Personal/Political: If I Were President

With the most controversial election in my lifetime looming in front of me, I've had a lot of thoughts about what I think is wrong with with our political system and what I think ought to be changed. As part of my ongoing series trying to “present” my politics, here are some of the things I would do if I had control of the executive branch.

Some of my priorities: Don't overstep the bounds of executive authority; Solve the long-standing problem with legislative corruption; Reconcile the problem between the government doing what the money wants instead of what the people want; Prune wasteful, corrupt, and/or redundant agencies to both reduce the size of the federal government while improving its efficiency; and attempt to move more power into the hands of individual voters.

I can't say whether I'd run as a Democrat or a Republican. It would probably be determined by which party was at least publicly espousing the sort of things I want to do in office at the time.

Step 1: My Cabinet and the Department of Information

The first thing I'd do is dissolve the Department of Homeland Security and move all of its various agencies back where they were before Bush created the department. I think the whole formation of the department was a knee-jerk response after September 11 and we've since been exposed to 15 years of it screwing up our country. One of my major priorities during the election would be identifying competent cabinet officials based on what I know about them. I would do my best to pick people based on ability rather than politics. For example, Bobby Jindal, the former governor of Louisiana, would be my Secretary of State. He did what amounts to the Secretary of State's job throughout his time as governor, and he'd be excellent at it. Once I had a competent group, I'd leave most of the departments, especially the ones I'm not going to try to shake up, in the hands of people I could trust to keep everything going without my input and without distracting me.

With the DHS gone, I would form a long-overdue Department of Information. I'd do away with the CIA, the NSA, and any other little niche intelligence groups to be replaced with two: the Bureau of Foreign Intelligence and the Bureau of Domestic Intelligence. I think it's important to scrap the whole agency and start fresh so we could get rid of some of the baggage those agencies bring to the federal reputation. I would leave others, like the FBI, where they are, but I'd strip them of any sort of intelligence work not related to their primary purpose. The FBI, as a law enforcement agency under the DOJ, would keep doing things like watching suspected criminals (with the appropriate warrants), but would no longer be doing bulk surveillance to try to find people to suspect. I'd pick one agency, quite possibly the FBI, to take over all federal “security” jobs, instead of having 3 or 4 who have time and resources wasted with jurisdiction questions. This would also centralize all of their records, so there would be no more problems caused by one agency knowing something another one didn't. With all this concentrating of authority in the hands of one agency, I'd have to put a watchdog on them to provide oversight to keep them from abusing power. This is part of where the Bureau of Domestic Intelligence comes in: The Bureau of Foreign Intelligence would take over the CIA's job, with a clean record, and handle all the foreign intelligence work, as the name says.

The Bureau of Domestic Intelligence would have two main functions: gathering information from the people for the federal government, and watching the federal government for the people. It would need total authority to investigate other federal agencies.

I'd also restrict the ability of any one agency to classify information and make it secret: any other organization would have to submit it to the Bureau of Domestic Intelligence, who would be charged with weighing whether or not it's in the interest of the American people and/or national security, and then decide whether or not any given information could be declared secret. Just to make sure the new Bureau keeps its own record transparent and can't just classify all its own mistakes while exposing everyone else's, it wouldn't be able to classify any of its own information without approval from the FBI or another equivalent agency, so they'd in effect be covering each other at all times.

Step 2: Bureau of Domestic Intelligence and Survey Polls

Apart from watching the rest of the government, the main job of the Bureau of Domestic Intelligence (Have I used that term enough to just abbreviate it BDI from now on?) would be to gather information from the people for the government. This doesn't mean domestic spying – I'd largely get rid of any and all domestic spying programs – but polling: surveying instead of surveillance. Our polling system is incredibly underused, and technology has reached a point where it's time for an overhaul. Polling ought to be a full-time job, under the new BDI, where citizens can go into polls once per ballot to voice their opinions. The idea that people can influence how Congress votes by writing to their representatives and senators has not been shown to work except in some very extreme and public instances. When the US was considering attacking Syria, for example, the people were able to get them to back off, at least temporarily. Then we started hearing more and more about ISIS, until when the president said we have to go get them, the people were so afraid of them they just stayed out of it. ISIS of course is involved in Syria, so ipso-facto we got into a war in Syria right after the people said not to because the government found another way to do it. Now all we have to do is allow, or even help, ISIS gain control of one of the parts of the country we wanted to take from the Syrian government, and then we can take it from ISIS.

