In a normal scandal story, the appropriate committee would grant immunity to Snowden, have him testify, then bring up Clapper, have him testify, and compare notes. Preferably publicly.
Here they bring in one side of the story for a secret Powerpoint presentation, no doubt with a high degree of spin to it, and publicly call Snowden a traitor. Then they complain that nobody shows up.
This isn't a bake sale or a dog and pony show, it's supposed to be the workings of the U.S. Senate. This sounds much more like an effort to CYA from the committee chair and NSA than it does an actual investigation or anything useful. Not going to make much progress continuing to operate in this fashion.
It IS interesting, however, that both sides here feel that, if only the other side knew more about what was actually going on, they would agree with them. But then the government insists on keeping it all secret. Meh.
I honestly think it's time to take action more than just normal protests.. Which are useless.. We need to find a way to get more than just the minority to revolt. Think about how many straight up stupid things are happening.. We make jokes about politicians and theyre decisions (see daily show) but i dont think its funny anymore. We need to change. I'm thinking about making some sort of political website, I can't decide what the best way to do it is... But just a way to show how corrupt these assholes are, a very clear interface, showing their decisions, and how common sense doesn't dictate them. It's ridiculous and I'm upset by it. Anyone have any ideas to make this thing as good as possible? Ill start it tomorrow, any designers feel free to contact me :)
The retarted amount of money our government spends on "defense" and other things... Think about how much better we can do with the worlds best engineers and 1/10th of the defense budget. Ugh
What I've been wishing for recently is a site that has a superficially simple interface: a grid whose rows are members, and columns/subcolumns show votes cast or not cast. The votes wouldn't be just bills, but every action that they voted on, including their working arrangements.
For legislation, the columns would have gross bills, whose embedded decisions and regulations could be broken out at will. For example, the Clothing Improvement Bill could be shown on its own (great, my guy voted to improve clothing), and its internals could be broken out to show that, for example, one effect is that citizens and residents of Canadian descent are only allowed to wear red socks (oh, feh, my guy hates Canadians).
You could also ask for just the breakouts from all bills that are concerned with socks, for example.
Which would be hard, because big bills have lots of individual effects. But it would show exactly what your guy supported, on purpose, unknowingly or as a compromise. Heck, they might even like to see that, they could learn what they voted on after the fact. I'll bet a lot of them still don't know in total what they voted for in the Affordable Care Act.
Each vote would also indicate things like if the member had more responsibility than just being a member, like on the relevant committee. A no-show here should be embarrassing. Or if the vote specifically impacts his region.
Bonus points to do this analysis all the way back to the beginning of the Republic.
And by the way, voice votes for a candidate would show a match with how the vote went, regardless of official position. If you hide behind a voice vote, then you're recorded and responsible and accountable for the winning result.
I'm working with some of the folks at stopwatching.us, and we've got some cool things going on. We're currently working with some of Aaron Schwartz code that he wrote when getting involved in politics to deliver citizens' emails to congress en masse. There's a bunch of really interesting projects going on that are starting to come together these days. It's an exciting time to be a politically-active developer!
If you're interested in volunteering some dev time on some creative ways of getting involved, let me know! My email is [email protected] :)
Create a list of representatives and mine all their data that is available on the internet and put it on your website. I think that would allow us to easily form a picture of who that person is and what he stands for, whether he's being influenced by certain corporations etc...
Saw this there: http://www.govtrack.us/about, but it just seems like gov data. Maybe instead of just mining, one could crowdsource photos/videos from people as they see them in places and get the timestamps and geotags.
In my opinion the best way to raise awareness with the general public, not those who would seek out a website on their own, is to go where they are.
I would use the same technique Apple used to change minds when the iPhone was new. Come up with bite-sized ads, and play them like regular ads, many times, but instead of advertising for a product, they should educate.
The media is doing a terrible job at this. The same way Google tries to force ISPs to change with Google Fiber, we should try forcing the media to step up by putting them in a bad light, by focusing on the important problems they're ignoring.
Imagine 30 second ads that focus on non-partisan information, stats not emotions, factual information like current laws and how they're not followed, a focus on a more global picture, on something more long term, something that would make you think and be more aware.
