Comment by throwaway894345 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway894345 | Hacker News Reader

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throwaway894345

The more troubling problem to me is that my government (United States) will drag their feet on just about any issue that matters to ordinary people--spam, climate change, overfishing, healthcare, etc--provided at least one corporate lobby of virtually any size at all advocates for the problem. Using this spam case to illustrate, it's taken a decade of multiple daily spam calls to virtually every single American for the government to budge on this issue (and still no solution is even on the table for snail mail spam); how are we ever supposed to tackle issues that only really affect a subset of Americans (e.g., healthcare), or which affect us all but invisibly/intangibly (e.g., overfishing, climate change, etc)?

If I had one policy wish it would be to completely eliminate corporate lobbying. Concerned citizens can lobby individually or in groups, but corporate donations, perks, etc to such people/groups would be tightly regulated with steep fines for trespassers.

A friend of mine is working on a book, arguing that the root problem is public votes by members of Congress. Prior to 1970 or so, Congress used secret ballots. You could lobby them but you wouldn't know whether they voted your way. A new law changed that in the name of "transparency" and corporate donations and lobbying took off in a big way after that.

We insist on secret ballots for individual voters so they can't sell their votes, but for our legislators whose individual votes are far more consequential, we've given up on it.

In exchange, we get to see how they voted and "hold them accountable." But we can't do that nearly so effectively as corporate donors. Most of us don't look at voting records at all; our information mostly comes from attack ads taking votes out of context.

This is actually quite a fascinating note. Thank you for sharing. Is there an eta on the book?

I don't think so, but he and his collaborators have a website: https://congressionalresearch.org/

I hadn't realized that there were secret ballots before.

Recently, the House Republicans publicly voted to back Marjorie Taylor Greene (strong Trump supporter) but also had a secret ballot to back Liz Cheney (Trump critic, voted to impeach, #3 in House Republican hierarchy).

It seemed obvious that if the second vote was public that Liz Cheney probably would have been censured and lost her position.

> Prior to 1970 or so, Congress used secret ballots. [...] A new law changed that in the name of "transparency".

No, that’s not true. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have information like this, the breakdown of votes by members on the 1964 civil rights act.

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/88-1964/h182

It may be that prior to 1970 or so the number of bills (or the number of bills salient to major donors, or whatever) passed by voice vote rather than recorded vote was higher, that’s a harder claim to assess. But it is certainly not the case that Congressional votes either (1) were ubiversally nonrecorded prior to sometime around 1979, or (2) cannot be by voice vote today.

Looks like I overstated it a bit. Here's some detail on the changes made in 1970 and later that decade: https://www.congressionalresearch.org/LRA.html

Even junk mail through the US mail is a travesty.

The US Government acts like your US mail is a sacrosanct communication channel that if they send you something it doesn't get drowned out by junk mail.

Basically, our society says: any communication channel you will have to deal with a 10% to 90% ratio of useful communication vs forced against your consent advertising and fraud, even in _the_ constitutionally mandated/provisioned official government communication channel..

>provided at least one corporate lobby of virtually any size at all advocates for the problem.

It's the Golden Liberty of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, except instead of the szlachta, we have corporations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Liberty

It did not work out for the PLC's democracy, which entered a state of perpetual deadlock, and became a cautionary tale taken into account by the framers of the US Constitution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitions_of_Poland

Democracy should be more direct when it can be. A referendum with the question "do you want spam?" would quickly solve the problem.

Hmmm. They’ll redefine it like when someone in the admin said the old definition of infrastructure needs to be redefined in order to accommodate their goals.

Likewise they would redefine what spam is if there were a referendum.

Verizon lobbied against govt stopping spam calls because they sold an anti spam service at high profit margin.

Pretty simple. Create an expensive corporate lobbying tax that pays for the people’s lobby

What is "the people's lobby" and how is it governed such that it doesn't become a target for corruption? Who controls it?

How can you expect us to not create one when corporations are constantly trying to screw us? How do you mean keeping it from becoming corrupt? Are you suggesting that not having one is somehow better? Anything the corporations have to pay in order to lobby is a plus. Even if you just stack up the money they have to pay and light it on fire.

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