 

This kind of blatant disregard for the opinions of the voters should be stopped. I'll get to the blatant disregard for the people in the other countries in a while. I would transform spying on Americans into listening to them. I'm not talking about transforming us into a pure democracy, though. The constitution does guarantee us a republic, so it would be unconstitutional to put all power directly in the hands of the people. However, I've thought for years that a lot of the underlying problem with our government is that there is no instrument for measuring the Will of the People that they're supposed to be implementing. Suppose reform-minded leaders get into office, which they do sometimes. Once they get there, what are they supposed to change? What sort of laws do the people want? If they don't know that, how can they find out? Go through mountains of mail from their constituents, which only comes from people who still think writing paper letters is a good way of communicating and doesn't represent any sort of “common” view. Or maybe they can go to the streets and talk directly to the people, although I haven't seen that this works either. It always looks like a stunt, even if it's meant to be sincere. As a result, the people they talk to tell the politician what they want to hear, and the politician tells the people what they want to hear, and then everyone goes back to business as usual.

The biggest problems with both of these methods are firstly, there's no way to get a good representative sample of what people really want, and secondly, they're probably going to hear different things. In the end, they just do what everyone else does and listen to their paid advisers, who are of course paid to advise them in a certain direction.

The only way to really get them the information they need to do their jobs is the way we elect them to the job in the first place: we have to tell them at the polls. And we can't keep doing it only when we elect them, because that's why they spend so much money trying to convince us that they're doing a good job already. We need to tell them constantly. I'm talking weekly official polls, at official polling places, staffed by full-time professionals, where the people vote in numbers on laws, policies, etc. in order to ensure that the government has a good idea of what the will of the people is. The results of these polls remain advisory, though. Congress is still the deciding body, but suddenly we'd have something to go with their already-public voting records: people could see on a continual basis whether or not their politicians were actually voting in accordance with the way their constituents wanted them to. As president, I could use the “bully pulpit” to expose lawmakers who are ignoring their voters in favor of professional lobbyists.

Step 3: Satisfying the Money

If you've read this far, you're probably thinking “You'd never be able to pull this off. In fact, if you were running on a platform of doing something like this, you'd never get elected, because you'd be going against what the campaign contributors want by taking the power out of their hands.” And so far, you'd be correct. I hear a lot of reform advocates saying that we have to get the money “out of politics.” This might sound like a good slogan, but it's not reasonable. You're never going to get the money out of politics. This was true in Athens, it was true in Rome, and it's true now. We could pass all the laws we want to try to stop rich people and businesses from influencing government, but it just can't be done. Money finds a way; that is its purpose.

When you really look at it, it's not even right to get the money out of politics. Not only has the Supreme Court ruled that repeatedly anyway, but it's probably objectively right that the people who have more money have a bigger stake in the system than those who don't, and if they have more skin in the game, isn't it right that they should have more say in the outcome? The way I see it, the problem isn't that this influence exists. The problem is that what's good for business doesn't always line up with what the American people want. The “solution” they've been implementing is for the government to do what's good for business and either try to sell it to the people beforehand as being good for them, or just do it and then try to convince the people afterward that it's good for them.

I think a better solution all the way around would be to find out what the American people want, find out what would be good for business, then go with what the people want and pay the businesses off to let that happen. See my post about buying our way out of the oil industry for some more details on how we could do that.

Once we resolve the conflict between the Will of the People and the commercial interests, a lot of the corruption would go away. Of course, we'd still have the lobbyists trying to persuade the politicians just like we do now. How do we get that to stop corrupting the legislature? We get it above board. We get some laws in place that allow businesses to give to politicians directly. “But that's quid-pro-quo corruption!” you might say. Yes, and no. The whole reason we don't allow quid-pro-quo exchanges is because having politicians sell their votes means they vote the way the people who are buying them want. What we've done instead is have businesses donate money into campaign funds – some of the most regulated money on the planet – so that politicians have to do everything they can to get reelected because they've already pledged to vote the way their donors want, and the only way they can get the rewards is to stay in office and keep voting for them. How is that less corrupt than a system where the business gives the politician money and the politician votes the way the business wants them to? So really, we already have a quid-pro-quo system, but it's through just enough loopholes to stay legal while giving us none of the benefits. We just need a different system, then.

