CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran
foreignpolicy.com
foreignpolicy.com
Much of this, is not news in many countries, although it lacks solid proof or confessions, it is impossible to keep all that hidden for long.
Brazillians for example figured only one or two years after the US backed coup here, that the coup was US backed. (declassified documents confirmed our suspicions about 5 years ago).
Also, there still many people here waiting to see if documents detailing how our ships got sunk during World War II, the official history is that it was the germans and this is why we joined the war, but WWII veterans swear it was US posing as germans, so they could close the steel mill deal.
When WWII started, Brazil president was very close to Italy leadership, and he was a fascist himself, Brazil was providing lots of resources to Italy and Germany.
Later, US wanted the massive amounts of rubber we had, and of course, wanted Brazil to stop helping the Axis. Then there was the sudden attacks, and a sudden president change of heart, where Brazil would start to supply US instead, specially Jeep tyres, would buy a steel mill, and would help in the African front lines... this got changed to Italy mid-trip, with Brazillian ships dumping into Italy snowy mountains people trained and geared for a desert war...
I know a bunch of people (specially, obviously, fascists, but many non-fascists too, but most of them are over 50) that still resent that story, and wish Brazil had joined (with boots on the ground) the Axis side instead.
Also Brazillian soldiers got shafted hard by the US, specially the "rubber soldiers". US and Brazil made a agreement, where drafted people could choose to fight in Europe, or get shipped to Amazon (with several promises regarding the advantage of going to Amazon, and indeed 50.000 soldiers went to Amazon), they would gather the rubber to make tyres, and US and Brazillian government would jointly pay them and take care of them, and return them back to their family after the war... The payment arrived (and partially) only in 1988, and they are still stranded away from home... (some of them still roam the forest wearing their military uniforms, kinda creepy seeing 90+ year old soldiers roaming the forest)
Brazil declared war (on Germany & Italy only - not Japan) in late August 1942. That was a few months before Churchill's famous "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." speech.
This was well after Pearl Harbour and at a point where it was becoming clearer that the Axis wasn't going to win.
I've never looked into allegations of US sabotage on Brazilian merchant shipping. It's possible, but at the same time it would be very surprising if German U-boats weren't responsible for the majority of the sinkings. There's reasonable evidence that U-507 sunk at least 7 Brazilian ships (the German's were pretty good at keeping records of these things)[1].
It sounds to me like Brazil jumped in on the winning side after being on a wrong side of some bad decisions by some German U-boat commanders.
As an aside, it's fine to criticise the US, but I think it's reasonable to expect some evidence to backup some pretty big allegations. Additionally it's hard to make a moral argument that any country should have joined the Axis Powers during WW2 (with the exception of Finland, who made the best of a bad situation but were pretty much screwed no matter what they did).
I do wonder why people from countries with corrupt governments that commit terrible atrocities that they have no control over hate me because I come from a country whose government commits terrible atrocities that I have no control over, yes.
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=cOEbAAAAIBAJ&pg=3398,80...
"Iraq May Get U.S. Aid To Prevent Iran Victory" -- May 21, 1984
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=xcQ_AAAAIBAJ&pg=2897,26...
Not much of a secret indeed.
Our policies in Egypt and (ironically) putting troops in Saudi Arabia to fight Saddam, on the other hand, did motivate Al Qaeda.
Non-sequitur. No matter how true it may be for Al Qaeda, for which people may feel they have seen evidence, you provide absolutely no backing for your assertion that a "substantial proportion of all muslims everywhere" agree with what you assert Al Qaeda feel.
The situation really is terrible for everyone there, but I'm not sure an US intervention would make things better, and I especially don't trust US propaganda anymore. I'm way over the "spreading democracy" phase.
We should want nothing to do with that situation and indeed it seems most Americans don't want anything to do with that situation (http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/25/us-syria-crisis-us...). Unfortunately the possibility remains that Americans already do have something to do with the situation, whether that is what the people desire or not.
