SOPA Hearings Stacked In Favor of Pro-SOPA Lobby

Adrian Lopez writes "Techdirt reports that 'apparently, the folks behind SOPA are really scared to hear from the opposition. We all expected that the Judiciary Committee hearings wouldn't be a fair fight. In Congress, they rarely are fair fights. But most people expected the typical "three in favor, one against" weighted hearings. That's already childish, but it seems that the Judiciary Committee has decided to take the ridiculousness to new heights. We'd already mentioned last week that the Committee had rejected the request of NetCoalition to take part in the hearings. At the time, we'd heard that the hearings were going to be stacked four-to-one in favor of SOPA. However, the latest report coming out of the Committee is that they're so afraid to actually hear about the real opposition that they've lined up five pro-SOPA speakers and only one "against."' Demand Progress is running an online petition against such lopsided representation."

Comments

Congress, our representatives?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its simple

We are not represented by congress anymore

Its big business, for big business

Re:Congress, our representatives?

[Dr_Barnowl]

But voted out of office in exchange for what? Another one of the same.

Ultimately, yes, the problem is the voters. But it's rather like complaining that if the sheep don't like the pen they are herded into, they should get a new sheepdog, when we all know the shepherd is calling the shots.

Re:Congress, our representatives?

[jellomizer]

You are implying that there is corruption going on, while there is a more plausible, legal forces that explains why the business get the political ear.

Big Business hires a lot of people who pay a lot of taxes. If they are not happy in your City/State/Country they have the resources to leave and leave a lot of people without jobs and unable to pay for taxes.
The problem will exasperated if business need to pay far more tax. Now a lot of business may be willing to do this without moving or laying off people but what it does is centralize the money flow even further so the business will get more political pull because that is more tax revenue that could leave.

So a Mayor, Senator, Representative, Judge, Governor or President really cannot just ignore what a big business is saying and will need to hear out some of their issues.

Now that the businesses have these peoples ears they can explain things to them so they understand their point of view much better making the decisions much more complex.

Then finally these people contributed to their campaign so they cannot just ignore the business as they owe them a favor.

The core of the problem is that businesses have gotten too big. This is the economical/political version of the Irish Potato famine. Where business diversity has been replaced a small group of large companies. Just like how the Irish were planting very few species of Potato so when a plague that infected the potatoes there wan't enough diversity to handle the loss.
American have gotten wimpy.
In school we are afraid to study Math and Science and all those courses where you cannot BS your way threw, because we are afraid that B in math with hurt you A average, and you will not get into Harvard, or if you are in college you GPA will suffer.
We are afraid to start our own business.
We are afraid to make something new.

In general we are afraid of a lot of things, things that are not really as scary as we make them out to be. But they do take risk and we have became Risk Averse. Thus we go the safest path.
Take those classes that you can get an easy A.
Get a low level job in a big company. Keep quite and out of trouble that way you don't get in trouble.
Buy products from those big name stores because those little shops seem to sketchy.
Complain and moan about a products rise in costs but do not cancel the service. (This part is getting better)

Re:Congress, our representatives?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that by standing for public office, the candidate is showing that they are unsuitable for the job.

Re:Congress, our representatives?

[rtfa-troll]

But voted out of office in exchange for what? Another one of the same.

Another one of the same who is afraid to go against your wishes on the particular issue you got the predecessor voted out of office for. This is very important. Remember that the rule of American politics is "do anything the corporations pay you to; as long as it doesn't offend the NRA". This is not because the NRA has huge amounts of money (though they have quite a bit); it's because they credibly and effectively make the threat to vote out whoever offends them. If you aren't voted in then you aren't getting your corporate bribes.

There are a bunch of things to learn from the NRA. Things like:

• Organise; meet; get together.
• Gather money; put it into a fund which is dedicated to your exact issue.
• Be extremely focused
• Physically protest; be seen
• Write actual letters to specific representatives from specific supporters
• Very clearly target specific politicians and ensure that you are seen to get rid of them
• Be fun and interesting to be part of

These things do not come at once and immediately; the NRA was founded in the 1870s and only got to full success in the 1980s, but if you are patient and keep at it you will win.

The idea that we can do nothing is planted in our minds in an attempt to stop us from doing anything. It's true that most people will still ignore you, but that doesn't matter. Most Americans aren't part of the NRA and they are still the effective rulers of the country for the particular issue they care about.

