perjured themselves during their confirmation hearings? On the whole I think term limits at least won't make things very much worse and it could improve things a bit but you're right, it doesn't solve the root cause. But that Dem example bias damages your credibility. Look at the Montana Plan as a start to getting money out of politics because we can't rely on Congress. See: https://transparentelection.org/
Respectfully, I think you're quick on the trigger to accuse me of "Dem example bias." I mentioned Dianne Feinstein in my brief comment because, over my lifetime, she is far and away the most egregious example of a clearly-incapacitated legislator lingering on Capitol Hill. (Two examples: After a months-long absence battling an illness, she chided a reporter who asked her about her return, and seemed unaware that she'd been convalescing in California from February to May, insisting "I've been here...I've been voting!" In a hearing, she also appeared totally disoriented from the proceedings, and a staffer was heard whispering to her "Just say aye." She eventually died one day after casting her last vote.)
Even more importantly, though, note that my article emphasizes that the ills of the Capitol Hill status quo are bipartisan. (E.g. "It’s the same on both sides of the aisle.") I also took care to include quotes from both a Republican and a Democrat decrying the quid pro quo of the fundraising machine, and the image of a call center for reps to use is from a GOP call center.
Thank you for the link to the Montana Plan, I'll have a look.
If you're bipartisan that's great. The only data I had was what you posted and my post is a result of that. Use both sides in examples. No need to defend criticism of Feinstein. I agree about her. In fact, I'm proud that in the mid 1990s I personally gave her an apoplectic fit in a Q&A session with constituents when she didn't like a question I asked her about accepting PAC funds buying access to her. Mitch is also a posterchild for who shouldn't still be there. And I'm going to be pushing the Montana plan here in NM with the legislators. It's an end-run around Congress that won't stop rich people, but at least will stop corporations from bribery. Lots more needed, no insider trading, etc. but that requires Congress. The Montana plan doesn't. States can do it on their own. Just like Canada got universal health care similarly, started in one Province. And there's an effort here in NM to have a type of universal health care here which could spread. Check out www.NMHealthSecurity.org
Term Limits is a completely obsolete solution to the current situation America find itself in. Things are so far gone now that the world needs to go through a catharsis which results in extreme decentralization.
We have a piper to pay. However, that soon to be $40 trillion debt has nested in the American subconscious in one of the worst iterations possible, i.e., "familiarity breeding contempt." SHTF now has grown into an inevitability. The price ultimately paid will be determined by "How much and for how long?"
Speculating on those two reactionary phenomena isn't really conducive to generating solutions however. We're just going to have to truly toughen up for the duration, a thing perhaps/likely of multiple generational scope of 'character-building.' The gold index to hyper-inflation charts from Weimar Germany in the early 1920s are eerily similar to today's trends, essentially paralleling for the 100 + year anniversary trends.
Fourth Turnings indeed.
Yes, I can’t conceive of a scenario where that much-needed decentralization of power (whether in one country or the world) comes about without an enormous crisis.
That said, since frightened populations seem eager to centralize power even more when emergencies arise (and governments are ever eager to exploit crises in that way), it seems the decisive catharsis might come in a one-two punch, with an initial calamity driving one last cycle of increased centralization, followed by a grand finale where everything splinters a few years later.
I think we are seeing what you described unfold right now. At least the first part, the last desperate cycle of increased centralization. The backlash to that is already growing though, so much so that we are seeing cracks in various areas. I know I am going to enjoy watching the unfolding collapse of the centralized institutions when they begin to implode en masse.
The problem is that we even have a government. It will always be the master-slave relationship with ALL governments. We have never experienced a government where the citizen held all the power. Never in the US where it was supposed to be accomplished. It is a fallacy.
Thanks for this article. In spite of it distracting from real issues, I had always reflexively favored term limits, but now I see it in a new light. One of several things you mentioned that I didn’t know was about committee assignments being tied to fund-raising for the party.
You’d probably enjoy watching Massie expand on the topic in this interview:
https://youtu.be/fD6wxH5gIk8?si=Hj8cM2qo2FivOChD
Mr Massie provided a rollicking interview on The Jimmy Dore Show today. The two truly hit it off.