How about this? What if businesses could give money to the politician in an escrow account in exchange for their vote, but the politician couldn't collect the money until they leave office? This already exists, by a way, for the president. It wouldn't be a stretch to extend it to the House and the Senate. So now instead of a bough-and-paid-for politician who votes the way their donors want and ignores the people, we have mostly honest politicians who occasionally need to vote the way the people with the most stake in the government want. If they want to collect that money, they have to leave (and there goes any need for term limits) and if they want to stay in office, they need to vote the way their constituents want them to most of the time, with the BDI watching. You couldn't have anyone stay in office unless they made their voters and their donors happy, their votes would be public, their incentives would be public, and sure they'd sell a vote now and then but they'd mostly be beholden to their voters. That's several degrees of improvement with everyone getting what they want.

Step 4: Fix the Foreign Policy

I'm just going to say it: we have to stop antagonizing Russia. Let me go through some of the things we've done since the end of the Cold War. First, we promised we wouldn't take advantage of their weakness and wouldn't move NATO's borders an inch closer. Then we took advantage of their weakness with lopsided trade deals one after the other and expanded NATO to even include former Soviet satellite states right on their borders. Russia put their foot down when we started making overtures to Ukraine, a nation so culturally Russian in part that Russia once had more to do with Kiev than it did with Moscow and St Petersburg. So instead of pushing NATO in we sent in some NGOs to topple the elected government and try to install a pro-Western government that would ask for NATO on its own. Then when Russia took over a tiny bit of Ukraine for themselves and flew two bombers into the Gulf of Mexico, we acted like we were the aggrieved party.

In military terms, we need to pull the heck out of the entire Eastern Hemisphere. No NGOs, no troops stationed in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, or any of that. Russia, and China, are going to rise to superpower status again whether we like it or not, and we're not doing ourselves any favors by either ignoring that fact or trying to hold them down. When they do make it, do we want them to remember us as the nation that did everything we could to hold them back? My plan would strengthen the position of the US in the world and increase military spending above its already stratospheric levels (and keeping the money happy), while at the same time pulling the pressure off the rising powers, and welcoming them, even helping them, reclaim their national pride and glory in a way that helps us do the same.

In a nutshell, I would focus on the navy. The US Navy is the backbone of the US military historically speaking, and in fact the navy is biggest determining factor in every military throughout history. Ours is the strongest in that history. It controls the skies, the seas, and the land with the Marines. In fact, the Navy does nearly all our military work for us, and is only supplemented by the Army and the Air Force when needed. I would use that force to form a sword and a shield for our country that no nation could possibly match. I'd establish fleet lines in both the Atlantic and the Pacific stretching from pole to pole. We'd allow no foreign military inside that lines, except Canada, Mexico, and any country in the rest of “our” hemisphere that gets its stuff together well enough to get some ships of their own. In other words, our military would have an impassable barrier holding half the world for us, but beyond that we wouldn't project power. Instead, I would invite Russia, China, and the rest to create their own naval lines alongside ours, so that they would feel included and encouraged in this idea instead of threatened by it. In the Atlantic and the Pacific there would be two great fleets sailing up and down past each other constantly, not like sentries menacing each other but as a fence between neighbors. If the UK wants to keep up their special relationship with us, then there can be a third, shorter dual line in the English Channel and the North Sea for the same purpose.

The true cooperative measures would come from the expansion of merchant shipping – after all, we let merchant ships from rival countries, even enemy countries, past our military ships now, so there's no reason to assume our floating fence would block those. There would be more of those than we have now with the oceans as safe as they would be with our respective navies constantly deployed in them. For that matter, we could expand our shipyards here in the US enormously just to build ships to sell to other countries for shipping. Think what that would do to the economy along with all the increased exports.

The other thing that would truly defuse the tension we have now is liberty calls for the navies. The one reason we'd let a Russian or Chinese fleet inside our barrier – escorted by a superior number of our own ships, of course – is to bring them to Miami or San Francisco to spend their money partying it up in our ports. That means jobs, jobs, jobs in shipyards, bars, hotels, restaurants, all flooded with foreign sailors looking for a good time. Not to mention all the added jobs for law enforcement making sure those foreign sailors don't get out of the port into the rest of the country. I'm not an idiot.

