Lamar Smith: Campaign Finance/Money
opensecrets.org
opensecrets.org
- Who do we report this to who can prosecute this?
- What laws make this illegal? (or similarly, how do we make this kind of behavior illegal if the gatekeepers to the law are the people who are taking part in this?)
- If we can't make it it illegal, how do we make it unethical?
- How do we, as the citizenry, punish this?
I'm convinced at this point that the kind of people who make it into Congress, incumbent or not, are just going to be more of the same kind of quasi-criminal we have there now, so fighting with the vote is simply not enough.
Is there a way to use the courts? The DoJ?
Or are we simply going to have to wait for critical mass to develop behind some political movement that will stamp this out?
In other words, with Congress in single digit approval ratings, what seems to be the road block that we as the citizenry can grind into dust to affect the change we want to see but haven't yet done so?
I'm not attacking you personally, but the post you made.
It is the Federal Government's responsibility to regulate interstate commerce. The Internet is not limited to 1 state; it falls right in the purview of interstate commerce.
I get the "small government", "low taxes", etc. arguments. But there's a place to make them; discussing how the Congress is trying to kneecap the Internet is not one of those places.
Larry Lessig has some interesting ideas about how campaign funding should work:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111214/17245817090/lessig...
American activists would be better served if they had a good notion of a theory of government. The dominant attitude in activism, on any side, these last three or four years, has been one of making the government do X, where X is some extraordinary ill-defined goal.
So people are offended when X doesn't happen, and begin to suspect Congressmen are evil. The truth is probably more like this--Congressmen are good people in general, but selected by their appeal to moneyed interests and influential political causes. Then they are thrust into an environment where everyone wants them to do their bidding, and so condition themselves to ignore most sources of information, particularly sources outside their own interest, or sources they don't understand. This appears to an outsider to be like cronyism and willful ignorance. The reality is they haven't a clue about certain things, and in fact that's part of the reason why they got elected...
TL;DR: don't fix the people. You won't get anywhere making unrealistic demands on anyone forced to conform to a bad process. Instead, fix the process.
I agree with the first part, but not the second. Otherwise there simply wouldn't be a reason to push these numbers out as if they were a sign of some kind of badness.
In a representational democracy such as ours, Congress is hired to represent the interests of their constituents not the interests of who pays the most money. That the voice of the constituents appears to not be heard or represented at all is the thing that's wrong.
Simply buying your a vote for your interests is not how this is supposed to be working. And the people who can actually change it are the ones who are being bought -- virtually guaranteeing no opportunity for change to occur, despite immense desire from the electorate for exactly that change to occur.
Are you corrupt? Are there people in your circle of friends who aren't corruptible? Do you know anyone with integrity? Why not vote that person in instead?
Yes its an emotional response to the defeatism. Congress people are people not some select pool of corrupt toadies. There is no requirement that you be a person of low character to be a member of congress, rather its that folks who have adopted this defeatist attitude that there is nothing they can do to change it gives people of moral turpitude an advantage, they are willing to run for office.
How about a kickstarter for public service? People sign up and say what office they are running for and changes they want to make and we crowd source them? How about creating a youtube channel for people who want to change the world can speak easily to the folks who might elect them without having to pay extortionate television fees? How about we kick out the corrupt congress people by applying technology to the problem of surfacing the better candidates?
Who? Nobody I know personally who isn't corrupt is running. I'd vote for them.
But sadly the way things are setup to work guarantees I pretty much get two equally bad choices.
Even when some group gets lots of support and gets themselves stealth elected -- the recent tea party elections are a fantastic example (despite my personal disagreements with their political philosophy), they find their ability to change the broken system reduced to almost nothing.
"Who? Nobody I know personally who isn't corrupt is running. I'd vote for them."
Get to know the people who are running. By law they are contactable (Election Commission rules) and by design they care about you voting for them. So take a moment this round of elections and personally talk to everyone you can who is running. Really, its not that hard. If you put the sweetener in that you've got your $100 donation to the campaign of the person you find acceptable, its even easier.