The havoc that unfolds in the Middle East is the US intervention. Instability in the region fuels the War on Terror.
There's little concern for the locals who are mere pawns in the US game. Afghans and Iraqis already know that. Others, like Egyptians, are starting to realize this.
The US relationship with Iraq & Iran was very complex.
In 1979 the Iranian revolution occurred, which humiliated the US.
In 1982 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan (which borders Iran). That was significant because it let the USSR threaten US oil interests in the Persian Gulf, and put the USSR one step closer to getting a sea port in the Arabian Sea and/or Indian Ocean.
Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein was continuing to threaten the US's ally Israel but was also smart enough to play the US off against the USSR.
Hussein was very worried about Iran because of the large number of Shia Moslems in Iraq.
When Iraq invaded Iran the US expected Iraq to win quickly, because the Iranians had very few advanced weapons. The US certainly didn't want Iran to win, but nor did they want Iraq to become more powerful in the region.
So the US (with Israeli help) began arming Iran (on a small scale). This is known as the Iran/Contra affair.
Thing went Iraq's way for a while, but eventually the Iranians began to push them back using "human wave attacks".
At this point the US began to fear that Iraq would actually lose, so they started giving Hussein financial and military support.
This is when the Iraqis resorted to gas: (unsurprisingly) they found it was very effective at breaking up the Iranian infantry charges.
There's little doubt that the US knew this would happen.
The interesting thing is that the fact Hussein used gas put a new perspective on the Israeli bombing of the Iraqi nuclear program (in 1981, towards the start of the Iran/Iraq war). While that was condemned at the time, when the knowledge of gas attacks became wide spread few people doubted that Hussein would have used a nuclear bomb as well if he had access to one.
Anyway.. a long history lesson.
I guess my question is "What should the US have done"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Mossadeq
And if you want you can go back all the way to the 1920's.
What the US and the UK should have done is to let the Iranians govern their own country when it mattered.
So much for exporting democracy.
I agree the story goes back further, but I can't write all of Wikipedia. I think what I wrote is a reasonably factual account that supplies reasonable context.
Thanks for the summary! I do think that the Mossadeq affair should have been an integral part of the whole.
Ironically I have previously raised the Iran coup on HN, but someone appeared to disagree that it was sponsored by the CIA (this was prior to the release of documents proving it though): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5779374
Why would you want to continue to live in a country that seems to make things like this routine? (honest question, I don't understand)
Honest answer to the honest question: I want to live in this country[1] because I consider it my home. The government? That is the part I don't care for. I feel absolutely no loyalty to it. When another victor inevitably starts writing history books, those books will not be kind to the modern American government.
[1] Where "country" is both a chunk of geography, a loose-knit culture (perhaps best described as a culture of loose-knit cultures), and the place where most of the individual people I like also live.
Yet you are enforced to be loyal to it. Try not paying your taxes, for example, and they will deprive you of your freedom.
I would say this is better described as "obedience" than "loyalty".
Should I move to another country and pay a different government my tax money instead? Arguably. It is not clear to me which government I should instead be forced to pay, and my options are very limited as I am ill-equipped to live in most other countries. Five Eyes rules out the most obvious answers.
I'd say any government which does not have a standing army killing innocent people overseas is a better choice. At least your taxes would then not be used to produce bombs and guns. I agree with you that no country is perfect and you can find flaws in every of them, but still. There are some levels of differences.
Moreover, you can get out of paying US taxes. You just have to leave the country, renounce your citizenship, and pay an exit tax (after all, it would be rather absurd to allow someone to profit off the US legal system and business environment and then leave before paying the bill)
I think you are playing with words. The government expects you to pay your taxes. It is counting on your money. On your loyalty to feed them constantly, until you die (and even after, actually). Since people don't wait until guys with guns and uniforms come to their door to pay their taxes, I would say everyone is pretty loyal to the State and do not wait for threats to comply. If that's not loyalty, then I don't know how you call it. And many citizens do think taxes (no matter the amount) are a GOOD thing, and will defend the Right of the State to steal your money in a significant manner. Isn't that loyalty ?
