Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works
informationdiet.com
informationdiet.com
Force your legislature to start using version control.
* No more sneaking revisions through in the middle of the night without anyone noticing.
* Being able to do `git blame` style operations to resolve individual clauses down to individual lawmakers, then back to lobbyists.
* Simple diffing would prevent deliberate obfuscation tactics like burying provisions deep inside piles of irrelevant stuff.
* You could build a sweet github-style outward facing interface allowing the public to track the progress of bills in real time, increasing democratic awareness and participation.
* Legally mandated commit messages accompanying each change justifying and explaining it; force them to write these in simple english. This alone would spin 'em around so hard they wouldn't know what day it is.
* Use your imagination. I'm sure you can think of 100 reasons why this would be awesome.
Build it, open source it, then start your own lobbying/PR machine to demand that they use it. Constantly ask for justifications as to why they are not willing to use it, given the massive, obvious benefits it would bring. Ask what they have to fear from the extra scrutiny and accountability it would bring. Surely the "social media generation" can out-lobby the lobbyists? That sounds like it should be the kind of thing we're good at.
Or just forget about that entirely and try to think of some way to decimate the lobbying industry in the same way that hackers are destroying the content distribution industries and all that other stuff.
1) We've already gotten ourselves into a situation where people who don't want changes to the system have immense power. It would be very difficult to force this (or any) solution on them without our own equal or greater power which would require a much larger population than just us geeks and would cost a fuckton of money.
2) What makes you think having this stuff be transparent would actually change anything? The saddest part of US politics in 2011 is the politicians and lobbyists don't even try to hide the fact that they are bending you over the barrel anymore, they just do it mostly out in the open and blatantly. The majority of the population is too numb at this point for knowledge to really matter much. If we can't get them to vote rationally (and so far we can't), who cares if they know who is screwing them?
We know SOPA (and other bad legislation) was bought and paid for. We know who was bought, who bought them and we know how they are going to vote. None of this information is going to help kill it or stop the same from happening in the future.
When you come up with an idea of how to mobilize the non-geeks en masse and you figure out how to do so in a "bi-partisan" enough method to get critical mass, then get back to us.
But VCS for Congress isn't going to solve anything.
As far as your bullet points, we already do much of that (ok, not in "real time", not with commit messages (you could have it, but everyone would quickly fill it in with "cause it's good for America"), but much of this is publicly available). Anyone who adds or votes for or against is very well documented. For my state it is a real PITA to parse out and apply but that information is provided and in a usable manner. The only thing missing is the speed and pretty ui.
Also, Sunlight has already done a great deal of work in this area (when I last checked they were still working on the API).
*Since, I've let the idea lay dormant for months now, I'll share it. The original idea was to setup a Facebook type "game" where bored housewives or whoever get a list of 5 random bills. They get the summary and it links to the bill's text and any current laws that will be affected by that bill. What they don't see is the bill's name and who the sponsor and co-sponsors are. After reading the summary they fill out a short survey of who and what party they think the bill came from, do they think the bill is a good or bad idea and any tags they think are appropriate for the law ("pork","insurance","nice", etc) and even add their own notes. After they do that they find out who the sponsor/co-sponsors are.
The idea was to give people an incentive to read pending legislation without an instinctive bias.
Though my code is ugly, I may GitHub what I have so far.
At best, someone works with you to expand on it. At worst, nothing ever happens with it.
Ugly code or not, sharing is beautiful.
I find it incredibly rare for someone to go through Github and "steal" an idea of someone else's. People just don't have the time for that.
If we presume that Congressmen are actually trying to get away with something, even parsing all that stuff won't help. B/C they'll take the real discussions some where else, they'll "amend" the first bill to completely replace it just before the vote, etc. And when we consider the enormous dollars at stake -- these guys are managing 25% of the US economy -- there will be so much going on that it's just not possible to follow what they're doing.
If you want transparency, you have to build for transparency. You may have to sacrifice some things to get it. If complexity is generating opacity, you need more simplicity. If _size_ generates complexity, and / or diversity of purposes, you have to scale and or scope down. If that means government "does less", that's a tradeoff for transparency.
