The committee that granted a trillion dollar bail-out of a few companies including Goldman Sachs was staffed with plenty of current/former executives from Goldman Sachs.
The FDA and agencies involved for approving bovine growth hormone (later found to do freakishly hideous things to the poor cows and increase by incredible amounts the contamination of the milk we drink from infected utters), the Round-Up-ready patented corn seeds, and aspartame just happen to be largely staffed by current/former Monsanto executives.
The FDA and agencies involved in inspecting the food production in the states and making sure that it remains uncontaminated and safe and regularly inspected have reduced the number of inspections by something like 85% and the contamination rates increase, while under the watch of agencies staffed largely by current/former executives of the few main companies being overseen.
The US government is beyond corrupt and beyond any possible reform and nobody cares. Nobody gives a damn that almost every office and committee appointment in the country is a matter of the wolves guarding the sheep. It has been this way for decades and they are now so brazen about it that you can look at every single person in every single job and do a simple search to trace the truth of their position and appointment back and nobody gives a damn.
I mean, seriously, we let them give themselves a trillion dollars. We let them poison our food supply with largely untested and unproven chemicals. We let them cover up and manipulate right in front of our faces and we do nothing. After thirty years of looking the other way on all of these things, what on earth could possibly ever even remotely raise our eyebrows and make us do something other than participate in the attention-occupying busy-body bullshit of "durr durr republicans are stupid and evil" and "durr durr democrats are stupid and evil" my team versus yours bullshit?
Maybe if the government and corporations decided that it was just easier to require that all births be sponsored to make sure they can be cared for until adulthood and then those sponsored children become indentured servants for their sponsor company until the age of 40 . . . maybe . . . MAYBE we might possibly take our eyes off Dancing With the Stars and the football game long enough to do something other than pull the red or blue lever according to the team we've associated ourselves with and demand that we have choices that aren't part of the game and won't be part of the game and will radically change things.
The US government is beyond corrupt and beyond any possible reform and nobody cares.
my team versus yours bullshit
It won't happen in my lifetime. I know that much.
Have you ever volunteered for a local politician? Paid close attention to an particular issue? Gone to your state capitol to lobby for a particular bill? Took notice of any substantive differences between politicians of both major parties running against each other? Have you ever spent a substantial amount of your own time and effort to attempt to fix any of these issues?
Or do you just bitterly complain about the irredeemably corrupt nature of US government on online message boards?
Your cynicism, and those of people like you, is also a large contributor to our nation's innumerable problems. There exist honest, well-meaning, hard-working people working in government and politics to attempt to fix these issues. Unfortunately they're outnumbered by people like you, who tar all of them with same brush you use for the most corrupt business lobbyist. That's probably because it's much easier to complain than fix the problem.
Unfortunately, the system is setup to expediently counter attempts to change it. Why do you think we keep getting the same results after every election? If it was just a matter of "getting a democrat" in the office or "getting a republican" in office, then problems wouldn't exist, because we have one or the other in office every few years. It's a deeper problem in that the fingers that manipulate the puppetry and the machinery are so deeply embedded in the process that with very few outlying exceptions, little occurs which isn't vetted by the corrupt process. (Also reads: There aren't really many substantive differences between viable politicians.)
The few people with any power in politics are expelled by the system itself. They're either not viable to begin with or if they somehow absurdly get into the system, it marginalizes them. They're called crazy or otherwise derided and made irrelevant through all the modern mediums we have available to us and society itself is too pre-occupied with what church they go to or if they ever smoked pot.
I didn't say I have any meaningful way to contribute or improve the process. Nobody else really does, either. It's not merely as simple as "well, run for office and be the first honest person in the government!". Very few people can even stand up against a single company and fight injustices. What hope does anyone have against the corrupt government plus all of the companies - together?
I know, this is all very anti-American. We're raised to believe that there's always hope and "we the people" and "power to the people" and all. Just check the right box in the voting booth or volunteer your time to support the right magic politician that we've been waiting a couple centuries for.