Are there any countries that do not take punitive actions when citizens decide they do not feel like paying their taxes?
Probably not, or very few at least, since there is no pure libertarian country example in the world so far. Even though, you may decide where you pay your taxes - depending on how much you agree with the policies of the country where you pay them.
You can't keep feeding the Dragon and then complain the day it burns another village with its inhabitants. Don't feed the Dragon in the first place.
Or is your contention that we need to motivate the government to actively steal from the commons rather than persuade the commons to give it money?
Care to elaborate?
Countries without taxes. They tend to have other problems with loyalty though.
I'd prefer an American empire to a global caliphate, but that's not really the a likely decision. What is likely is a hegemonic US empire vs. some kind of decentralized system with autonomy and freedom at different levels (individuals retaining a lot, local governments and companies having some, provinces some, nation-states other, regions other, and global some). That would be a pretty clear choice, and I don't think you can say opposing a US empire is opposing the US overall.
At you can, at the same time, be completely critical of certain aspects of US domestic and foreign policy -- and even certain aspects of US culture.
I think the US is a better place because of people like Mary Harris Jones and Joe Hill or Dr. King and Rep. Lewis. If they (and countless others) had adopted your philosophy things would be much worse for people living in the US who lacked the financial mobility to emigrate to another country.[1] If you think the US is on the wrong path now imagine how much worse the situation would be if the only people left were individuals who supported all of the policies and programs you find so heinous.
Can you imagine how much worse life would be for some people in South Africa if Nelson Mandela said "screw it, I am out of here"?
[1] I did not want to belabor the point anymore but suffice it to say I think there is a serious "class/privilege problem" with this philosophy.
Second, if you had extrapolated out your premise, you'd quickly come to the conclusion that almost nobody could continue to live in their countries. See: Germany, Britain, Italy, Russia, France, Spain, Japan, China, and on it goes. There isn't a single major country on earth without a sordid history. Whether we're talking various European states that massively supported the slave trade or used military expeditions to conquer territory, or the Communist era in Russia or the Fascism era under Putin, or the tens of millions Mao murdered through famine and gulags, well, you get the point.
Third, America has 300 million people. What do you think they're all going to do exactly, immigrate to Canada? If they did that, Canada would become America. It's about the culture of the people: the American people elected this mess, and continue to allow it to happen / support it.
Overall your questions don't really make any sense. Your intent seems to be nothing more than to drive guilt and passive aggressively bash the US. What's the point of that on HN?
Humans have an amazing capacity to hold contradictory views.
> Why would you want to continue to live in a country that seems to make things like this routine? (honest question, I don't understand)
If you disown your government, you relinquish any hope of fixing it through democracy.
Because I know it best. If I'm going to contribute to fixing a system, it's going to be this one.
The brutality is expressed in different ways to different people. At home, the bureaucracy is brutal, the police are brutal, and the justice system is brutal - the law is applied unequally (when it is applied at all) to those with money and power. Abroad, we undermine legitimate governments, invade countries illegally, assassinate people with drones, we torture, detain people indefinitely, commit war crimes - all with impunity from our own people, even after the atrocity has been exposed and there are no doubts about the facts involved. We vote for new leaders - and the new leaders continue the same practices and grant immunity to their predecessors.
Relatively small incidents like Miranda's detention or that guy who wrote the incredible "Don't Fly on Ramadan" piece show how brutal, unprincipled, and indifferent to suffering our governments have become - and now it's totally out in the open. There are too many examples to cite: police mistakenly raid homes by mistake, shooting dogs and then leaving empty handed but telling the terrorized home-owners "you're lucky we didn't arrest you"; women being groped by deputies who are ignored by the family court judge when she tries to get protection; Cameron Ortiz and Aron Swartz; Manning, etc. Of course, terrible things happen. But in each of these cases no-one up the line thought there was a problem. Any corrective action has to be forced by overwhelming public sentiment - and even then the powerful know that time is on their side.