Me, I think transparency is a pretty high priority in a democracy, I'm not sure how you have reasoned debate without transparency. That fits happily with my opinion that free people generally do a pretty good job of taking care of themselves, but there are other opinions of our current situation. But if we _must_ have a big government to do this that and the other, we are going to sacrifice some degree of accountability and reasoned discussion to have it, because we are clearly at the point where it's just about impossible to tell who's doing what in our government.
That is, unless you believe the rhetoric of whomever it is marketing some viewpoint seemingly closest to your own, and prefer to blame the other guys for the whole mess. There is, of course, no transparency problem with making such assessments.
resolve individual clauses down to individual lawmakers, then back to lobbyists.
In some cases you might be able to attribute a clause to a lobbyist, but this isn't the general case. And how could this be enforced?
outward facing interface allowing the public to track the progress of bills in real time, increasing democratic awareness and participation.
This exists, and doesn't seem to be helping. See thomas.loc.gov. For example, concerneing SOPA: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d112:1:./temp/~bdNuy... (Suggestion for enhancement: easy permalinks)
Legally mandated commit messages accompanying each change justifying and explaining it ... force them to write these in simple english
There are already requirements that bills specify the authority on which they're grounded. Most of these just wind up saying "Interstate Commerce". In other words, you'll never be able to enforce this in any meaningful way.
In my imagined utopia, all these justifying messages would be listed on a lawmaker's github profile-style page next to a big picture of their face, and any lawmaker with a long list of "interstate commerce" type messages would look like an unelectable crypto-fascist in the eyes of the public. I'd put the messages in speech bubbles emanating from the headshot photo, like you see in some commenting systems, just to drive the point home.
Do you want to bring Democracy back to the system (or your choice of roughly equivalent question), or are you just trying to put your own political ideals on a privileged pedestal? I think one of the key reasons we have been unable to successfully reform things is that in general, people want the latter a lot more than they want the former. And DC knows what to do with those types... embrace, extend, embed.
Maybe they'd be forced to do so in order to compete with the new cohort of younger, technology-embracing politicians which will sweep to power on the crest of a wave of louis ck-style "OMG finally someone who understands" sentiment from the reddit generation, bumrushing congress in much the same way that the tea party has done.
I fully admit that these ideas are not workable in this form. I'm trying to "dream big." That's why I used the phrase in my imagined utopia.
[1] http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/socdemo/voting/publications/p...
That is, making an optimal choice for your vote is an extremely expensive undertaking. Thus, relatively few people do it well.
If I may, I'd like to squish the content of your comment into the single word "motivation." At present, it takes a high enough amount of motivation to either take time off work to vote early, vote by mail, or wait in excessively long lines after work, that far fewer than a majority of people participate. The arguments I've typically heard suggest that highly-motivated voters are more likely to make correct choices, and well-informed voters are more likely to be motivated.
My (untested) conjecture is that, rather than trying to increase motivation, we should decrease the level of motivation required by making it ridiculously easy to vote. Allowing larger numbers of less-motivated voters may lead to an improved "wisdom of the crowd" effect[0][1], counterbalancing the vocal minorities that we often see controlling local and national politics.
[0] http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/12/in-group-decisio...
In your second link, it notes two problems. First, it says that Crowds tend to work best when there is a correct answer to the question being posed, such as a question about geography or mathematics. I submit that this is quite the opposite of political questions.
But more importantly, it also discusses one of the big problems of "Wisdom of the crowd", although it couches it as an advantage. The effect is enhanced through communication between individuals, as would (and should) be the case in any political question. To this I reply with two words: "witch hunt".
History is replete with examples wherein the common, accepted ideas of society have stood in the way of progress -- I don't think I even need to recite any. And the whole point of the United States is to protect the minority, or even the one, against the will of a strong majority. So I don't think it's wise to strengthen further the crowd-based aspect of our political system.
But that said, it's important to distinguish "crowd" from "people". I've lately been trying to explain to people that the vote is the least important (while still being necessary) part of a democracy. The effort of explaining to the whole population why a certain law needs passage is the soul of democracy; votes are merely to maintain a formal record of dissent and to resolve deadlocks. They're decision making tools of last resort.
You didn't go to high school or the library growing up?
Let's hope not. The Teaparty congress started going to work on things that didn't serve the tea party, but rather, corporate benefactors.
Another example of the big problem being that money == speech.
It would be more apropos to talk about "commit messages" that were a long list of : "typos", "bugfix"... not that I have commit messages that look like this... nope, not me...
