//government

If You’re Wondering When You Get to Stimulate the Economy

by cari | May, 2008

You can find the time table here. I have to say, I could really use $600 because it’s basically already spent before I get it. Either I pay down my hardcore credit card debt or I get to put a crown on my root canal. Whatever I do with the monies will be fun-tastic.

It’s great that the U.S.A. is borrowing money from other countries so it can give money we don’t have to poor people. How about just a permanent tax break for people who earn less than $40,000 a year? How about that? How about not taking 50% of our Christmas bonuses? Hmmm?

Dear Government and IRS: you guys are dicks.

Government types need to figure out how to spend our tax money better (more efficiently) and we, the people, have to stop living beyond our means. No more $100 Nikes for people barely making their rent. No more credit card companies issuing credit lines to dogs and toddlers. No more buying shitty gizmos to open your cans of Chef Boyardee or crazy diet pills that fuck you up or coffee tables with dolphins and waves holding up the tops or ground effects for your El Camino. No more suing someone because you drank shampoo and now all shampoo bottles everywhere bear labels asking you nicely to please not drink the contents. No more Nanny State. No more reality TV. No more pandering to the lowest common denominator.

[ Topic Politics, Politics, Etc. | Comments Off ]

Government Fights Back!

by adam | April, 2008

When I sat down to begin writing my first post on government this week, “Your Elected Officials”, my plan was for it to be the first of several forthcoming articles about government. As it happened, my first working title for the article was actually “Why Government Still Matters”, but when I came to the end, I realized that I wasn’t yet ready to make that point. I believe government can matter. I believe it can accomplish astounding things, in addition to its basic role as a ward against the anarchic alternatives. But I also believe that government is flawed at its most basic level, in large part because it was crafted, and is conducted by, flawed people.  This was the point I ended up choosing to make on Monday which, it turns out, apparently rankled members of my local Atwater Village Neighborhood Council.

I didn’t set out to pick a fight with MY local elected officials. In fact, I’m sure we have much more in common than we have at odds. Heck, given that it has been a year or so since last I attended a meeting, I’m perfectly happy to hear that things on the council have changed dramatically. Also, since the comments on my first article make it clear that they took my observations a bit personally, I should clarify that it was not my intention to impugn the characters or professions of any individual council-members (though I stand by my “dirty cop” irony). Quite simply, I meant only to measure the council by the efficacy of the body of government as a whole. And by that measure, this is a council that doesn’t have a stellar track record. In the end, however, the conclusions that I drew at the meeting I attended are certainly not unique to Atwater village, and I’m sure the current council is well acquainted with the substance of my criticisms. This, I suspect, is exactly what made them choose to get involved in the first place.

With that said, the point I had hoped to make when I began thinking about the role of government in my own life, is that at its core, Democracy has somehow been able to find a common language to express many of the core values and principles of the wildly divergent opinions and beliefs in this country. That is an accomplishment possible only because we have devised a pretty elegant system of government which systemically requires dialogue and compromise.

Given the above, local government makes for a rather interesting prism through which to analyze the failings of this great system. Even at the best of times, when the great political minds bring their attention to bear on a problem, government seems to react slowly, and frequently, their “solutions” fail to fully satisfy anyone completely. At the worst of times, differing opinions and agendas can reduce the proceedings to a complete and total impasse.

So with reference to the Atwater Village Neighborhood Council, it sounds like matters have improved, and for that, I couldn’t be more thrilled. Moreover, since two council members have taken the time to respond to my article, I’ll do my part and take them up on their invitation to attend a meeting.

Now if you’ll excuse me, my popcorn is getting cold and I need to go watch The Shield.

[ Topic Politics, Politics, Etc. | 1 Comment ]

Your Local Elected Officials

by adam | April, 2008

Last night, while trying out a pretty delicious new Italian restaurant in Los Feliz, I got into a conversation with a friend about how his retired father recently joined, and then immediately resigned from, a position on his local traffic commission. He quit after attending a single meeting, which is all it took for him to realize that the commission board was populated by a bunch of fellow retires who seemed far more interested in the mechanics and formalities of governmental procedure than in actually doing anything to attend to traffic safety problems in their district.

This story recalled my own attempt to brave a regular monthly meeting of the Atwater Village Neighborhood Council shortly after I bought my house. In my mind, as the son of a man who has worked in government his whole life, and as a now-responsible, tax-paying member of the community, it was time to try contributing to my community by getting politically involved. Just shy of an hour after the meeting began, and about when they’d finally finished reading in the minutes from last week’s meeting, I drew a starkly similar conclusion as my friend’s dad: Local government sucks! It’s REALLY ineffectual, and worse than that, it’s boring!

The similarities my friend’s dad and I experienced are, to my mind, a bit startling: In both cases it’s a bunch of retirees, stay-at-home-whatever’s, and in my case, a girl who plays a dirty cop on The Shield (grab some irony to go, will ya?). These are pretty much exactly the sort of people you’d find in your average jury pool, and like in any good jury deliberation, they seem to have reduced local government to an endless succession of rules, procedures, and minutiae about which the group can spend hours bickering.

Based solely on the aforementioned first-hand experience, I can only conclude that the people getting involved in local branches of government are much more interested in being IN government, then in actually achieving anything WITH government. Instead of using government as a tool, they just are tools. And if this is truly the case, then clearly the jury pool is tainted, and if it’s tainted on a local level by aspiring bureaucrats, then it seems logical to assume that the higher you climb up the ladder, the more likely you’ll be to simply encounter bureaucrats of the professional variety.

Like many people, I think the last seven years with our soon-to-be-ex-president has greatly reduced my faith in the ability of government to efficiently and fairly govern. And yet, as my father’s son, I know of many public servants who have dutifully endeavored over their careers in politics to accomplish some truly important changes which have made all of our lives better.

That said, while I firmly believe that our system of democracy has the capacity to move mountains, I confess to my own frequent lack of faith in it’s ability to do so with any regularity. So as someone who believes that government CAN work, I can only conclude that it is not working because we have failed to staff the store properly. Clearly, as is anecdotally evidenced by our local legislative bodies, there are too few intelligent, motivated, and principled people seeking and winning public office.

I write this only to personalize a flaw in our system which has been exposed, far more eloquently I’m sure, by legions before me. But I also write this as an open invitation to anyone reading this, particularly if you live in Los Angeles, and are in the Silverlake/Atwater Village area: I NEED A POLITICS BUDDY! Can you? Will you be mine?

Maybe if some smart people actually get together and rush the stage at our local councils, we’ll wake up one day soon and find we’re running the joint. Then, if we’re lucky, we can just blame ourselves for fucking everything up.

Cheers.

[ Topic Politics | 3 Comments ]