It is very important to note that "almost nothing" is not "nothing." The tea party has had a disproportionate effect on the republican party votes because they are enough to swing votes one way or the other. The 'career' politicians give every impression of hating them (from both parties).
Personally I find the tea party 'line' way more conservative than I like but I massively respect that they chose to volunteer for serving the public.
"But sadly the way things are setup to work guarantees I pretty much get two equally bad choices."
This misplaces the blame and that is why it doesn't get 'fixed'. It is not 'the way things are setup', it is the participation of the electorate (or lack thereof) which currently creates the situation you dislike so strongly. A majority of elections for Congress in 2010 were decided by significantly less than half the number of people who didn't vote. Think about that for a minute. The people not voting are screwing up the country. They have been 'trained' to not vote by stories and folks who would rather they not realize that their not voting gives folks who want to run the system power.
Talk to people running for office.
Vote for the one that isn't corrupt.
Get at least two and as many as you can of your non-voting neighbors and friends to vote.
You will help change the world, I guarantee it.
At first that looks bad. For comparison, look at Senator Wyden, who has been prominent as a SOPA opponent. He doesn't have any tv/movies/music industry donations in his top 20!
However, if you look deeper, the reason he doesn't have any in his top 20 is that he has such big contributions from others that it pushes the tv/movies/music industry out of the top 20. If you expand the list to show his top 50, you find tv/movies/music at $75k, not far behind the amount they gave to Smith.
She's taking money from tech and VCs. She's really no better than he is, she just happens to be right this time.
Hence the problem.
The purpose of congress is to provide representation for American citizens who could not travel to Washington D.C. to vote on the bills and amendments that congressmen take part in.
These days reporters in D.C. can blog about all bills or report them in news stories instantly. So U.S. citizens are always in the know. More importantly, American citizens can easily vote with the current technology we have. Youth can use the internet, elders the telephone etc.
What do you guys think? I doubt it would happen...congress is too ingrained in our constitution and 'murica in general...
The bottom line is that governing is hard, and doing is adequately requires a lot of knowledge about a lot of different things. Pick the Senate committee with the least-interesting sounding name - for me, that'd be the Subcommittee on Jobs, Rural Economic Growth and Energy Innovation or the Joint Committee on Printing - and try and watch a video feed of it in session for a few hours...the amount of things they have to deal with is amazingly broad, and way beyond the ability of any one person to capture (hence the importance of having a class of professional political staffers).
It's a similar reason why I'm in favor - generally - of lobbying. Is the way it's done now right? Not at all. But is there room in a well-run government for external subject matter experts with agendas? Certainly.
Lastly, I just don't think direct democracy works especially well. Check out California for the canonical example of what happens when you let people vote on complex issues in isolation of one another, with the information dumbed-down to target people who are willing to only budget an hour of their time per week on thinking about politics. Complex issues with national and international repercussions should be debated and decided by people who can study them in-depth and who represent a cross-section of the population, as opposed to those with the economic freedom to pick one or two to become involved with - I'm not saying that we have this now, but it's more what we need than a platform where OWS/Tea Party crowds can overwhelm a web vote on something.
The system of law was designed not by engineers, but by law makers who had no concept of system architecture and runaway complexity. They employed an imprecise language to construct an unstable structure which requires continuous patching and propping, resulting in a quagmire of legislation, open to manipulation due to its inherently contradictory and subjective foundation.
This problem can only be solved by proper system design, but it requires a hard reset of extant legislation. Once the law is written such that every literate citizen can understand it, we will have arrived at direct democracy.
Consider an issue like water-use rights on the Colorado River. Even if you codified all the regulations relating to it into a well-organized and clear format, there's still the difficulty of figuring out what the right answer is. How would an average literate and interested citizen consult with farmers, environmental groups, conservationists, power companies, land-use stakeholders, first-nations groups, agricultural companies, municipalities, individuals who have been on the river for decades, bureaucrats, etc. and then link all those consultations to what's going on with other affiliated riversheds, general environmental and developmental polities, fish stocks, etc.