There's a lot of misinformation out there. We know this from the numerous polls that show large number of people believing things that are factually and provably not true.
We need to correct that first.
EFF, ACLU, and other organizations like these are trying, but they're not reaching most people. We need to reach and educate the people who have been turned off by the current state of affairs.
We need Twitter-size ads that people would find interesting and that would wet their appetite to seek out more and get involved.
One thing I always wanted to do, is mine all the data I could, and produce a corruption index for each politician, it would kind of be a Facebook for bills, Bills would be friends with lobbyists through politicians, and you could try and rank each bill by who bought it.
> I honestly think it's time to take action more than just normal protests
I think you're right. The amount of abuse in the government and corporate sector has gone out of control.
We already forgot the atrocities of the 2008 financial crisis, which wrecked numerous families and households, and caused real deaths. As far as I know, none of the senior management was held accountable. Same people who invaded the market with toxic assets are still invited for dinners at the White House.
The NSA scandal will be similarly toned down and forgotten, unless we change our attitude.
Watch Glenn Greenwalds twitter (@ggreenwald) over the next few days/weeks. He alleges to have several more bombshell stories to release, and it looks like he's waiting for the government to lie themselves into a corner before dropping them in the limelight.
>looks like he's waiting for the government to lie themselves into a corner before dropping them in the limelight.
He's that good? Knows the `infinitude' of time? Chess gambit(@)?
I like him.
(@)The word "gambit" was originally applied to chess openings in 1561 by Spanish priest Rúy López de Segura, from an Italian expression dare il gambetto (to put a leg forward in order to trip someone).
In a normal scandal story, the appropriate committee would grant immunity to Snowden, have him testify, then bring up Clapper, have him testify, and compare notes. Preferably publicly.
Have you seen Manning lately ? White as flour. Shows how much exercise and sun he has been getting while in jail. Snowden would be insane to come without an unconditional pardon/ and full immunity, not just immunity for what he says in Congress. He knows what awaits him in US jails
It is but tell that to NSA and to all those angry Senators and Congress people--and especially to those lobbyists from the military industrial complex. He will be kept "in isolation because he can leak secrets even from jail"
They are, but the lines of authority only meet at the very top. The NSA only has influence on the Justice Dept to the extent it can influence the president.
So what's the solution? Get celebrities to run for office. (Seriously.)
Over 60% showed up to the gubernatorial elections won by Schwarzenegger [a] and Ventura [b]; you know, the former body builder and the former wrestler, who co-starred in Predator... Wasn't George Clooney born in Kentucky? He might be a "rich old white man" at this point, but do you think Mitch McConnell (or any incumbent, for that matter) would stand a chance against him?
If Brad Pitt, James Franco, Shaquille O'Neal, or Ashton Kutcher ran for office... they'd win. And they'd be better representatives, because they're not career politicians, and they don't know how the system works. Then watch as normal people are suddenly tuning into CSPAN to catch a speech by Sen. Pitt or Rep. Shaq. I'm surprised the major parties didn't court celebrities after 1984, when a former actor captured the highest number of electoral votes in history...
"It's Charisma, Stupid" is focused on presidential elections, but pg remarks near the end that he's "not saying that issues don't matter to voters. Of course they do." Yes, issues do matter to voters. But voters are generally a minority, at least in non-presidential elections. The majority cares more about movies and sports because celebrities are interesting. Existing politicians are boring.
I read the other day that Allen Iverson is basically broke, recently divorced, had a house foreclosed, and doesn't know what to do with his life after basketball...
Another advantage is that celebrities, by definition, aren't in politics to acquire fame and fortune. This has the potential advantage that they might be less able to be bought off.
His tenure, as many know, immediately followed Schwarzenegger's, who was less successful.
In fairness, though: Brown seems to be exceptionally good this time around, and I'd bet that most people believe Arnold's problems didn't stem from too much partisanship or a lack of good faith effort.
Or they could be single issue candidates, a particular form of corruption IMNSHO, like Clint Eastwood as the Mayor of Carmel. His restaurant then finally got its liquor license or expansion permit or whatever his issue was, I forget the details.