It's time we start asking ourselves whether or not we feel like there are sufficient safeguards in place to protect us against wide-spread abuse at the hands of our government. It's time we ask ourselves if there's really anyone who has any sense of urgency to address the ever growing problem of brutal, unprincipled, and indifferent application of power in the US. Is democracy enough? Is democracy of the type that we have, dominated by a manipulative, effective, money-driven two-party machine, giving us the candidates that we want?
Why aren't people at every level of government getting fighting mad when these stories come out, and who take immediate, decisive corrective action to make sure that a) the people responsible are not only terminated immediately, but criminally charged, and b) make sure it doesn't happen again? Why aren't people at every level of government so afraid to admit mistakes, apologize for wrong-doing, and ashamed at the lack of restraint, the lack of compassion, and the lack of principled action shown by their people? Where do we find these candidates?
However...
I don't think you should try and combine this incident into the narrative surrounding the erosion of rights in the US.
There is very little in common here, except perhaps something like "powerful countries do some shitty things".
If you do want to combine them, then I think you need to explain how things are worse now than when the US did things like the deliberate infection of native Americans with smallpox etc.
I think the truth is that things are different now. It is much more difficult for the US to let a dictator get away with things like using chemical weapons because of the rapid dissemination of information from people on the ground. At the same time the volume of bad news make it difficult to create action on the US on any single issue.
That's how things are worse. We've done despicable things in the past, but we had shame enough to deny it, shame enough to try to edit history to hide it. Nowadays a video is released showing Apache pilots laughing while they kill unarmed civilians, and the USG from top to bottom has the temerity not only to ignore the war crime, but to attack the guy who released the video for being a traitor. And people don't riot. That's new. That's worse.
Nowadays men of conscience reveal secret plots that undermine our most basic freedoms. And rather than showing shame, contrition, rather than being apologetic, Obama "welcomes the debate" about privacy, and prosecutes the whistleblower with a ferocity unmatched in living memory. Christ, Obama had a foreign presidents plane grounded on the suspicion he might get his man.
It's worse because the brutality, the cold indifference to principle, the naked self-serving agenda, is entirely unmasked now. It's worse because people can't do anything. The myth that "public sentiment" matters at all in a democracy has finally been busted.
Coming from a part of the world that has seen at least one revolution and several coups d'etat in the last century, this is one of the things that has made me particularly troubled about how much Americans value their democracy and about how much they value their comfort. Back there, when the Iron Curtain fell, they needed about ten years of deportations and forced imprisonments to get things under reasonable control, and it only lasted for thirty years afterwards. That's in a country where people could literally be thrown in jail because they knew someone, couldn't possess fire weapons and couldn't assembly in public places, making any riot almost impossible to start, let alone work. Countries with one tenth of the US population mobilize more people in a teachers' strike than the Occupy movement -- with arguably more widespread concerns -- mobilized.
When the government's abuse takes the form of unfair judges and militarized police force, you can't break down the abuse by whining in the press and debating on the TV. That's the circus they hand out when the grain isn't cutting it anymore. I'm yet to see even the most modest form of civil disobedience in a sizeable quantity. A bunch of people gathering up and not paying taxes or something. FFS -- a students' strike. When I was a kid, there was a point when students grew so unhappy that they simply called a strike and refused to go to class -- nationwide. A lot of professors tried to bully them into it, many of them ended up having to take a lot of exams again, but conditions did actually improve to some degree -- and they also didn't do anything that was remotely in danger of being labeled as some form of disobedience worthy of imprisonment. Basically, everyone decided to skip the classes with the same reason.
There's also the sense of community -- or, rather, the sense of division against the government. Everyone there seems to be friends with each other, but the sense of injustice is enjoyed by everyone in private, and only shared over a couple of beers.
About twenty years ago, a team from the local equivalent of the DEA missed the apartment and smashed open the door of one of our neighbors. His wife was pregnant and both of them were terrified, but when one of the policemen tried to drag her on the floor (protocol asks for it -- but they also didn't show any ID when they smashed the door open) the dude snapped and punched one of them. Needless to say, a lot of rabble ensued and the whole block woke up. Our apartment was next door to theirs, so the first one to jump out was my father (to make matters worse, he was a Colonel).