We'd do the same on the other side too, sailing to Hong Kong or St Petersburg for some of our liberty calls. Of course, the tension would be pretty high at first, but over time as these sort of things became more common, our peoples would get more used to each other and we would finally have some adults on all sides who'd spent significant time in the other one's company and had some fond memories of the other one's homeland. Only once that sort of pattern was established could we really be friends and cooperative partners with the next most powerful nations after us. At the same time, we need to crank up our almost-dormant diplomatic corps, perhaps a new agency within the Bureau of Foreign Intelligence, to not only keep their governments on our sides but as a scalpel to carefully keep them divided from each other. It would take a lot of effort, especially for us, but I think it would be worth it in the long run to see a world dominated by the US, Russia, China, and the UK all standing together arm-in-arm, following our ultimate lead of course, because the alternative is that we keep staring each other down in rising tension while we all still have our thousands of nuclear weapons.

As to all the various areas that my plan pushes outside our sphere of influence, I would be actively encouraging one of the other superpowers to take over management of those areas – especially the Muslim world – so that we can just get out of it altogether. My position on Israel is already clear; you can read that post if you want the details. As far as securing our oil interests, just because I'd pull our military out of the area doesn't mean I'd abandon our business interests. They'd just be defended by professional mercenaries, and contract troops from the other superpowers wrangled by our diplomatic corps and paid for by their own governments instead of risking the lives of our own sailors and soldiers to do the same job.

Final note: South Korea can take care of themselves. I'd pull out the “tripwire” forces. I think there's more than enough pressure on them from two enormous fleets up and down the Pacific Ocean to keep them in line, besides which I think if everyone else stayed out of it South Korea would win their fight anyway. And even if I'm wrong about that, that's China's problem, not ours.


[2018 EDIT: Several people who would know have told me that my energy ideas are dumb, and I don't have any business formulating ideas about something I don't understand. So just ignore Step 5.]

Step 5: (At Least Survey to) Fix the Energy Crisis

I've already explained my thoughts on global warming in exhaustive detail. I'd have to conduct one of those survey polls of the population to see what action the people would like us to take, then go with that. I'd really like to see some cities and states try different options and see which one works the best before we try adopting a national standard. I've also already covered the oil issue previously. Those really aren't the parts I think the president needs to lead the way on.

The biggest challenge facing us when it comes to energy on all fronts is how to get out of coal without hurting either the coal companies or the coal miners. As much as I believe in nuclear and hydro power, I think the best lateral move from coal would be geothermal power. We can even convert coal plants to geothermal plants: we just have to dig deep enough holes under them first. The best part for the economy is that once we reduced our own demand for coal, we could still keep digging it up to export it.

There is one thing that has to be checked out before we tackle geothermal power, though. The reason we have an atmosphere is because the liquid iron of the inner core rotates inside the solid iron of the outer core, which produces our planet's magnetic field. It's only because of the strength of that magnetic field that the sun's radiation can't blow away our atmosphere. That's a lot riding on the nature of that core. The potential problem is that the only thing keeping the inner core liquid is the enormous pressure being applied to it by the weight of the mantle and the crust. If we're going to bore holes through the crust, we need to know in advance how that venting will affect that pressure. If we somehow let enough pressure off the core to let it solidify, we would lose our atmosphere, and by the time we knew about it we wouldn't be able to do anything about it. So as dangerous as global warming might be, the danger of geothermal energy gone wrong is the complete destruction of our planet's ability to support life.

Either way, once we have tons of electricity flowing, the main role of the president is to encourage the states to put them to some good use. It would be good to see a lot more public transportation, especially when it comes to cities, so that cars would not be as necessary as they are. Cars are a part of our culture, and I'm certainly not calling for getting rid of them or getting rid of oil; just reducing the degree that they're needed to get anything and everything done in this country would be a major improvement. But the president and the federal government's role in that should be encouragement, not legislating. I would shine a spotlight on the states and companies that go along with this, as well as those that refuse to, and let the citizens make their own decisions. It's not the federal government's job to force that sort of thing on the citizens.

There you have it. Those five things would be my main goals to improve our country if I was the president. It's probably a bit ambitious to assume I could get any of them done, but that's why there aren't more than five. I think that's the most I could get done in 4 years nevertheless, and I don't think I'd run for reelection unless one of my survey polls told me the people really wanted me to.