If that's true, then why do many already rich celebrities continue to participate in grossly commercialized lowest common denominator work? Being rich doesn't mean you don't want to be richer.
A rapper does a few hours work, it buys him a new car. Very rational cost-benefit, even if short-sighted. It'd seem exceptionally inefficient for that rapper to launch a political career for the purpose of increasing his fortune, particularly with the increased scrutiny and fewer post-term consulting gigs he'd have compared to your average politician.
I can see celebrities doing it for the fame though-- specifically to show that they're "more than" an actor, singer, athlete, or whatever.
Politics hasn't been "for the people" since party politics took over. The elephant in the room has always been how can someone represent their constituents when their constituents views might be at odds with the party line, and the chief whip is on their case to make sure they vote as the party expects. These are career politicians; there are no promotions or prizes for voting for your people over your party.
"All obstructions to the execution of the Laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels, and modified by mutual interests."
That was populist pandering based on some sensationalist fictions. Getting personal political gain by capitalizing on outrage ginned up through the activities of several yellow journalists. Some of the worst (not the only!) behavior in the name of progressivism in our (American) history.
For the record, I used to really like this guy, until I read more about the era from some real (not high-school) history books and analysis pieces.
Not to be too glib, here's another impressively depressing stat: 56% of Americans don't have a problem with the recent NSA tracking revelation and a significant plurality would be happy to see it expanded[1]. What do we do when our representative government truly is representative?
This seems like a form of "Tyranny of the Majority" [1]. Apparently there are several ways of dealing with such things including (ahem) a Bill of Rights.
The senate is suppose to represent the states, essentially the wealthy elite (at least that was the original intent).
The house is suppose to represent the people. Also, each senator receives a written transcript of every meeting, so why not leave and just read it on the plane?
Not to mention, if the people do not know what is in this briefing it should really be the senators duty to leave by the logic you used. They should only vote on what the people want and have no reason to waste their time attending something that is not for the people. In other words, why attend something that does change their constituents minds?
> Politicians spend much of their time in office fundraising for re-election.
Politicians should be disallowed from consecutive terms. They can run only when they're not already in office, preventing them from spending all their time on reelection, and (hopefully) leading them to fight for what the people want.
I'd love to. If you could find a way to limit civil service to 6 years, I think you'd find things work a lot better. Obviously you'd need exceptions for things like the CIA and the military, but those could be managed.
We can't do better within our current system; it's optimized. Congress must agree to fixing it (with instant run-off voting, to allow competition) but they certainly won't work against themselves to do it. So we're stuck. The president or a member of Congress can largely disserve you with impunity.
Ooh, that's an interesting one. Thanks! I've used a system before (no idea what it's called) that gives each voter a number of points (say 10) that they can distribute among the candidates. They can give all 10 points to one person, or spread them out. Of course, your average voter would find this way too confusing.
From the Wikipedia article:
> FairVote [argues Approval Voting] can result in the defeat of a candidate who would win an absolute majority in a plurality system, can allow a candidate to win who might not win any support in a plurality elections
This sounds like a good thing. You end up with an elected official that satisfies most of the population.
51% of voters think Alice would be the best person to lead, they'd be OK with Bob but think Carol and Dan are morons. 49% think Carol would be the best person to lead, they'd be OK with Bob but think both Alice and Dan are morons.
So now if we use normal majority voting, Alice wins and 49% of voters have an elected official they think is a moron.
With Approval Voting, Bob will win. Sure, he might have been everyone's second choice, but he's EVERYONE's second choice. So now we're all reasonably happy.
There is a skeptoid episode[0] from 2011 that overviews the different types and some of the science behind it. And, it even mentions the difference between a voting system and a ranking system.
How do you solve anything when the people who are most aware of the problem also know that the problem inherently prevents the solution to the problem?
It reminds me of an immune disease -- if your very means of getting well is broken, how do you get well?
Friday afternoon briefings and statements like the following (paraphrased): "All congressmen have been briefed and are fully aware of the NSA's totally legit and above board program. There is simply nothing to see here, and making a big fuss about it compromises everyone's safety."
Reminds me of this:
"But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months."
"Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything."
"But the plans were on display ..."
"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
"That's the display department."
"With a flashlight."
"Ah, well the lights had probably gone."
"So had the stairs."
"But look, you found the notice didn't you?"
"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."
It seems that rather than attracting the best of the best to lead this country we managed to arrive at a process that reliably picks the most self serving crooks this country has to offer and allow them to run this country.
With a few exceptions nobody in congress seems to actually care even a bit about the people, but only how to drive the personal agenda forward.
It's the same in Europe. Apparently representatives are actually paid by attendance, so what they do is, they come to the session, sign in their names, and then leave.
Has no one ever noticed how poorly the leadership of our democracies are treated?
It's understood in the commercial sector that you have to pay (both on benefits, quality of work/life balance, pay, etc.) to attract and retain the best and brightest talent.
How can we all take that very important lesson and completely throw it away when considering the leadership of an entire nation?
I'm not sure I'd take Pres. Obama or Rep. Boehner's jobs for a million bucks, so how are we supposed to get the "best of the best" leading the country, when they're off leading the Fortune 500?
EDIT: People, there are reasons I mentioned things other than actual cash compensation when I referred to pay and benefits. You can almost literally watch the President of the United States age in front of your very eyes nowadays.... so I'm not saying the job of public service doesn't pay enough, I'm saying the job is so stressful that it's not possible to pay enough, as money quickly loses its motivational appeal once you make enough to live comfortably.
What you wrote is so misguided that I got up from bed and turned on the computer just to reply it (I was reading HN on mobile).
Brazil (where I am from) has one of the biggest politician salaries of the world, also politicians here get many secondary ways to get money, for example our last president, Lula, when he became president he owned a single apartment and two more or less nice cars (Chevrolet Omega).
When he left the presidency he owned 53 apartments. And noone could prove that was from stolen money...
Our congress also can vote on its own salary, and they frequently do, a recent scandal was when they refused to increase the police salary and then increased their own by 70%, later smaller chambers from around the country went into more outrageous mode (one city for example, gave their lawmakers a 100% salary increase, while reducing the salary of teachers and medics to compensate the budget).
No, giving politicians money, won't make them less self-serving, if anything it gives a very clear incentive to self-serving people end there.
I am very sure if there was ways to ensure political power could not translate so directly to money, people would abuse it less.
"Has no one ever noticed how poorly the leadership of our democracies are treated?"
No, I haven't noticed this (because it's not true). What I do notice are many stories about politicians abusing their positions, almost systematically [1,2]. I see no reason why a higher rate of pay would curb such behaviour (it's not like they're broke in the first place). I don't see why leaders of the commercial sector should be considered the "best of the best" either (think back to banking and other corporate scandals of the last decade).
In addition, the gap between CEO pay and 'normal' people has been the subject of debate before. When you realise that some of these folks sit on each-other's compensation committees it's easy to see how such arrangements can be abused -- and conveniently justified in hindsight as 'necessary' to "attract and retain the best of best".
I think you're almost onto something here, but I think the problem is not compensation or benefits. It's that the President has too much power.
And if I may quote Spider Man, with great power comes great responsibility. The constitution wasn't written under the assumption that the federal government would ever be as large as it is. It isn't set up for it. So the President is in charge of too much and is consequently spread too thin for any one person to handle.
Here's the problem: The number of officers of the federal executive branch who are elected: One. Just One.
Compare that to anything else. In any given state you'll elect the governor, but you'll also elect the mayor of each city and possibly the sheriff, etc. I want to vote for the head of the FBI. I want to vote for the head of the IRS. Stop putting it all at the feet of the President.
I never thought of this, but this is a brilliant observation. From the presidency, we get issuances forth like Carmen Ortiz, heads of FEMA like Mike Brown, etc. The possibility of cronyism writ large, with decades of consequence. This has to change.
Is there any chance that the people would ever vote for the multitude of these positions? There's probably (I'm not a US citizen) hundreds of federal bureaus. The people can't even bother to vote in the current federal elections.
Also, would the people even know better? Who even knows what the director of the FBI really does, what is the concrete executive power that he or she wields?