When everyone there realized what had happened, the policemen barely got out alive. One of them got out with a dislocated jaw, another one with a broken nose, and it was literally only the timely intervention of their colleagues that prevented them from being lynched.
Three of them were eventually discharged and one of them was moved to another city. I have no doubt that, under normal circumstances, nothing would have happened; the abnormal circumstance here was that my dad was the one who threw in the first punch. Pressing charges against someone from an institution who also had enough influence over judges was simply unproductive: it wasn't as much a problem of not fucking triple-checking what door you're smashing down as a problem of messing with someone who had the biggest bureaucratic cock.
This was as dystopian as it could be. There was no impartial justice to speak of and the government had no formal policy to protect its citizens from abuse, and the reach of the government's power/control was modest to say the least. However, some safety was provided by the sense of community: when everyone could jerk the system to their own interest, some of them occasionally chose to jerk it towards the interest of their families or friends.
I think it's Gilliam's best film by far. Enjoy!
The question, as you pointed out, is where are the angry ones? It could be that the numbers are still too small, or, the more likely reason in my opinion, people are just not used to being angry. They're used to calmly solving problems. Being angry is not something a civilized person does. It's only those who end up in jail. Being angry shows lack of control, it's emotional. If you're angry you're low class, you belong on Maury or Jerry Springer. Or it's something that can only be excused if under the influence of alcohol.
The other factor is fear. People are afraid of losing what they have. The system is built in such way that the smallest step out of line could cause significant hardship. Why would one go out and protest when doing so may get them arrested, which would prevent them for ever getting a high paying job?
When those in power realize that the lion is so well caged... why would they pretend the lion is powerful? In the long run their hubris is what will be their downfall, but we're nowhere near that. In the meantime we're lingering between denial and depression with very little acceptance. It takes time for people to process all this, and it takes even more when you don't have good sources of information.
We desperately need people in the mass media to stop beating around the bush and show us reality as it is. We need them to call corruption for what it is, to unravel the game so that people could process it. Until that happens most people will continue to be stuck in denial.
"Independently of Glen, Ronald Ridenhour, a former member of the 11th Infantry Brigade, sent a letter in March 1969 to thirty members of Congress imploring them to investigate the circumstances surrounding the "Pinkville" incident.[36][37] Ridenhour had learned about the events at Mỹ Lai secondhand from talking to members of Charlie Company over a period of months beginning in April 1968. He became convinced that something "rather dark and bloody did indeed occur" at Mỹ Lai, and was so disturbed by the tales he heard that within three months of being discharged from the Army he penned his concerns to Congress.[36] Most recipients of Ridenhour's letter ignored it, with the exception of Congressman Mo Udall[38] and Senators Barry Goldwater and Edward Brooke.[39] Udall urged the House Armed Services Committee to call on Pentagon officials to conduct an investigation"[1] (emphasis mine)
This was two months before the public heard about it, and corrective actions were already beginning.
"In November 1969, General William R. Peers was appointed to conduct a thorough investigation into the My Lai incident and its subsequent cover-up. Peers' final report, published in March 1970, was highly critical of top officers for participating in the cover-up and the Charlie Company officers for their actions at Mỹ Lai 4."
The general sense is that whether or not Mai Lai was sanctioned, once congress (e.g. the people) got wind of it they began to look into it. An Army general looked into it (and the cover up) and sought to find those responsible and punish them. It wasn't enough, and Mai Lai added more fuel to anti-war demonstrations, but it was far more than we get today.
Our congressmen sit there watching public videos of war crimes, and do nothing except prosecute (and put pressure on other governments to prosecute) the people responsible for leaking and distributing the evidence.
That's a big difference.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre#Reporting.2C_co...
Thinking that things are worse now, helps you to want to change it.