Unfortunately none of them are a really coherent integrated system that people can use to track what's going on with government. They're more like cool research tools for political scientists and economists.
PlainSite (http://www.plainsite.org) is trying to build more of the version control system talked about above, but it would be significantly better if some of the Sunlight Foundation's APIs were integrated.
Fundamentally, if you believe that the organization that determines the organization of Government is broken, there is no way to fix it with means that go through the regular system. An aberration in normal operational procedure is needed.
This is called revolution in the political space.
The lead on the concept - Silona Bonewald, a good friend - pushes the concept that we should be able to cite bills down to any granularity we want under any version we want.
The quick and dirty solution right now is to mine Thomas and load it into Git.. but we still lose the "who did it" part. :(
Judging from the number of comments, it isn't very heavily used.
The solution to piracy is to make the legitimate route so enticing most people don't bother to pirate. Isn't that the same with congress too? If we simply create an environment where it's advantageous for congress to do the right thing, then they will. No patches, laws, systems or oversite will prevent corruption.
We don't have bills yet, but we allow diffs on the text of laws and proposals to improve them.
If you're interested in helping add features (we have a long list), e-mail info at plainsite dot org.
Besides which, you are attacking a symptom. The root problems here lie in the amount of power that congress has, the nature of the news media, and the nature of the election process. Those are much, much harder to fix.
How could politicians not pick it up fast?
Have you ever read through the list of what Congress passes in a single day? For every SOPA that gets people's attention, Congress passes thousands of random subsidies, one-off import tariff exceptions or tax exceptions that just scream "paid special-interest".
That situation was an America that was mostly an agrarian society, pre-industrial revolution, pre-globalization, pre-climate-change. Are you suggesting the huge problems of the day could be addressed by a congress that meets once a year?
I would argue that, yes. Then again, I believe that most of our problems don't need Congress to be involved in the first place, and/or that Congress is the cause of most of our problems, not the solution.
I suspect that you'd see far fewer people getting into politics with a system like this.
However, I do dearly want this system. I want it to be accurate and I want it to be useful.
One difference however is I was thinking of it as a Wiki. Discuss pages are transcripts of conversations in committe or on the floor. That way you could see line for line diffs, etc. Although a Git-style thing would be neat too.
This is in stark contrast to the laissez-faire approach the Bush administration took towards the internet.
You can argue whatever else you want about him, but it is undeniable that more legislation regarding the internet has passed under the current administration than under Bush -- he even fought off the UN's (read: china/russia) attempt at taking over ICANN.
The truth is, we don't know if Obama will sign SOPA. This bill is universally reviled among Obama's base (probably more than any other individual issue since the start of his presidency), and that same wave of enthusiasm that put him in office threatens to become a tempest of rage as anti-Obama as the tea party. We'll see.
There is no reason bills could not be developed in the open over Github.
This is why they initially wanted health care debates behind closed doors - the lobbyists can make much more use of transparency than the uninterested voter can. Fareed Zakaria wrote a lot about this in The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad.
{1} [A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution by Carol Berkin]
Accusations of corruption are a common framing argument; if I can get you to believe that my opponent is corrupting the system, I can make you believe almost anything about the issue or their point of view. This is much harder to do if both sides negotiate privately and then jointly present a compromise.
One thing to consider is that while secrecy might a way for congress to create consensus free of outside influences, modern technology has somewhat foreclosed the possibility - so we may as well have the best openness we can get instead.
Another point is the atmosphere of each congressman constantly campaigning has forced them effectively outside of Washington and so barely know each and thus have a hard time finding consensus.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/01/03/no-more-was...
In Brazil, we've have a lot a of success drafting some documents in a public space. The beauty of doing things in the public is that ideas cannot be presented separately from the person responsible. Every idea is traceable to its author. TBH, I can't think of one idea that I would want to become law where the author shouldn't be held accountable.
Accountability breeds civility.
I don't care how law comes to be. Be it invoking satanic rituals, getting it written by the lobbyists or just copied off 4chan.
Just use the goddamn source control. And write the freaking commit messages.
There could very easily be a closed door aspect to the initial drafting of a bill. So that the entire committee would get the "blame" for the initial draft.
Go read Citrine or for US types Roberts.
The trouble is executives have a lot of ways of playing the game - they controll the agenda.