There is a critical point past which an organism is so consumed with cancerous tissue that nothing can be done to save it.
They seem to be making progress at massive change in the middle east (Libya, Eqypt, Syria, etc.). It's pretty inspiring how much strength there is in numbers. I'm not much of a leader, but I would always participate.
Maybe one of the talented designers around HN could spin up a nice site to pledge to march on DC if/when 10 million people sign up? I'd write the copy and donate some hosting $.
> They seem to be making progress at massive change in the middle east (Libya, Eqypt, Syria, etc.). It's pretty inspiring how much strength there is in numbers. I'm not much of a leader, but I would always participate.
This is after 40 or so years of dictatorship in every single one of those countries; and peaceful previous attempts did not work (were mostly met with deadly force)
In the US, most people have the illusion that they are actually voting for THEIR representative, and thus it will take 400 years (not 40) until something will happen. Douglas Adams described this very well:
"Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this, as he sat with Arthur and watched the nonstop frenetic news reports on television, none of which had anything to say other than to record that the thing had done this amount of damage which was valued at that amount of billions of pounds and had killed this totally other number of people, and then say it again, because the robot was doing nothing more than standing there, swaying very slightly, and emitting short incomprehensible error messages.
"It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."
"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
You know, it's not my job to fix the problem. I have my place in society and I'm not about to start over in life and become a politician just to fix my perceived problem with the system. No more than I would start over and become a doctor because I thought that, say, doctors had bad attitudes. I'll vote the appropriate way but that's really my only recourse. I still have the right to bitterly complain about rampant corruption in politics and even be pessimistic about reform happening.
> There exist honest, well-meaning, hard-working people working in government and politics to attempt to fix these issues. Unfortunately they're outnumbered by people like you, who tar all of them with same brush you use for the most corrupt business lobbyist.
I don't see how the OP's attitude affects the good people working to fix the issues. They clearly want the same thing the OP does. If they think he's wrong--prove him wrong! Get things reformed in his lifetime.
Yes, there are honest, well-meaning, hard-working people working in government, but there are also lying, corrupt, self-interested politicians lobbied heavily by corporations. When news like this comes out, it just adds to the suspicion and paranoia that all the war lies and government bailouts have already brought upon the American people. It doesn't help.
I agree with you, but here's my attempt at devil's advocate:
These industries require domain expertise gained over years in order to understand the fundamentals of these industries at macro and micro levels, So, who better to help regulate them then people directly from the industry with that expertise. Career politicians and bureaucrats simply have no real world experience, so we must get industry insiders to provide insight.
Regulation and control is by its nature an adversarial relationship. You cannot be an effective adversary if that will compromise your ability to be an advocate or employee of whomever you're regulating.
Just as an auditor doesn't need to be a domain expert to audit a companies books, a regulator doesn't need to be one, at least from an industry POV.
The "employ a hacker to catch a hacker" methodology of hiring is fine, if your hacker is going to catch other hackers. If you're actually just hiring thieves to help themselves to all they can carry in their pockets, then their expertise really isn't relevant beyond their own self-serving exploitation of that knowledge domain.
Absolutely agreed, but the industry insiders have to be impartial and use their knowledge and experience to come up with a decision.
The question you have to ask is what's the motivation to approve (or deny) a given application or law? If it's because it's the 'right thing to do' (broad term I know) then fantastic. If it's to 'help out a mate' or 'it may be the right thing to do, but meanwhile there's incentives for me to vote this way' then that's where integrity has to be questioned.
I would counter that anti-trust decisions are not industry decisions, but population wide decisions and hence they should be made not by industry focused bureaucrats but by more accountable general politicians.
So, in the spirit of HN I'd like to foster a challenge. I challenge the people of HN to come up with a startup to challenge the status quo. How about a startup that could expose this in an easily consumable way by the public? What about a startup that makes government corruption irrelevant? Lets put our money where our mouth is.