Thinking it's same old-same old, is just a defeatist, "nothing ever changes" attitude.
>I think the truth is that things are different now. It is much more difficult for the US to let a dictator get away with things like using chemical weapons because of the rapid dissemination of information from people on the ground.
Actually in this case it's the opposite. The "rapid dissemination" can be manipulated, and events can be fabricated or done covertly by agents working for the other side. Not to mention, any agent or partisan with a phone can write his "information" as "a man on the ground".
Case in point, the current situation -- where it makes no sense at all for the (winning at the time) Assad to use that stuff, but it's a very good ploy to get sympathy and support for the other side. People spoon fed by mass and social media, will learn about it 20-30 years afterwards and be "surprised", but it kinda obvious to European observers.
I am not so sure that we wont read in 20 years that the gassing of civilians in Syria was done by the opposition forces with logistical and tactical support of the US to legitimate another US war.
But as for the slowly becoming brutal and unethical? Nah. They've done that for a while. A recent example of this is the Cold War: they fed radioactive oatmeal to mentally-retarded to children to "test its effects" (http://tech.mit.edu/V114/N28/fernald.28n.html), supported brutal tinpot South American dictators to "fight communism" (http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20000919/) and abused this giant list of people who we thought were Communist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Un-American_Activities_Co...).
Notice how the actions and methodology are the same (replace "communist" with "terrorist"). Notice how the reasoning is the exact same. Notice how it all starts with "wanting to protect you" from a threat most feel is real, and does exist to some extent.
The people in the government are humans like anyone else. Some people really can't grasp the idea that those people might actually be abusing you or lying to you. If and when they figure it out, they have a small revolution, become heroes, write a book, and then forget about the past and the victims and keep on rolling.
Maybe if we'd all stop have "reasonable" discussions about how people who say, "HEY GUYS, THIS PATRIOT ACT THING IS A REALLY BAD IDEA" are crackpots or paranoid when it's happening, we'd have more of a chance of stopping this...but probably not.
Systems run by people are created and exist to protect us from the nature of people.
I find some irony in the complaining about all the spying the USG is involved in. I much prefer that they do that than go to war. The various intelligence agencies in the US got a lot of (political) grief for not stopping the 9/11 bombers, and whether it is actually helpful or not, it is understandable that there would be an institutional response to step up "intelligence" activities.
In terms of whether the USG has become more brutal and unprincipled to the suffering of our own civilians, I see no evidence of this. A simple look at the treatment of blacks and Native Americans throughout the history of the US shows this sentiment to be a false idealization of the past.
That said, I am certainly appalled by many of the current scandals. I'm just not quite as appalled as I am by the outrageous actions of the USG throughout its history.
The reason I think this matters is that the US is a complex and powerful nation. To effect positive change requires at least a roughly accurate view of the various trends, and the forces driving them.
I think you don't see the outrage because most people don't get outraged until they start to see significant, ongoing, systemic negative effects on themselves or those close to them.
For example, the injustice of the Jim Crow laws was so massive, and had a direct negative effect on African Americans, that there was a substantial number of highly motived citizens from which to build a movement.
Another example was the Vietnam War protests in the US, which were given huge fuel by the fact that a civilian draft was pulling so many US citizens directly into the war against their own wishes.
The negative consequences of the NSA spying on US citizens are nowhere near these examples.
I also happen to think that the NSA has been spying on whoever it can for a long time. The scale has just gotten much bigger because of the internet. The modest outrage we are seeing is a positive sign.
This is, of course, the same Chris Christie who has recently abandoned his own purported principles in order to court his party's base in preparation for a run at the presidency in 2016. He's also wasting millions of taxpayers' dollars in order to hold a special election a few weeks before the general this November in order to ensure that his reelection bid is as successful as possible.
On the one hand, we need democratic processes to peacefully resolve unresolvable conflicts: to find workable middle grounds on issues of disagreement. But on the other, we also need collective solidarity in preserving the system as a whole: law and order, transparency, corruption, etc. We got so good at competitive democracy as a culture (due in no small part to First Past The Post), that we've forgotten how to engage in the cooperative democracy that allowed a Constitution to be drafted in the first place, despite all the vehement disagreements at the time.