However of they don't do it it all ready It would be a good idea to see who proposed and seconds any amendments (is this not in the public domain already)
As the UK parliament and Lords do (they have fined expelled and put in jail MP's and Lords who asked questions for money or proposing amendments)
I'm a user experience designer. I started my career in the mid '90s, trying to turn green-screen DOS applications into GUIs without letting things like Internet Quorum be the result. I've been fighting the good fight for fifteen years.
With that one screenshot, I felt like the whole thing had been for naught. I literally got a chill up my spine as I sat there, thinking about the stifling, bureaucratic, inflexible DMV mindset that led to an abomination like that, and realizing that even at the highest levels of government, that's what it's like.
Our entire government, from municipal planning offices up to the top levels of the Pentagon, Congress, or even the White House, lives in this world of We've Always Done It This Way and You'll Need The Proper Authorization For That.
I mean, I knew this all along, but somehow seeing that screenshot - http://www.intranetquorum.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/featu... - it hit me in a visceral way I hadn't thought about in a long time.
All these years in corporate and startup America put me in a world where the need to move faster and compete has led me to believe that things had changed since the beginning of my career. In the world I live in, they have. But I had forgotten that in many places, things haven't changed much at all.
Of course I'm upset and fuming at the massive bloated waste that is our government, and I wish we could just put on our Guy Fawkes masks and wipe it clean in one easy swoop.
Clay Johnson is right, though. We need to learn how Congress works, make better tools, get our own lobbyists to educate the dinosaurs that are there now, and get new people into office who know more about the world we live in.
It's a daunting proposition.
Before my startup days I spent years working for the local government, and before that for a large (formerly public) gas pipelining company. I've seen so many horrendous Access/VBA-based frontends, or worse, Excel spreadsheets with macros that this system doesn't seem so bad.
In a way I'm actually surprised that Congress even has system to collate all the emails, letters, phone calls and visits into one single database. That sounds really useful, and I'd love to hear from someone that has actually used it.
"this world of We've Always Done It This Way and You'll Need The Proper Authorization For That."
I don't think this is the product of "We've Always Done It This Way", it's the result of "We Have A Strict Budget For This And User Interface Is Difficult To Quantify". As for "You'll Need The Proper Authorization For That.", well, that's the stuff of government. I agree that it's overly restrictive, but I wouldn't want to see the government tip too far in the opposite direction.
I'd be all for donning a Guy Fawkes mask and changing the world if there was even the slightest assurance that the system replacing it would be better. I don't think there is.
No, not at all.
My first thought when I saw it was that it's actually pretty clear and straightforward as far as interfaces go, the only real difference between that and the type of Web 2.0 interface that people use today is probably a 100 line style sheet to make it look less 1995 and a conversion to use AJAX requests instead of full page reloads.
Then again, "just" probably means quite a bit of work in the case of converting to AJAX requests, if the code that generates these pages looks anything like I imagine it does...
Bravo - this is going in my quotefile.
The only argument against this is a statistical one, akin to how entropy works: One should engage in revolution only when the set of likely worse systems is larger than the set of likely better systems. (I could probably state this better if I knew more mathematical terminology; I suspect matrices are involved.)
Obviously in the US you haven't reached that point. Yet.
Essentially, you want to measure the 'quality' of each outcome (utility), and the likelihood of each outcome. Then, you calculate the expected utility (which is different from the utility of the expected value - you apply the function before taking the dot product, not afterwards).
I'm blanking on the TeX at the moment, but you basically take the sum of p(i)*U(I), where p(i) is the probability of the i-th outcome occuring, and U(I) is the utility ('benefit') associated with the i-th outcome. Utility is unique to a monotonically increasing function, so that means the individual values are arbitrary, as long as the relative order is preserved.
Then, see if that expected utility is better than the status quo. (Of course, this assumes that you already have a well-defined utility function, which is easy in theory but hard in practice).
There is a major difference between the bureaucracies of the executive agencies (think DoD $100 hammers), and the political and office staff of members of Congress. Political campaigns are basically startups, and most campaign and Congressional office staff are in their 20s or 30s. They are not scared of technology, and (especially in the House), they are intensely focused on competing every day.
On the other hand, realize that they are working within a system of government whose #1 goal is to make sure that every law gets fully considered. It's built slow on purpose. The value of this is evident every time an opposition is able to slow down or stop a bad law.