Is there money to be made from benefiting the social good? Is there a way we can bring people together with an app or service that can bring about an end to all of this? On HN I see some of the most intelligent people that have ever lived. If we can't come up with a solution, then who can?
I know it's not quite the same thing, but wasn't there a "startup" of sorts awhile back that focused on exposing documented evidence of different levels of corporate and government corruption? I can't remember what it was called, but I'm pretty sure the guy behind it had to flee the country and was charged with several counts of rape and a lot of the people he was trying to expose the information to about their own government said that they wanted him executed.
Anyway, there are certainly already-existing entities that serve the public good, but government corruption isn't irrelevant as long as there is government corruption. You can benefit social good all you like, but how exactly is it going to wholly displace the existence, expense, and function of a government office or committee?
The FDA example. Or the Goldman Sachs example. How are you going to displace the need for the FDA to exist or for the SEC and the Treasury to exist? Or the need for the military industrial complex? These are all functions that seemingly need to exist and be performed for the good of the people. The problem is that they require oversight. The public needs to be aware of the corruption and given the power to do something about it and it seems we either don't or won't. (And I'm part of that group, because if I knew how to change it, I would).
It is so massive. So complex. So layered. And so corrupt. I really almost can't expect someone busy trying to keep a roof over their head and their children clothed and educated to somehow be aware of many of these corruptions, much less have a way to change it (beyond the trivialities of voting, which mostly seems to just serve us as a way to make us feel better about ourselves).
When we have lots of regulation, we're told that the solution is to deregulate and then industries are singularly corrupt. When we don't have enough regulation, we're told the solution is to regulate. Then the regulator positions are staffed with people from the companies being regulated and corruption is there.
If there are some great solutions, I'm all ears. :)
I've banged my head over a similar idea for a while, and I have failed to figure out a viable monetization strategy that won't compromise such a service eventually. The best I've come up with is that it must start at bottom and move up. From local communities and the governments that manage them, the power could be slowly drained away from the federal level (and even the state) eventually leading to a more decentralized system that is less susceptible to corruption (which obviously requires constant vigilance on the part of the local communities).
So what about a site that allows local communities to organise and co-ordinate? Your big problem would be astroturfing, but if you did it right, it would be as simple for them to arrange for 'Lets get rid of taxes on oil firms" as "Lets get the garbage taken out properly in the xth district in y area", then to link them together.
I think the key thing is to disrupt the lobby structure. If we can do that as well as MP3 downloads disrupted the RIAA then we win.
What about a social-network-like site where people communicate directly with their elected officials?
This would need someway to make sure that the politician was actually looking at the site and not just the delegating it to subordinates. Having a direct line to these politicians (that cuts past all of the subordinates that answer email, snail mail, etc) is one of the strengths of lobby groups.
There is one, but I can't remember the name of it right now. I spent a week going through lots of it to see what kind of activity, but there was very little. On top of that, there were lots of people just barking non-nonsensical and/ or derisive remarks at the various federal politicians; and, absolutely zero participation from any of the politicians themselves.
This is why I suggested to start in a small community first. In order to keep it relevant to people that live in that community, the only thing that made sense was to authenticate users via post cards (with OTP passcodes) sent to an address within a zipcode (In my town they send out a community news page with my water bill). My thought was to keep it to short messages realted to only municipal maintenance issues and try to build from there. Funding it would be the biggest obstacle in my mind, so if anyone has specific ideas there, that'd be great.
Very well said. IMO anyone who disagrees either doesn't know enough of "the situation" or has simply scanned over your words, not actually digested them.
> IMO anyone who disagrees either doesn't know enough of "the situation" or has simply scanned over your words, not actually digested them.
That's not a useful stance to take on things. "Anyone who disagrees with this is ignorant or didn't understand" is a recipe for never having a useful conversation.
You want people to change their minds? Spend at least a little time listening to them. Not "I'm waiting for you to shut up" fake listening, actual listening. Learn why they think what they do. You have to counter their biases/ignorance/arguments on their own terms, anything else is more self-important posturing on your part than useful debate.