>>> Has no one ever noticed how poorly the leadership of our democracies are treated?
While in office, US Presidents live like royalty. None of the Fortune 500 CEO cohort live like the President, especially if you throw in perks like the reverence with which presidents are treated anywhere in the world they may go.
After office they can look forward to a remainder of their lives earning tens of millions on the speaking circuit.
To that I would say the members of congress are exempt from insider trading laws (why?), and it turns out that many members of congress make the majority of the wealth from stock trades after they join congress. (now, that might be hear-say. I read this somewhere, and I have no good way to verify this).
In response to your edit: I don't think many (if any) politicians are in it for the money. It's either the genuine belief that they can improve things or just a straight-up hunger for influence and power.
In light of your edit, I have no idea what point you're trying to get across. Being President is so stressful ... so what? Anyone who could become President is likely well past the "living comfortably" stage so there's obviously something else that drives them. Same goes for any of the Fortune 500 CEOs you refer to (none of them need the money).
We should elect the house (or senate, one or the other) by randomly drawing a large number of people from the population. See how easy it is to corrupt 1000-2000 randomly selected folks who, for the most part, have an ingrained set of morals. It'd be like a jury for the government and they'd easily be able to roadblock the vast majority of bullshit that goes on.
We could even let them decide who the president is.
Alternatively, we could have it set up so our representatives give up most of their rights to privacy. Their whereabouts, communications/conversations (of all kinds) should be monitored and made public after a short period of time. It could be considered a price they have to pay to be in public office, and we could pay them a lot more so that good people would be willing to do this.
The problem with this is that you end up trading corruption for incompetence and uncertainty.
Suppose we pick elected officials at random. OK, in the first round we get a bunch of reasonable people and they do a bunch of reasonable stuff. In the second round, maybe the same thing, except that they have different ideas from their predecessors so they end up repealing all the programs and replacing them with still reasonable but quite different ones. Businesses can't plan anything because they don't know what the regulatory environment will look like the year after the election. The churn strains our already-difficult ties with countries like China, Russia and Saudi Arabia when the things the Nth Congress promised get repudiated by the N+1th Congress which is comprised of entirely different people.
Then, sooner or later, random chance produces a majority coalition consisting of people who are willing to horse trade for corrupt programs that specifically benefit their own friends and family, or "libertarians" and peace activists who very suddenly disband the entire U.S. military, or nationalist religious fundamentalists who decide to declare war on "Muslims" or drop a nuclear bomb on somebody with the ability to strike back.
The thing about politics is that you actually do want professionals running the country. You want people with formal training who know what they're doing. You just have to make sure they're representing us and not somebody else.
There is real historical experience with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition -- and AFAIK Athens wasn't worse-governed than the U.S. over its period of democracy. (It's true the scale is different.) Thinking we could just swap it in for elections seems silly, yes, but it could serve as part of a package of real reform.
Athens also had a much different population than we do and not everyone was eligible to be chosen. And I don't think it would go over well today to limit the pool of candidates to exclude those who are nominally unqualified for statecraft.
One great way around this is to alternate rounds of sortition with rounds of election:
- You pick 1000 random people to serve as the House of Representatives.
- They elect 100 people from among themselves to serve as the Senate.
- You randomly divide them into 10 person committees.
If you have enough rounds, there are some great effects:
- The election means that only competent or representative people make it through to the next round.
- The sortition makes it so that no one individual or small group is likely to make it all the way to the top.
sooner or later, random chance produces a majority coalition consisting of people who are willing to horse trade for corrupt programs that specifically benefit their own friends and family
Something that a "professional" would never do, and something that is much likelier to happen by randomly selecting 1000-2000 people, than if people are able to work towards it. It clearly would be nuts to take away the ability to deliberately commandeer a country and swapping it with the so much higher risk of that happening randomly.
Elected officials have at least some accountability to the voters. If they do anything sufficiently bad then they don't get reelected, and at any given time there are a majority of elected officials who don't intend to immediately retire and therefore care about being reelected. If you select Congress at random then there is absolutely no accountability whatsoever. They can come in and collude with a majority of the other randomly selected people to each put as much of the country's wealth into their own pockets and the pockets of their friends and family as they can and then retire rich to the south of France. The only thing preventing that would be their own consciences, which may work once or twice but is guaranteed not to work forever.