Could you with your skills fit more information and ability to change it that fast in that amount of space? I doubt it.
I'm not meaning to sound disrespectful, I'm just trying to explain this slow-moving car-crash of a situation has effects outside of your own continent..
No, the 'internet' doesn't need to learn about Congress, since the internet is a world-wide thing. I won't learn about politics in the USA anytime soon (no disrespect here, it's just of no interest to me and that's how I like it), but the article addresses me too.
You are right, of course. That means that I care about a world-wide disruption caused by (local) laws in the US. I read about those and follow the development of these laws to a point.
The article addresses the internet first (me included) and then talks about educating the US congress and throwing money at US lobbyists, while fixing the US system so that it doesn't _need_ this kind of involvement anymore.
I'm sorry, but that leaves me out.
- I cannot take part in the education of statesman overseas/abroad and doubt that they'd listen to me
- I certainly won't (especially on an individual level, but even corporate that would be waaaay weird and wrong) throw money at lobbyists in another country
- I'm not allowed to take part in the political system in the US, so I cannot realistically help with any systematic change
I think while you are, as I already admitted, entirely correct about the fact that Congress might affect the whole world, the article is still wrong in calling out to 'The Internet' to fix it. The issues have to be resolved locally. My way of influencing it _might_ be voting for a party that wants to wrangle for informational freedom in the EU and more independence from the US, but that's about it.
As people of power in a position to make important decisions it is their PROFESSIONAL. ETHICAL. DUTY. to know all the facts that pertain to the situation. At no point is it our fault to not understand their system in its entirety but it IS their fault to be making conscious decisions that effect people and systems they do not entirely understand.
As an engineer it boggles my mind to see someone weighing in on an issue they haven't rightfully studied before attempting to tackle. If there is a project I'm asked to assist on and I'm not confident I can work with my current level of knowledge> I tell my employer and I either get reassigned or scheduled for training. There is no faking it in my industry, why should they be allowed to fuck everything up because they were willfully ignorant.
It goes past that though. They HAVE experts talking to them, or at least trying. The engineers, architects and experts that practically founded the internet have weighed in on how this is a bad idea and yet THEY'RE IGNORED! Don't pretend like this level of ignorance and pure negligence is acceptable for one minute because it just shows how complacent people have become with their representatives.
/rant
I agree with the author of the article: we need to figure out a better way of educating Congress. I don't know how, but their ignorance makes this obvious. Blaming Congress for being ignorant does not get us what we want.
I'm going to assume that we (where I define "we" as those people who have technical backgrounds and could explain the problem to someone in Congress given the chance) have done a poor job of educating Congress on how the internet works. With that as a given, and further assuming that we know organizations likes the RIAA are actively lobbying Congress, the current situation is inevitable. People in Congress are like passive journalists: they need to have a basic understanding of a wide range of topics, but sources come to them, instead of them going to sources. If only one side of an issue talks to them, then they're only going to understand that side.
While I agree, I can relate as to why this will never be the case. Think back to when you first started programming, or were otherwise involved in technology. It was near impossible to know what you didn't know. And every now and then, that ignorance gave you the belief of being more of an expert than you actually were. This area is an uphill battle of constantly being reminded how little you actually know.
I think it'd be dangerous to have them learn just enough without being actively engaged. It would give them the false belief of being an expert since they'd stop once they feel they have a firm grasp on the subject.
> They HAVE experts talking to them, or at least trying.
This may be the case. However, they can't tell the difference. To them, any "nerd" using technical jargon may or may not be an expert, and there's no way to know which. Dealing with so many unfamiliar subject areas, I'm sure they're experienced enough to know people lie. So ignoring the advice may just be a defensive measure, realizing they have no idea what's being advised or even how true it really is.
It's a bad situation. I don't know how to solve it, but I believe trust is the key quality. More important than expertise.
I will pay you £5 though. Get another 100,000 like me and you're making a cool £500,000 gross. Just be sure to properly document what you're doing and what you intend to do.
I'll also give you £5 worth of slush money to grease palms and what not.
And if you meet certain objectives and milestones, I may even give you a £5 bonus at the end of the year.
Hell, I'll even give you £1 to give to every member of congress you secure, and £2 for every president you get!! (serving presidents only).