I dont at all disagree with what your saying, that is how I would usually approach things. In the context of some things mentioned on the thread I feel my sentence is appropriate.
Nobody on this thread could say/articulate a single point or argument that could possibly counteract the sheer amount of corruption that is occurring not only in the US, but everywhere. Hence my ears are essentially closed for business.
What I was saying was that the OP is absolutely right, and anybody who even considers disagreeing hasn't done their research or has not registered the seriousness of the situation when reading the comment. I was hoping to add weight to an already very good point, hence the seriousness of my tone.
The best part about this, under Obama's ethics rules, she's not allowed to lobby the FCC on any matters, nor can she lobby any executive branch member about the Comcast/NBC merger until President Obama leaves office[1]. So she's being hired as a lobbyist even though she won't be able to lobby anyone.
In this case, the "lobbying" was done from the inside as a regulator, and now comes the cushy job in which she can barely operate except to dump her rolodex and manage people.
While part of me isn't surprised, if both Comcast and she gets away with this without repercussions, I'm going to be seriously disgusted...
edit: Actually a question comes to mind. What can we as the voting/etc public do to make our will felt in this scenario? With the parties involved I don't know of a way and that really, really irks me.
Libertarian clap-trap. Governments and pies only become a bad combination when there is no meaningful oversight or regulation. Your point of view makes sense in America where this is the case.
That's a really good question. I don't know what specific action American voters could take.
After some searching the best I could find is this group (http://www.citizen.org/), which seems to be a non-profit working in the general area of disentangling government/corporate interests.
Though Ms. Baker was appointed to what is considered an independent regulatory agency, she signed the administration’s ethics pledge upon taking office in July 2009. Under the pledge, she will not be allowed to lobby anyone at the F.C.C. for two years after her departure.
Let me see... in the Australian context such things can and do happen, but happen much less because "lobbyist" is a bit less of a job category than it is in the US.
Part of the reason, I think, is that individual parliamentarians make fewer of their own decisions than they do in the US. It's almost unheard of for an individual member of parliament to vote against their party on a given issue, so all decisionmaking on whether to support a given law is done at the party rather than individual level. And you can't persuade a whole party to support a law just by buying it steak dinners and hookers, you have to convince 'em that it's actually a votewinner. (Or you could just get your industry group to donate huge sums of money to the party, which is how, for instance, the Australian Hoteliers' Association keeps liquor licencing laws written to their advantage in most states).
How would such laws be created with such a personnel system in place? If they existed, who would enforce them?
I'd love to be proved ignorant on this and see some unrelated-to (and therefore incorruptible-by) enforcement agency slap the fuck out of Ms. Corrupt Lobbyist, but I'm doubtful.
Every now and then I contemplate a system where, after leaving office, former high-level government officials are provided with a generous pension but subjected to a 100% tax on any income whatsoever from non-government sources. Obviously such a system has plenty of disadvantages - but apart from those, I wonder whether it would help the revolving door problem at all, or whether cronyism would persist even without financial motivation.
But then you have to also regulate the income of their family - it would be all to easy to give those financial motivations to their spouse, children, or others close to them.
Right, and there's also the ever popular "we'll donate to your favorite charity" maneuver (for a non-government example, witness the Captain Morgan NFL touchdown dance mini-controversy of a few years back).
It might be possible to do something about the friends/family issue with careful crafting of the laws - or maybe I'm just a closet monarchist. ;)
They would establish something like time-limited non-compete agreements: when you accept a position, you'll know that, when you leave it, you'll have to spend 2-3 years without working in a related field. Hell, they could even be 2 paid years.
(that) any official in a position within a government body, whether elected or appointed, which regulates a particular industry, area of industry, or the laws and compliance of said industry, may not take a position within any company that benefited directly from any regulatory or oversight decision of the oversight body within the last 5 years on any case where the stated company or organizations competitive status with respect to monopolies, anti-trust, or anti-competitive business environment was considered.
