House exempt from ethics education, lets change that.
So, I just got an email from my congressman letting me know that he has submitted a bill that would no longer exempt the House membership from annual ethics training. Their staff is required to have such education, the Senate is required, but not the house. He is also trying to get it into the rules for now.
How timely considering what has just gone down in the congress.
Needless to say, the leadership is not wanting it.
The Republican Chairman of the House Rules Committee has already rejected the idea and said that it wouldn’t be “proper” for House members to required to take annual ethics training…
It would not be proper? I guess it is beneath them? What professional group exists that does not have a requirement for some type of annual education which often includes ethics? My mistake, I guess they are not professionals!
Anyway, please sign the petition and share this. I know, ethics education won’t solve it all, but at least the ability to say “I made a mistake” will be limited.
Thank you.
Becker
I think what we have lost sight of is that ethics… and public decency in general… are not ideas or behaviors that humans are born knowing or thinking about.
It has taken thousands of years to build “civilization” in the expected behaviors of people living in close contact with those not their relatives.
But lately we have as a culture gotten rid of all the reminders that if we are not reasonably honest and decent with each other, life will become nasty, brutish, and short. Even to those who currently congratulate themselves on being the “winners.”
Yep, there’ll be a quiz! NancyO
Signed and sent, but I don’t hold out much hope.
I long ago came to the conclusion that good men and women go to Washington to do good, and either get turned off to the process and quit, or get turned to the Dark Side. All the $$$ sloshing around K Street has only made things worse.
Still, we have to try to hold them accountable.
Sandi
I see I was unclear (again).
The ‘process’ I believe they get turned off to is not the process of governing, with it’s give and take, but the various ways money insinuates itself into every aspect and slowly, but surely, either corrupts them, or they are turned off by the threat of such corruption, and leave while their conscience is intact.
Sandi
i agree with you, but let me ask you how you would fix it. people acquire money in order to have power to affect their world… that is politically as well as in the marketplace.
money has always been the most important factor in politics, and i think it always will be. and there is an arguable case that that might be the way it “should” be. money after all represents some kind of “success” in the real world, and “what works” seems to deserve some kind of representation in politics.
i’d like to see a good answer to this… because my conscience is still intact. but i have gotten very tired lately of people who call themselves liberals who have no more policy sense or political strategy than throwing a two-year-old tantrum.
oh, wait. i just said something that can be called insensitive. it seems that when you criticize the left you have to be very very careful how you say it. or better, don’t say it at all.
coberly,
I don’t claim to have an answer, but one place to start could be to make the time between leaving office and taking a fat job on K Street much longer would help. Jeff Connaughton, in his book on why Wall Street always wins, said that what’s most valuable to a lobbying firm (like the one he left), is the recruit’s Rolodex, which, like fish, has a shelf life. The longer someone is out of office, the less luster his/her Rolodex has, making that former pol a bit less of a valuable commodity.
I am not one of those liberals who believes money is evil. I recognize it is a tool and can be used for good and ill. But when it is used to game the system, or set up unfair advantage for one group over another, it becomes a problem, IMO.
Of course, people should be rewarded for succeeding. And money is the means our society has chosen to bestow those rewards. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t also true that the playing field has become much less level than it was when I was growing up, when ‘hard work and getting an education’ was a pretty assured ticket to success. Now, just getting a decent education has become much more problematic, and paying for it, even more so.
I am not asking for ‘equal outcomes’ as is often claimed that all liberals want. But when you break my leg and then tell me I have the same chance to win the race as anyone else, I call BS.
I also recognize that life is unfair, period. That doesn’t mean I didn’t teach my daughter to try to treat everyone as she would want to be treated, not taking advantage just because she saw a weakness in someone.
As for remedies, it might help, also, if the white collar criminals got the same level of ‘justice’ as the working class slob gets when he steals, either from his company, his clients or the tax payers.
Peace,
Sandi
Sandi
I agree with you more and more.
I am not entirely sure about the revolving door. again, presumably those people know something and their knowledge is valuable.
but… and i think this is the important part: what you taught your daughter and what you believe yourself is what we have lost track of in this country. a sense of ethics. not a class in ethics to teach the crooks what words to say. i believe… on little evidence… that the folks who came back from world war 2 and the depression tried to build a better world. they may have given us the hippies… whether that is good or bad i don’t know. but the hippies were part of the genral turn away from leftist politics and the wisdom of Dr Spock. and shortly we got Dirty Harry and Charles Bronson to replace the post war popular films of fighting injustice while keeping our honor clean.
today, even the liberals, as they call themselves. are evaluating the world only in terms of money, and what’s in it for them.
i don’t know if we can ever go back or if we are in for five thousand years of Egyptian civilization (if that’s too obscure all i mean is a country of slaves ruled by fear…. pretty much still the rule in the world, but at one time America was the Hope for Change.
and now we know where people talking about Hope and Change are leading us.
But definitely, the emphasis should be on stopping criminal abuse by those with power and not on mindless “hate the rich” slogans. I am somewhat down on the rich myself these days, but mindless slogans and lumping people into broad categories is counterproductive.
Coberly,
Synchronicity is amazing. This just came across my virtual transom, and it seemed appropriate:
“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
Happy Holidays!
Sandi