The U.S. government uses cash accounting. That is illegal for any enterprise of any size in America except for the U.S. government. Every for-profit business, every not-for-profit business, every state and local government has to use real accounting except for Uncle Sam.

The model that I'd always seen as a little boy, as a teenager, as I watched other political careers, I saw people who'd start off in local government, gain experience, move to state government, and then on to federal office. I'd always believed that kind of experience was important.

From the late 1940s, into and through the '50s, there developed a complex interaction between federal government, state and local government, real-estate interests, commercial interests and court decisions, which had the effect of undermining the mass transit system across the country.

Building sustainable cities - and a sustainable future - will need open dialogue among all branches of national, regional and local government. And it will need the engagement of all stakeholders - including the private sector and civil society, and especially the poor and marginalized.

In the public sector, there are a million people in the health service. There ought to be a couple of dozen or more on the Labour side, who learned their trade in different parts of the health service, and the public sector, and local government. And bus drivers, and people on the Underground.

There is an interesting parallel between the 'Argo' story and '13 Hours' in that, around the world, we have 285 or so diplomatic outposts and the expectation that the local government will come to our aid if we ever come under attack on the sovereign property of the United States in an embassy.

When you are in local government, you are on the ground, and you are looking into the eyes and hearts of the people you are there to serve. It teaches you to listen; it teaches you to be expansive in the people with whom you talk to, and I think that that engagement gives you political judgment.

The seemingly omnipresent storm clouds hanging over the Constitution often make it hard to find a silver lining. Every day, the front page of The Drudge Report is littered with stories of government assaults on our civil liberties - from local government officials all the way up to the Oval Office.

The Canary Islands offer special incentives to companies looking at potential filming locations, so it was only logical for me to help the local government make connections with major U.S. film studios like Universal, Fox, Sony, Disney, Paramount, Time Warner, 21st Century Fox, CBS, Viacom, Comcast, HBO, Netflix, Warner Brothers etc.

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