---
This would mean that anyone who was in a position of oversight for a given industry and who had to consider, directly, regulations which may or may not benefit a particular company may not accept a position with that company for at least 5 years after their departure from that official position.
The immediate reaction to this proposal will be the argument from every corner that you have just barred anyone with industry knowledge or expertise from being willing to take any government regulation position. Thereby guaranteeing incompetent regulation. (Insert long list of examples where unknowledgeable regulators have proven incompetent to regulate.)
You can be sure that this argument will be accompanied by large donations to lobbyists, and by outrage among all government regulators who were expecting to wind up in the industry that they regulate (and that they frequently came from).
Sorry, no. The FCC has been pushing a relaxation of media ownership rules that benefits the whole industry and has the active support of both ABC and Time Warner. (Active up to and including the level of buying newspaper ads to sway people towards their position that the FCC should be allowed to do this.) That fact would bar people in the FCC from working in the entire industry if the proposed anti-corruption rule were in place.
How then are conflicts of interest handled within any given law firm. This is effectively the same thing. Let them bitch about it - we need to solve this problem.
You think that law firms do a good job of handling conflicts of interest? Really?
Let me give you an important example. David Bois won his anti-trust case against Microsoft, and then proposed a penalty that was a slap on the wrist. He turned around, and then was handed an endless stream of revenue from the SCO case. There is evidence that said legal proceeding was funded behind the scenes by Microsoft. Coincidence? I think not.
As for the argument that I said you would face, I didn't make it up. That is the bog standard argument that is always trotted out to support the standard practice of having regulators come from, and then return to, the industries that they regulate. In practice people really do get swayed by the argument that a person who knows the industry is at an advantage in understanding it well enough to get involved in regulation. Either that or they pretend to be while accepting donations, but it works out to the same thing in the end.
Then all you do is increase the cost by about 5 years worth of pay and we're back to square one. Admittedly, it'll handle lobbying at the local level for construction jobs for example, but it won't stop the oil lobby in Alaska.
The greater the concentration of power, the more likely it is that it will be used for personal gain. And the less likely it is more meaningful competition and choice to exist.
This can only happen when people don't have a choice. If a government is bad, people should have a way to remove their property from its domain.
Cities and towns should be able to become part of a neighboring state or start their own. The Swiss have this ability and can change cantons and create new ones. Its rarely used, but its always there if needed.
And if the people had to approve many actions of the national legislature (again, as they do in Switzerland), ridiculous actions are less likely.
Of course, results are what matter and Switzerland has the highest incomes in the world and the least involvement in stupid wars. It must have something to do with the difficulty in spending other people's blood and money without their approval.
Sounds like a recipe for white flight. Switzerland was also among the last industrialized nations to allow women the vote (1970!). Provincialism is not a panacea and government isn't the only place where power can be concentrated.
On the other hand, my idealistic version of political reform is so far from reality, I won't even bother you with it here.
Government isn't the only place power can be concentrated to be sure. But it is the only place where power is concentrated using coercion.
Everywhere else, some value must be delivered in exchange and there are competing choices. For example, the media has a lot of power but also a lot of competition. And the more technology and choice we have in general creates even more competition.
Your version of reform may not be reality, but nothing is until discussed.
What makes you think that other groups wouldn't be the first to fly?
I mean, think about it: Would you secede from a city that used your own tax dollars to humiliate you on buses and at water fountains and lunch counters? And then beat you in the head when you object?
It's really become a sad state of affairs in the telecom industry. All of these "leaders" claim to foster innovation with their decisions when they're actually just lining their pockets. It's comforting to know that the old regime is slowly dying off. Let's hope the future wave of leaders call out the bullshit and actually do something with their time. Really disappointing to see this taking place.
There is a ton of inbreeding on capitol hill and top corporate companies. This is ridiculous but not more ridiculous than banking ex-CEOs giving bailouts to their former companies.
