My personal preference would be for a constitutional amendment that added a wholly new branch of Government - outside the Executive, Legislative and Judicial - that has all the necessary powers, clearances, means and protections to investigate corruption at absolutely any level in every branch of Government. That is it. That is all it would do. Just investigate. Because it was independent of all other branches, it would not have political appointments made to it, could not be ordered to stop, or indeed even ordered to start. The power of such a body is not in what it could do, but in what it could know.
I believe that this "branch" of government is known as the journalistic media. In a more general sense, it's known as the "people," who in this country have abdicated their rights to effective and honest governance via the mind-numbing euphoria of television and consumer culture. I suggest that establishing this fourth branch of government would take place after, not before, the members of this political community got up off their fat couch-potato asses and revived the democratic process from the ashes of runaway consumerist capitalism and least-common-denominator forms of mass communication.
So, we reduce the problem of better checks and balances via any institution to better political engagement of the public. I have no idea how to answer this one except by encouraging everything to go to shit a little faster (before our oil supply dwindles and our economy crashes), so that we can start to deal with this stuff in the moderate safety of the current economic environment.
Although I would love to find a way to help. Any ideas? I don't know what else to do but let the fat couch-potato of the american social consciousness fall on its ass and dislocate one of its lardy hips.
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I believe that this "branch" of government is known as the journalistic media. In a more general sense, it's known as the "people," who in this country have abdicated their rights to effective and honest governance via the mind-numbing euphoria of television and consumer culture. I suggest that establishing this fourth branch of government would take place after, not before, the members of this political community got up off their fat couch-potato asses and revived the democratic process from the ashes of runaway consumerist capitalism and least-common-denominator forms of mass communication.
So, we reduce the problem of better checks and balances via any institution to better political engagement of the public. I have no idea how to answer this one except by encouraging everything to go to shit a little faster (before our oil supply dwindles and our economy crashes), so that we can start to deal with this stuff in the moderate safety of the current economic environment. Although I would love to find a way to help. Any ideas? I don't know what else to do but let the fat couch-potato of the american social consciousness fall on its ass and dislocate one of its lardy hips.