Comment by andrepd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrepd | Hacker News Reader

It amazes me still how much power in our "democratic" system is help completely outside of the control of the public. How some people, by virtue of owning capital, are vested with such powers that can make or break the lives of millions. Theirs are the decisions that can kill thousands or cause suffering to millions.

Democracy is not a boolean. It's a continuum. To me, it means "power held by the people whom it concerns". That's it! But even in our best democracies, only some portion of power is held democratically. Other decisions, often no less impactful or critical or harmful (think polluting factories, advertisers that insidiously manipulate people's psyches, governance of enterprises bigger than many nations, etc), are done by undemocratic, unelectable, unaccountable elites.

This needs fixing.

PS: this is bad even if the capital "well earned", for some definition of "well earned", but it is especially aggravating when we're talking about the Saudi royals or the Waltons of this world...

Well, yes and no.

Actually, for US public companies, about 60% of value (common stock) is owned by individual citizens, including beneficial ownership through mutual funds. Everyone with a bit of retirement savings. And that proportion is actually increasing, as institutional money chases private asset classes.

The real democratic tragedy is that these retail investors never vote (less than 11% of accounts vote at all). So results like this one are dominated by hedgefunds, who are the most vocal voice in the room. The big mutual fund managers often abstain, in large part because they don't know how their constituents want them to vote.

So there is actually a big democratic opportunity -- the public owns the majority public companies, and has the ability to hold them accountable to public interests. If only people would pay attention. Usually, people throw away their proxy voting cards.

To try and address this problem, I built this website, built around a simple online petition UI (a la change.org) but which verifies your shareownership (via api to service like Plaid). For example, one of our users put up this exact petition on our website. https://www.yourstake.org/ask/amazoncom-inc-facial-recogniti... We've been hacking away on features recently, and haven't yet gotten the word out enough.

But as a 401k or Roth mutual fund, the citizen could be in our out of the particular stock at any given moment, without their say.

Uncanny. I watched the documentary "The Corporation" the other day (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/corporation) and it opened my mind to this issue completely.

It is well worth the watch.

I get what you are saying, but this gets really tricky really fast.

The power you are talking about is the power to use what you own (in this example, that thing is money). If we believe in private ownership of things, we will never be able to eliminate this power completely. Where do we draw the lines? How do we let people have the freedom to choose how to use the things they own without letting them have too much power over others?

I think we can come up with good answers, but I do fear an over simplification of what it means to restrict how you can exercise your ownership of something.

Sure, Amazon shareholders can "make or break the lives of millions"... but only if the government lets them. Neither Amazon nor its shareholders can really overrule what the American government decides. In theory, this means that you and I hold ultimate power, and Amazon operates at our discretion.

The real problem is that the American government is beholden to corporations like Amazon, and the ultra wealthy like Amazon's shareholders. Not you and me. This in turn comes back to campaign finance reform. As long as politicians are beholden to the wealthy to fund their election campaigns, you and I aren't going to have nearly as much say.

Huh? If the government wanted to ban facial recognition, they could do it. Our democratic system absolutely has the power to ban it. It hasn't been done, presumably because there isn't a public consensus that it should be banned.

If you're arguing for public ownership of companies, that's literally communism -- so not "democratic." But we don't need communism to regulate facial recognition.

If you hadn't replied first, I would have replied the exact same thing as your first paragraph - also starting with "Huh?".

That said, public ownership of companies is not necessarily undemocratic. It's just a bad idea for different reasons. USPS would be an example in the US of publicly owned company.

I believe that Marx even originally intended communism to be democratic. The regime in the USSR was supposed to be transitory.

Exactly. Does Amazon have an army more powerful than the US? No? Then absolutely the government can regulate corporate America. It's a matter of the will of the people.

Edit: 20 bucks OP (andrepd) has an Amazon Prime account.

>Absolutely the government can regulate corporate America. It's a matter of the will of the people.

The issue (or rather, one issue among many) is that that isn't so straightforward. There is an inherent assymetry: a trillion dollar corporation can influence the government at a scale so staggeringly huge and pervasive there isn't even a comparison that can be made with the power and influence of a regular Joe. They can lobby government, bribe politicians, run ads, put on massive campaigns, all of which distort government into their hands.

>Edit: 20 bucks on OP (andrepd) having an Amazon Prime account.

Cute of you, but no. I've bought things from amazon 4 times since 2015 (I just checked).

That is why cable modems hold special status via FCC rules and thus federal law (in the US).

>There is an inherent assymetry: a trillion dollar corporation can influence the government at a scale so staggeringly huge and pervasive there isn't even a comparison that can be made with the power and influence of a regular Joe.

Where does Amazon's power originate from?

A Princeton study in 2014 found that public opinion in the U.S. has virtually no influence on national policy decisions.

https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/study-the...

Subsequent studies have found that it's not as bad as all that. But even they found that the public often doesn't get what it wants. Therefore we can't conclude there's no public consensus for a ban just because the government hasn't done it already.

A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 2005:

http://rebels-library.org/files/d3Thompson-1.pdf

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