The idea that the government is out to protect your interests is an incredibly naive viewpoint. The government is not some mystical ideal immune to corruption - it is a collection of people as weak and human as you.
This is why the only humane, practical government is one with significant checks and balances, limitation of power. Libertarianism is the only way to solve real world problems, instead of idealistic naive thoughts.
Let's get really practical: public-only financing of elections, plus conflict of interest rules with teeth (no job in the industry you regulated for X years after you left) will make it significantly harder for special interests to exert undue influence on our elected officials. At least, if they sell out to corporations, it will be out of deeply felt corporatist convictions rather than for intellectually bankrupt cash considerations.
People change jobs all the time. The folks in government commissions are probably from that industry and when they do want to change jobs, will probably find work in that industry. It is a bit unfair to cast aspersions on people. It is also interesting that to stop this would require something akin to a non-compete policy which is typically frowned upon in HN :)
Yeah, it's wrong to cast aspersions on people who go to work for the government and act as extended arms of the industry and corporations they just left. Like the many Goldman Sachs people on the committee that authorized a trillion dollar bailout for companies that primarily included Goldman Sachs. Or the Monsanto guys who ran the FDA and other government agencies and made sure chemicals like rBGH, aspartame and others (from the DDT/agent orange corporation) were given a green light. There's nothing going on there at all! Why golly, it's just government in action! And the guys from Raytheon and GE certainly have no vested interest in agitating national fears and military spending at all.
That's the problem with big government... it size as a consumer builds in a need for companies to schmooze with and influence the government. The US government EVERY DAY than ExxonMobil makes in a year.
That doesn't excuse crony capitalism or outright corruption. But it does help to know where it comes from.
It's a shame that people have voted this comment down because they don't agree with it. That's not how voting is supposed to work.
You make a good point: why would anyone knowledgable about the communications industry EVER take a job on the FCC if they knew it would bar them from working in the private sector in the future? We don't pay FCC commissioners nearly enough to make that work.
The committee that granted a trillion dollar bail-out of a few companies including Goldman Sachs was staffed with plenty of current/former executives from Goldman Sachs.
The FDA and agencies involved for approving bovine growth hormone (later found to do freakishly hideous things to the poor cows and increase by incredible amounts the contamination of the milk we drink from infected utters), the Round-Up-ready patented corn seeds, and aspartame just happen to be largely staffed by current/former Monsanto executives.
The FDA and agencies involved in inspecting the food production in the states and making sure that it remains uncontaminated and safe and regularly inspected have reduced the number of inspections by something like 85% and the contamination rates increase, while under the watch of agencies staffed largely by current/former executives of the few main companies being overseen.
The US government is beyond corrupt and beyond any possible reform and nobody cares. Nobody gives a damn that almost every office and committee appointment in the country is a matter of the wolves guarding the sheep. It has been this way for decades and they are now so brazen about it that you can look at every single person in every single job and do a simple search to trace the truth of their position and appointment back and nobody gives a damn.
I mean, seriously, we let them give themselves a trillion dollars. We let them poison our food supply with largely untested and unproven chemicals. We let them cover up and manipulate right in front of our faces and we do nothing. After thirty years of looking the other way on all of these things, what on earth could possibly ever even remotely raise our eyebrows and make us do something other than participate in the attention-occupying busy-body bullshit of "durr durr republicans are stupid and evil" and "durr durr democrats are stupid and evil" my team versus yours bullshit?
Maybe if the government and corporations decided that it was just easier to require that all births be sponsored to make sure they can be cared for until adulthood and then those sponsored children become indentured servants for their sponsor company until the age of 40 . . . maybe . . . MAYBE we might possibly take our eyes off Dancing With the Stars and the football game long enough to do something other than pull the red or blue lever according to the team we've associated ourselves with and demand that we have choices that aren't part of the game and won't be part of the game and will radically change things.
It won't happen in my lifetime. I know that much.