The existing system isn't one with no accountability, it's one with accountability to the people who can drive election outcomes. The problem is that in a functioning system that is only the citizens, but in the current system it's also the campaign donors. That is a problem, but you can't solve it by eliminating all accountability whatsoever.
Elected officials have at least some accountability to the voters. If they do anything sufficiently bad then they don't get reelected
If I say "pay me 50 dollars, and I will give you X", and then you pay me and I just grin at you, and the WORST you can do to me is to say "fine, then we won't do that again", that's not accountability.
The only thing preventing that would be their own consciences, which may work once or twice but is guaranteed not to work forever.
Their own consciences AND each other. "Each other" meaning a heterogenous group of people from all walks of life, instead of mostly their buddies and "the people doing the same stuff for a different team", which is so much weaker a check. Ever been where thousands or ten thousands of people are? No cameras, no cops? At least where I am those tend to be peaceful and rather moral on average. Small groups of friends however, they can be real dicks. Split them up and mix them with people they don't know that well, or at all, and they will behave much better. Such is the nature of criminal conspiracy, it doesn't like randomness and shooting from the hip.
Don't ask me about the specific implementation details, but I think there should be more "actual accountability", and I don't see why that wouldn't be applicable to "random politicians" as well. For starters, if everybody could theoretically get "drafted" for this tomorrow, many people would make it much more of their business to pay attention to what is going on, to what others are doing in that capacity. That in itself could have a positive effect.
And maybe it could start small, with a few hundred random people who have somewhat of an influence. And if that goes well, do more of that. A/B testing, you know? Because if we're just doing Gedankenexperimente, I don't see why how I experienced the world so far, namely that people in general are good even when they might be a bit lame, and people who want power are usually compensating and sport at best some kind of genius of mediocrity, shouldn't win over your concerns.
>If I say "pay me 50 dollars, and I will give you X", and then you pay me and I just grin at you, and the WORST you can do to me is to say "fine, then we won't do that again", that's not accountability.
Sure it is. You're presumably selling X to me at a profit, so if you screw me now, you're losing all of your future profits, which keeps you honest when that's worth more to you than the benefit of screwing me out of $50 once. Obviously that only works in cases where we're talking about repeat players, but it's still miles away from nothing.
>Their own consciences AND each other.
What do you think that buys you?
Here is how this would play out. A hundred honest people go to Washington. Someone suggests that they get $250,000 for their local community center. That's nothing out of the federal budget, and it seems like a worthy cause, so OK. Somebody else is a teacher and wants a million dollars for her school, same deal.
Soon people are exchanging support for each others' "worthy" pet causes. Somebody's pet cause is a sister who needs a heart transplant. It sure would be nice to get a heart transplant for everybody who needs one, though it turns out there just aren't enough donor hearts for that. But we can make an exception for this guy's sister, can't we? We need his vote to get the community center and the school money.
Eventually somebody asks for something that costs a billion dollars instead of a million and some people have reservations about spending that much on something that smells like favoritism, but the first one will be something sympathetic like a billion dollars for cancer research (which so happens to target the rare type of cancer that the bill's sponsor has). So that one gets the green light because who is going to tell a cancer patient you won't fund cancer research? And once you set the precedent for a billion dollar personal project the next thing you know federal laws are being passed which give a regulatory advantage to the company of the chosen one who works in that industry and major government contracts are being awarded on the basis of "I don't trust these low bidders I've never met but I know this guy."
1) The financial sector of the economy attracts away many of America's smartest and most charismatic, while simultaneously making a career in public service, especially by comparison, very unattractive for this valuable group. Thus an escape to lucrative lobbying (and gov't contracting) positions becomes the only economic redemption for those experiencing such injustice (as they might call it).
2) There is a school of thought that believes, and aims to show, that gov't can't do anything well. In the U.S., a significant proportion of the time, people who espouse this attitude hold powerful offices -- it's no surprise, then, that they don't instil in their subordinates a sense of civic responsibility and pride. Neither should it be surprising that they behave cynically.