We need to realize that there is ONE "Party", this is the UNI-PARTY. There are two sides or branches of the party, the "Red" side, and the "Blue" side, they occasionally and mostly symbolically swap power back and forth, but they maintain complete control over the $$$, how wealth is extracted from the people and how it is redistributed. These funds are overwhelmingly spent to maintain the politico's power, benefit their patrons and enrich themselves, the "people" get the crumbs from their masters tables. These are the facts. Term limits will do nothing to fix the problem.
You seem to use that Pew as a sort of crutch when there are plenty of explanations for it such as people moving from House to Senate, people moving to lobbyist positions & Redistricting.
And you even acknowledge the problem with gerrymandering. If people don't want $ in politics then we need to stop all the mechanisms that redirect public dollars back to politicians & parties via kickbacks and people receiving grants and subsidies that include portions just redirected back via campaigns & PACs. We pay for this system that uses our money to keep us from ever changing it.
Your last sentence says a lot!
I give you the ultimate self-licking ice cream cone.
Brian, a call for untiy from the mountains high, to the wave crashed coast, in memory of Martin Luther King Jr:
"We must learn to live together as brothers, or we will perish togetherbas fools."
"The person down the street who votes differently than you is not your enemy. They are your neighbor. They worry about the same things you worry about. They want their kids to be safe and their bills to be paid and their country to be a place worth living in. They have been manipulated just like you have been manipulated, fed a different flavor of the same poison, sorted into a different tribe by the same algorithm, pointed at you as the enemy by the same people who point you at them.
The working class Republican and the working class Democrat have more in common with each other than either of them has with the billionaire class that funds both parties.
You share the same struggles. You face the same rigged systems. You are being crushed by the same economic forces that have transferred more wealth upward in the last fifty years than at any point in human history. And instead of uniting against the people doing this to you, you are screaming at each other on the internet about pronouns and flags and whatever fresh outrage the algorithm served up this morning.
This is exactly what they want. A nation at war with itself cannot resist a takeover. A people consumed by mutual hatred will accept any authority that promises to protect them from the manufactured enemy. Every empire that fell was divided before it was conquered. Every free people who lost their freedom were set against each other first.
The red versus blue war is not real. It is a show put on by people who own both teams. It is professional wrestling and you think it is a real fight. The wrestlers go backstage after the match and laugh together while you are still screaming at the guy in the other section who was rooting for the wrong character.
This Is Our Country Not Theirs
This nation belongs to the people who live here and work here and raise families here and will be buried here. It does not belong to billionaires who hold citizenship in three countries and will flee to their bunkers the moment things get bad. It does not belong to tech oligarchs who view democracy as an obstacle to efficiency. It does not belong to foreign interests who have purchased so much influence that they might as well be writing our laws themselves.
We have to stop letting them divide us. We have to start seeing each other as fellow Americans again instead of enemy combatants in a culture war that was manufactured to keep us weak. We have to remember that the person screaming at us online is also a victim of the same manipulation, and maybe if we stopped screaming back and started talking, we might realize we have been fighting the wrong enemy this entire time.
Turn off the television. It is not informing you. It is programming you. Question everything, including the sources you trust, especially the sources you trust. Talk to people who disagree with you and do it without trying to win. Listen to why they believe what they believe. You might discover that the monster you have been told to hate is actually just another person trying to make sense of a confusing world with imperfect information, exactly like you.
Remember who you are.
You are an American. Your ancestors came to this land or were brought to this land or were already on this land, and regardless of how they got here, they built something together that was supposed to be different from the old world’s tyrannies and aristocracies. That project is not finished. Every generation has to fight to keep it alive against the forces that want to drag us back to a world where a handful of rulers own everything and everyone else serves at their pleasure.
Stop letting them divide you. Your enemies are not your neighbors. Your enemies are the people who profit from your division and are building machines to replace you the moment you are no longer useful.
Start acting like it before it is too late". —The Wise Wolf
No matter who you vote for as president you get Bibi Netanyahu.
Or John McCain. Interchangeable when bought as a kit.
Bibi is bad but there are 100 more from all the industries like energy food healthcare govt unions defense etc who all get $ from the pie & fund the campaigns to keep it coming as long as they give a little back.