All these numbers are in Pounds Sterling. Do the math.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobbying_in_the_United_States#F...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Act
- George Carlin
I have this from an .mp3 I got from some weird torrent, but I haven't been able to find it on YouTube or on iTunes. I'll try to get it up on the web if I can...
Seriously, look at it. The IP lobby is spending millions to buy out Congress and we've got the billionaires and corporations that are significantly larger, richer and more powerful than the IP lobby writing fucking letters?
All that the MPAA/RIAA can offer to congress is money, but we have something they want much more: votes. When the NRA or the AARP cough, congressmen sit up and listen. The reason? They have millions of members.
Now what about the organization representing our interests? Pro startup, pro contractors, pro net neutrality, anti censorship, anti patent? Why isn't there such an organization with a million members?
We hackers are smart, we're prosperous, there's no excuse for being so damn unorganized.
This is about power, holding on to it and increasing it. Nothing else. Absolutely nothing else matters these people, no matter how nice, intelligent and understanding they sometimes seem appear to be. Being a politician has become a career path with no goal that has anything to do with representing the will of the people. "Ill will or spite" doesn't come into it: it's just business.
And the people have nothing to offer them in that respect except votes and obedience. As long as they get both despite everything, no strategy will give us any more access because there is simply no need for them to give it to us.
The only way this will change is if it no longer pays to ignore the people.
But can we do that? Large corporations will have disproportionally much more economic power to bribe Congress. They can throw money at the problem repeatedly until they have exactly the law they want.
If Congress cannot work, then Congress should write the laws but not vote them. Citizens should vote the laws, like in California or Switzerland.
Thanks to ballot measures, the people of California voted to never raise their own property taxes, and then later voted to require massive spending initiatives in education and other places, which of course went unfunded, because they'd voted not to pay for anything.
Now California has regular budget crises that are essentially unsolvable, thanks to citizens voting on laws.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initiatives_and_referendums_in_...
Think about how hard it often is for developers to estimate the time and effort involved in a project. Programs that involve putting together networks of people, hard assets, and information systems are going to be just as hard to estimate properly if not harder.
In a way, every "innovation" in democracy becomes a cheaper, simpler pathway for the same interests to run the game in their favor.
A rule of thumb I've heard for the weighting of different constituent opinions is that 1 office visit = 100 letters, 1 letter = 100 phone calls, 1 phone call = 100 emails. (One email might be a million names on an online petition, I don't know.) Faxes count as letters, but both only count as above if they are (or look) personal, not a form letter. Opinions from people outside a Congressman's district don't count for much, unless they have a direct business or other interest in the district.
(-1 for citizens voting the laws. California is not a model of effective democracy. Fix the Republic!)
It's one of the things I detest about politics in Italy: ordinary people are so convinced that nothing can ever change that they make zero effort to do anything, and, surprisingly, things do not change.
If campaign contributions were entirely banned I doubt it would make much difference, because legislators are too busy to pull information on every topic that they feel they need to Do Something about, and its the people with lobbyists who succeed in pushing out the (fraction of the) information needed.
http://maplight.org/us-congress/bill/112-hr-3261/1019110/tot...
By obvious, I mean in the game theory sense i.e a system of selfish rational humans acting under the rules of "democracy".
The U.S. system has some factors which make it worse e.g. "first past the post" voting leads to a two-party system from which the electorate cannot break out.
It is sad. Really.
Take the community of Hacker News for example. Any constructive and rational chain of thought is positively reinforced by the community and any name-calling or irrational rant fades away into oblivion. Such environment keeps every participant in the honest.
The environment in politics is toxic. Not just in US but in almost all democracies. A representative, once elected, gets immersed in the political environment. He quickly adapts to the environment because its so much easier. When the time comes to be re-elected, they dont have to prove that they are competent but that they're not as bad as their competitor (or that their party is not as bad as the one they're competing against).
To effect any change, the environment needs to change. And it will not change as long as seasoned and career politicians, cynical and jaded by the political climate, keep getting re-elected. Obama is a good example of this phenomenon. I'm not a from US but I closely followed the 2008 US elections. And I bought the idea of hope. But once Obama was elected, he was submersed in the political climate and he adapted.
So, while educating congress is a step in the right direction, as the blog suggests; infusing new blood in politics is also crucial. Creating a healthy environment in the Capital (not just of US, but every country) can go a long way to affect the changes that are long way due in the political process.