I'd support a house of congress (or part of either or both existing houses) picked via sortition (with a filter for non felon, etc). Ancient Athens actually used this for the very reason of being harder to compromise. The problem with competitive elections for power is the people they attract.
> It seems that rather than attracting the best of the best to lead this country we managed to arrive at a process that reliably picks the most self serving crooks this country has to offer and allow them to run this country.
Isn't this obviously visible in the structure of the democracies?
How do politicians get selected? By votes from people. The more people like one (politician, party), the more they vote for them. Given that saying/doing the right thing is likely to offend at least some groups of people, it will always be the case that political groups trying to be popular will be selected by the system in favour of the ones trying to get things right. It's deep in the structure of this process; our democracies optimize for short-term popularity contests, not making the right calls that benefit the nation most.
So self-serving Congressional insider-trading on privileged information is kosher, but performing the People's business with information which is now public is not.
Given the Father's Day weekend, it wasn't hard to guess that the attendance will be low, so the question is why the briefing was still scheduled for that particular spot. I bet they are trying to tell us something...
Not an excuse at all but part of the problem of our system, why they run home so fast, is they are constantly fundraising for their next election. They spend a massive amount of time in office just fundraising.
It keeps our campaigns pleasingly short, and the advertising deliciously mundane and cheap-looking. Also it preserves a nice equilibrium, it's in nobody's interests to try and break or change the limits.
That would require a constitutional amendment to overturn 30 years of legal precedent that gives an enormous advantage to the wealthy and connected. It is illegal for Congress to put everyone on the same playing field and disallow wealthy candidates from self funding. So any public financing would simply give an enormous advantage to wealthy candidates and dark money groups with the resources to overwhelm the publicly financed guys.
Right now in order to compete you must fundraise constantly or risk not having funds to counter the spin of a bankrolled
opponent. It would be interesting if the Supreme Court simply eliminated the contribution limits but this would give even more of an incentive for congressmen simply to sell their votes("Vote for us and we will give you X gazillion dollars over four years vote against us and we drop millions in dark money against you and fund your opponents").
That doesn't get you around the Citizens United issue, where 3rd parties spend $$$ on election messaging which favor particular candidates but are not directly involved in the campaign.
It can be fixed by putting $100 caps on donations per person. Then they'll also work that much harder to please the people, not his/her "biggest donors".
Which itself leads to a permanent issue of elected public servants with no long-term experience on the very important function of leading the nation.
That leaves the expertise in the hands of unelected bureaucrats, who could easily maneuver the constantly-inexperienced politicians in the direction they wish.
Absolute term limits would probably also worsen the trend of retiring congressman becoming lobbyists.
But what if you only limited the number of consecutive terms? This is a solution more directly targeting the actual problem: the advantage of incumbency.
This also creates more positive feedback between their lives in the public and private sector, congressmen hoping to be reelected will need to do something positive when out of office, and when in office they will have more understanding of the lives of working people than those who have spent the last 50 years in congress.
It's important to note that limits on consecutive terms were used by the Greeks, Romans, and supported by many founding fathers (who admired the Romans especially).
The only way I would support term limits for politicians is if there were a corresponding term limit provision for civil employees. No one should be spending a lifetime feeding off the public trough.
God I'm so sick of this lame proposal. What's your evidence that this will improve things? Because we already have term limits in California and our legislature is a byword for dysfunction.
better solution: comprehensive campaign financing reform (e.g. all donations must be done by an individual, strict limits on the amount of financing, limits on the amount of advertising and type that candidates are allowed to do, public disclosure of donors, amounts, and campaign spending etc...)
To be fair, I doubt I would attend the classified briefing. The point is the senators represent the peoples interest (specifically the states interest), if the state does not want it, then they shouldn't get it.
Also, each senator should receive the briefing in paper. They never need to attend unless it is being voted upon.
Glad to see at least one of my senators attended those meetings and doesn't remember being briefed about phone metadata collection (Johnny Isakson R-Ga).
But then again the Director of National Intel James Clapper said that he understands that "collect data" would mean they take a book off the shelf and read it. Not that they have a giant bookshelf of data that is possibly yours and mine.