Even if the law is super-easy to understand, I think it would still be difficult for an average unsupported person to understand the subtitles and implications of something like a water-use bill, let alone one that regulates complex financial and regulatory transactions.
In the resource allocation example, each interested party would state the amount of the resource they currently receive, the minimum amount they need to survive, and the maximum amount they could use efficiently, and their expected revenue in all cases (if they are a commercial resource user). They could also indicate their relative satisfaction with the various allocation algorithms proposed by engineers and others. Independent audits could determine how essential a given resource or resource user's product is to the economy, and how efficient the various resource users are.
I'd expect this would require less supporting staff than our current legislative system. Right now, each representative has his or her own complete advisory staff. If the same data is shared by everyone, you'd only need enough people to audit the data, algorithms, and visualization systems to avoid manipulation of outcomes, freeing up current staffers to contribute directly to the economy.
When I say making sure that US citizens are always in the know, I mean that the resources are almost always available for those who would like to be in the know.
With regard to your comment about having informed opinions on everything the Government deals with: I don't necessarily mean local matters. At first, perhaps we could start with the U.S. Congress while leaving the state.
I definitely agree that there are some issues to deal with. This is one radical proposal and I'll be the first to admit it might not even work. I do think that a more direct democracy in the model of the Swiss could be of great use in these times of questionable ethics (lobbying in particular).
There have been several revisions of the bill, in particular of the 3 controversial sections. The majority of people in any given discussion are not discussing the current version. If there concerns are addressed in the current version, and you try to tell them that, you run a good chance of getting voted way down, because they saw some article by someone famous that said the bill was bad and they can't seem to grasp the concept that the article was written about an older version of the bill.
Congress deals with many deep and complicated issues. It is simply not possible for most citizens to competently decide how to vote on most bills. They have neither the background nor the time.
Under your system it would basically come down to a popularity contest among the proponents and opponents of a particular bill. People would simply look at who is for and against it, and go with which group fits in better with them. E.g., if Rush Limbaugh says it is bad, you'd have a large group of Limbaugh fans voting against it with no further analysis. If Glen Greenwald says it is good, a bunch of his fans will vote for it with no further analysis.
Advertising would also play a large amount in determining the outcome. You can already see this in states that allow initiatives to create legislation directly, bypassing the legislature. The outcome of initiatives if often heavily influenced by whether or not one side can significantly outspend the other on advertising.
It sounds like you're describing exactly what we have now, only without abstracted accountability through representatives. Sure, most citizens cannot competently decide how to vote on most bills, but clearly many congresspeople can't either. That's not only a problem of competence, but also of the unnecessary complexity of legislation. Using something like unified diffs alone would reduce the length of many bills significantly.
Under your system it would basically come down to a popularity contest among the proponents and opponents of a particular bill. People would simply look at who is for and against it, and go with which group fits in better with them.
Citizens and their representatives already do that now. People look to their party to decide how to vote, and representatives look to the lobbyists with the most persuasive voice. It's easy to appear persuasive when your entire industry is built around convincing people to watch your advertisements.
Advertising would also play a large amount in determining the outcome.
It already does, and not just in initiatives. Direct democracy is not a panacea, but it would remove one of the significant roadblocks to addressing the problem of corruption and undue influence in politics.
But direct democracy is still the answer IMO. What needs to change first however, is for decision making to become more decentralised - as low as a given problem will allow it.
You can't expect everyone to be informed about all issues (govt has consistently demonstrated that even they can't stay on top of the laws they create). But you can expect people to be informed about the immediate issues that affect them. Most issues are local or regional ones & very few need to be national or international.
Even without direct democracy, decentralising political power whenever possible is a very good thing.
These not-particularly-large donations could very well be a consequence of his political opinions, not (as everyone seems so eager to assume) their cause.
That's how most political donations work, after all - you give to people you already agree with.