Mission: We believe the federal government has grown too centralized, too intrusive, and too expensive. We believe in constitutional limits, smaller government, civil liberties, federalism, and low taxes. We want to end laws and programs that don't work, cause harm, and violate the Constitution. We want to restore the full force of the 9th and 10th amendments, which reserve most social functions to the people and the states.
Technology:
Our proprietary “Educate the Powerful System”SM (EPS) is not sending an email on your behalf. Usually, our system fills out the web forms located at the Congressperson's website. Our system gives your letter a more personalized feel — even increases the odds that it will be read.
(I copied the above from their website.)
So - you fill out a simple web form, personalize with your comments if you like, and DownsizeDC will deliver it to all your Senate and House representatives using their own Congressional web sites and web forms. All you have to provide is your address and DownsizeDC will figure out who your reps are.
It makes it much easier for public to communicate with their representatives, which allows for the communication to occur more frequently and in greater volume.
This is a cool hack and I use it several times a week every week to express my disapproval of the erosion of civil liberties in the USA attendant to the War on Terror.
The question is how to determine what is the "rational" view and what is the "crazy" view. If we can address that in some way, we may be closer to a solution.
In government, it seems like following the money is a good start. The deeper the pockets of the original source of the money, the more crazy the source seems to be. If an idea is coming in being funded by a lot of individuals, it is probably more rational (where rationality is defined as the true will of the people).
I agree with TFA that you have to work inside the system to change it (short of open revolt). It reminds me of a friend who wanted to get rid of highway billboards. His idea was simple: Raise money to buy a handful. Sell ads and use the profits to buy other billboards. Once they control all the billboards, take them all down.
Is not the way to defeat SOPA and anything remotely resembling it just to let it become law and then kick its ass in the real world. Congress would never take it up again once it has failed and a system put in place to ensure it can not be regulated in the future.
[1] http://www.mikewirthart.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/howla...
(MS's PAC was funded to the tune of $16,000 in 1995, 100x that 5 years later.)
Truth be told, SOPA is actually beneficial for the big players, it actually gives the big players a competitive advantage. No court or congress is going to harm the Facebook.com DNS -- that's political suicide. But the public is not going to care/notice if Facebook-Competitor.com gets shut down.
These laws will be used to crush sapling startups, which actually just eliminates the competition for Facebook/YouTube.
It's Congress's way of saying: you can have YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. This is all the social media anyone should ever need. Anyone who wants more social media options than the Big3 is obviously some kind of criminal.
SOPA essentially freezes the social media internet as it is and makes new social media companies impossible. It also makes borderline-popular social media companies like reddit unlikely to survive. Reddit is too free speech tolerating to survive this legislation. Facebook is borderline, but they're untouchable. YouTube is in violation. Twitter is shallow enough to be safe.
Sure, educating congress is a good idea. But there is a lot of room for improvement on the engineering too. The more decentralized our creations, the less opportunity for congress to get their grubby hands on them.
http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/dear-internet-its-no-longer-ok-to-not-know-how-congress-works-
http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/dear-internet-its-no-longer-ok-to-not-know-how-congress-works http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/dear-internet-its-no-longer-ok-to-not-know-how-congress-works-/What could possibly go wrong? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controve...
TLDR: They do not want to be educated, their goal is to obtain money.
This is exactly, EXACTLY why lobbyists must be banned.
It's not education, it's propaganda.
The country is run by people whose knowledge is solely based on propaganda?
So I just took a screenshot and forwarded it to the more religious of our representatives as proof that SOPA is indeed evil.
Oh, look! our Congress is sooooo dumb, they decided to do away with the Bill of Rights on the 222nd anniversary of its signing, and declare that disagrees with them is a terrorist and that "terrorists" can be held indefinitely without recourse.
From childhood we are told that we are smart and politicians are stupid. But maybe, just maybe, the average netizen is so prideful he believes that he cannot be manipulated by a powerful combine of men, pretending to act stupidly, but in truth acting maliciously.
It's no longer acceptable for us to not take responsibility for our Congress
anymore. If we want it to be better then throwing bums out, and replacing them
with new bums doesn't seem to be doing the trick. Let's work instead to
educate whomever is in Congress, and the professional class around them.But Congress takes your money to do a lot of things, and some of them are absolutely important, like taking care of the medical problems that older people have.