Just another politician type doing some CYA. We will see more to come.
The real question is why this was scheduled at a time that was pretty much guaranteed to conflict with the Senator's schedule? Scoring political points by foolishness is getting a tad old.
they're not attending because it's theatre. the NSA briefers are going to read from the script, no difficult questions are going to be asked, and even if they were, since it's secret, the public wouldn't get to see it so it doesn't matter.
Its important to note that some will NOT want to attend a classified briefing because they will then be bound NOT to discuss what they have heard in that classified meeting.
Same article was linked on Reddit; the top thread there points out that the meeting must have intentionally been scheduled to make this happen. It's common knowledge in DC that Congress is in session from Monday afternoon to Thursday morning, because Congressmen and Senators have duties in their home districts (listening to constituents bitch at them) that they have to take care of on Friday/over the weekend, and it takes them at least an afternoon's flight to get home.
Don't blame the reps for not being there, at least not too harshly. Blame the asshats who WANTED the meeting to be underattended to provoke exactly this reaction rather than actually letting their arguments speak for themselves.
It's obvious. Those who know the details don't feel like they need to attend. They know they'll learn nothing new; why waste their time?
Which begs the question: why didn't they speak up earlier? They probably would have, if they cared. The ruling class in this country knows that they won't be affected by these shenanigans. HSBC launders 100s of Billions of dollars for drug traffickers (sometimes literally accepting bags full of cash, and staying open late to do so), and no one goes to jail.
I think the senators who did this decided it would play better now that they skipped it, than what they suspected would come out in the briefing, which they would then be demonstrably complicit in by having knowledge of. Accomplices after the fact. They decided this very thin veneer of plausible deniability was the better option.
Re: “...It’s hard to get this story out. Even now we have this big briefing — we’ve got Alexander, we’ve got the FBI, we’ve got the Justice Department, we have the FISA Court there, we have Clapper there — and people are leaving,” she said.
This constant drone of Clapper-speak unbridled lying is taxing for even these people.
Isn't it his job as the elected Senator to call out Clapper on his 'lies' as he says them? If all Sen. Paul was going to do was watch the video of his testimony later then why schedule a hearing at all?
Then how do we know that Clapper is lying? We're not on the Intel Committee either, are we? At least Sen. Paul gets invited to these things, we have no access at all, so Sen. Paul is still in a much better situation to call out Clapper on what we are all so convinced are a constant stream of lies.
Sen. Wyden is on said Committee, and asked Clapper a question that, in Clapper's own words, he answered with a "least untruth" statement that was "too cute by half". This can be roughly translated as "a baldfaced lie".
Apart from that, I am personally unaware of any instances where DNI Clapper has publicly lied.
Additionally, DNI Clapper appears to only answer prepared questions (i.e. forwarded to his office prior to the discussion). I'm not sure if this is standard protocol for Congress, and for obvious reasons I also don't know if this applies to private briefings.
Certainly you'd send a list of prepared questions if you were holding a hearing to get answers. Otherwise the guy might be able to plausibly claim that he doesn't have the details and would have to get back to them.
If you're holding a hearing just to ask a trap question on camera then you might deliberately not send prepared questions, but I would like to think my elected representatives have more respect for people than that.
This isn't to say he left early, only that he left. Meaning he attended at least part, which is more than we can say about virtually anyone else as names don't appear to have been released yet.
Yeah, schedule the worst stuff at times with fewest senators available. Same way the Federal Reserve Act was passed a century ago on December 22, 1913.
Here they bring in one side of the story for a secret Powerpoint presentation, no doubt with a high degree of spin to it, and publicly call Snowden a traitor. Then they complain that nobody shows up.
This isn't a bake sale or a dog and pony show, it's supposed to be the workings of the U.S. Senate. This sounds much more like an effort to CYA from the committee chair and NSA than it does an actual investigation or anything useful. Not going to make much progress continuing to operate in this fashion.
It IS interesting, however, that both sides here feel that, if only the other side knew more about what was actually going on, they would agree with them. But then the government insists on keeping it all secret. Meh.