Sometimes I can't help but wonder if an adversarial political system is doomed to failure, and if we wouldn't be better off if anyone would wanted to participate in the political process was able, at least in some capacity.
Seems more real today than ever.
Why not you? Sure, you don't have the money. Go and get it. Tell HNers to put their money where their mouth is, get yourself elected, and do right.
It's not just about elections. Hackers have a much bigger role to play in modern civics, in my opinion, than they currently have. We need to be writing open-source software platforms for city, state and even federal governments and putting them on github. It's time for software to eat the bureaucracy. We need to have software that's ready to use, free, and with all the features we, as technologically enlightened citizens, know that it needs. Good technology would lessen the leverage bureaucrats wield over elected officials, because it would make them easier to hold accountable and to replace.
(We could write open-source banking platforms too, while we're at it. The software could have a "transparency slider" that banks could set according to their whim. But more importantly, it would reduce the barrier to entry for new, small banks to arise and compete with the incumbents.)
There is one policy change I think is very important: put limits on the complexity of law, and end what I call "The Tyranny of Complexity" (a take on Mill's "Tyranny of the Majority"). Complexity lies at the heart of many of our political and societal ills, perhaps most directly expressed as the brutality of our justice system, a system that punishes you for years whether or not you are found guilty. But complexity is also the enemy of transparency, which hurts accountability and prevents the voting public from being informed. One simple measure, at the federal level, would be to put a hard upper-bound on the size of the United States Code - and require all new bills to be written out in longhand by the congressperson proposing the bill. The law of the land is too important to delegate the writing of them to underlings. Our laws should be short, to the point, and meaningful - and writing them out, pen on paper, helps to ensure that. Word-processing and hired help have made our body of law so unwieldy and impossible to comply with that hardly any law makers read the bills that they vote on. A similar rule can and should be instituted on the state and local level.
I'd be interested, public or private. I'm working on such an idea myself, though as a person, I'm ill-suited for actually getting it to work.
> Hackers have a much bigger role to play in modern civics, in my opinion, than they currently have.
Than they've currently taken. They do. This is one of the reasons "everyone should learn programming" is actually a good policy; even if they're not experts, they can take data and draw conclusions.
Another thing we need is stronger collaboration infrastructure. The NSA got themselves that shiny new Utah datacenter which can apparently hold all the data in the world. (That's probably an exaggeration.) Why wasn't that money spent on improving citizens' ability to communicate with each other? Our discussion tools are extremely weak. I wish I could give better specs, but if I could, I'd be building it.
> We need to be writing open-source software platforms for city, state and even federal governments and putting them on github.
Being a politician doesn't actually preclude you from doing this.
> There is one policy change I think is very important: put limits on the complexity of law, and end what I call "The Tyranny of Complexity" (a take on Mill's "Tyranny of the Majority").
I think it'd be interesting if someone could figure out an algorithmic way to rate the complexity of laws. I recently came up with the notion of a body that would at least garbage-collect law by checking for rulings of unconstitutionality and just writing a repeal for submission, but I assume the idea has problems I haven't figured out yet.
Without such a standard, it'd be difficult to objectively determine over-complexity.
Those at the bottom are making enough to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.
Those at the top are making tons and tons of it off power: oil deals, stocks, lobbying/corruption, etc.
Those at the bottom don't make a fuss because they don't want to become homeless.
Those at the top don't make a fuss because they don't want to die: if the powers that be are powerful enough to invade foreign countries, grab the president, hang him on live TV and then lie to the rest of the world about how he was keeping the country back while at the same time the country regresses back into the stone age (Libya, Egypt, Iran, Iraq) - what chance have you to keep your own head if you were to start blabbing about how things are unfair?
It's all about money.
The only reliable tools for effecting change in society are: education/information, policy/law and enforcement.