They offered their legal guy who is also one of the main leaders at Google and is probably the right person to talk about this but Congress refused. They want figureheads.
https://www.law.com/2018/09/04/after-senate-intelligence-com...
(Disclosure: I work at Google)
I'm not trying to dunk on Congress too hard, but so much of their public hearings are about the spectacle of gov officials holding "someone" accountable.
And it's bipartisan too, the spectacle.
The Dems were looking to further the Russia election manipulation spectacle, and I'd guess Repubs were hoping to advance their narratives of "shadowbanning" and ideological search results bias.
This is how the sausage is made.
I don't mean just the dictionary definition of spectacle, rather I'm referencing the Situationist + Critical Theory concept of The Spectacle. Guy Debord's "The Society of the Spectacle" is a wild piece of thought.
It's an absolute tome, but essentially society is now mediated by social relations of spectacle which are symbols / signs / abstractions of actual material relations. And like you're saying, politicians play a huge role in wielding spectacle towards their material goals. Some of this might seem strangely familiar / redundant but that just speaks to the impact Situationist thinking has had on our conception of society and culture.
Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (Paris, 1967). http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/1.htm
What's the point? Is anyone actually responsible/accountable? Did anything change at Wells Fargo? Equifax?
Wells Fargo blackballed employees who make $35k a year. The CEO testified in Congress and took his golden parachute.
I am trying to understand what responsibility and accountability mean.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?415547-1/ceo-john-stumpf-testi...
Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12696494
Wells Fargo is under direct supervision of the Federal Reserve, and is locked into a growth ban, because of what it did. They've also paid billions of dollars in fines so far, with more coming.
> The [Wells Fargo] CEO testified in Congress and took his golden parachute.
You're making that up. There was no golden parachute, their CEO forfeited nearly all of his compensation for 2016 and was forced out of the company without severence or golden parachute.
"Wells Fargo CEO Stumpf to forfeit $41 million in unvested equity amid independent probe"
"The bank also said on Tuesday that Carrie Tolstedt, the former head of the community banking division, had left the company and would not receive a severance payment. She forfeited about $19 million in outstanding unvested equity awards"
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/27/wells-fargo-ceo-stumpf-to-fo...
The very ones that the citizens _voted_ for.
Why is this a problem? The CEO is the public face of the company. If Congress wants to question the company about serious issues, it shouldn't settle for a little-known subordinate who has much less authority or accountability for the decisions Congress wants to ask about.
I for once appload congressmen/women for not falling for this sinple trick again.
Of that's all they wanted, they'd issue a subpoena for the top executive. That removes choice.
What they want is, in order of preference:
(1) Both ritual validation of the legitimacy of their efforts via the voluntary participation of top executives combined with the increased media attention for their showboating that comes with having the top executive in the hot seat, or, failing that
(2) The opportunity to showboat about the firms decision not to send the top executive.
If they were interested in substance, they would accept the firm sending the most appropriate person to address the actual issue, and if they felt the offered person wasn't the right person, they'd issue subpoenas to compel the testimony of the people who are really needed. But substantive answers aren't what the hearing is about.
It's not a problem other than the fact that it is a clear signal that the purpose of the invitation is public spectacle, not soliciting testimony whose content had a substantive legislative purpose.
Another clear signal of that is the use of invitations rather than subpoenas, followed by dramatic complaints about the invitation being declined when the person best able to address the substance (though less attractive as a PR punching bag) was offered.
Another clear signal of that is the empty chair theatrics.
And if people learned to recognize these signals of unseriousness, then unserious approaches will become less effective, and if Congress wants to be seen to be addressing an issue, they’ll need to actually seriously address it.
They also want to to get either the ritual validation of voluntary submission or the opportunity for theatrical (but fundamentally dishonest) complaint about non-compliance; if it was really important to have the specific witnesses there, they would forgo both and issue compulsory legislative subpoenas, which is fully within their power.
By not doing so, they are, in fact, saying they don't consider the testimony of the invited witness all that important to the legislative function, so the theatrics around the decision not to accept the voluntary invitation are clearly unwarranted.