Re:Congress, our representatives?

[Grishnakh]

Exactly. Anyone who really wants the job that much shouldn't be allowed to have it. Arthur C. Clarke wrote a book about a human colony that had this exact rule; leaders were appointed more-or-less randomly, after disqualifying those who really wanted to be the leaders; it was called "Songs of Distant Earth".

Re:Congress, our representatives?

[FictionPimp]

Don't forget to fear monger to your group endlessly like the NRA does. I'm a gun owner, I love my gun rights. I carry daily. I WAS a NRA member. I'm so sick of getting letters about how Obama (or whatever evil you can come up with) is going to take away my guns unless I give the NRA another cash injection.

Obama has bigger issues than guns, and he won't be taking them away during campaign time (which with our media is basically from day one in office). The truth is that gun rights have gotten a lot better in the last 3 years. Their message of constant fear and attack just drove me away.

Re:Congress, our representatives?

[sproot]

So did Thomas More in the sixteenth century and Plato in about 400BC, it's not a new thing.

Re:Congress, our representatives?

[TheGratefulNet]

voting is not the key.

suppose you have a broken motor (its shorted inside, say) and it keeps blowing fuses. first fuse, you replace it. fuse blows again. damn. replace it again.

at some point, you realize that replacing fuses on a broken motor, while giving you some more 'time', is not a real solution. its not the fuse, its the motor, itself.

voting is a revolving doorway. while someone might be good (a brand new fuse) for a short while, its 100% guaranteed that OUR CURRENT SYSTEM will 'short him out' and he'll go bad. 100% guaranteed. its our system, not the fuses; er, I mean people.

"but I'll put a stronger fuse (person) in!"

sorry, this is not the way to fix it. when the motor is fundamentally broken, you replace the motor.

I hope some people get this... ..before the upstream breaker has to fail.

Re:Congress, our representatives?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. I've never seen anyone more brainwashed.

They research and detail for us what everyones real record is on "gun control", and send us those lists in American Rifleman so we know the score come voting time.

Except that they don't actually do so. They lie or play statistics games with the real record instead. Hell, the NRA even lies about its own record.

Most important, we've got the second amendment in our back pocket and every single one of us votes when we think there's anything remotely related to our right to keep and bear arms.

Oh for the love of... no, you freaked-out morons are too busy screaming "second amendment" to pay attention to the rest of the constitution.

A gun is a weapon. It can be used to kill. The NRA is against the registering of firearms, period. We register CARS via license plate in order to make them trackable (hopefully) in the event of an accident/injury/death. Why should guns be any different?

Oh, but no. For you, the "right to keep and bear arms" means "I get to walk into a grocery store with an assault rifle and an extended clip full of hollow-point rounds in case I spot a deer that I want to shoot later that day." What, is there some 30-point buck with a sniper rifle and bulletproof vest sitting out in the woods during hunting season, screaming "I'm ready fo' yo ass"?

I mean, really. The first amendment - far more fundamental to your civil rights than the 2nd - has limitations called time, place, manner. You can't randomly shout "fire" in a crowded theater (though it's sometimes funny to walk into the local firehouse and shout "theater" to see how many of the local firemen get the joke), because it'd cause a panic that is likely to result in injury. Likewise, your "right to own guns" is clearly limitable in terms of what guns are and aren't acceptable, and the government's right to register who owns them is unassailable except for uneducated idiots... come to think of it, the NRA thrives on them.

Nobody is coming to "take away ur gunz." They might - I repeat, MIGHT - pass a law requiring the registration of such guns. It might even include "gun fingerprinting" (ballistic markings) records such that the gun used in a crime can be more easily identified, much in the same way that cars are trackable by license plates.

But don't worry. I'm sure by tomorrow you'll have forgotten anything you read here when the NRA's next "that muzlim nigger wantz to take away ur gunz" memo comes in.

Re:Congress, our representatives?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The core of the problem is that government has gotten too big" Fixed.

Oh fuck you.

The core problem is not that government has gotten too big. The core problem is that businesses have become bigger than government, big enough to engage in regulatory capture and rent-seeking behaviors.

This is something that's happened time and again. The British East India company essentially took over the British government for far too long, leading to the ruin of Britain as a nation for some time. In the early 1900s, we needed a major slew of trust-busting activities BY the government because of abusive companies like Standard Oil and Nortnern Securities who had engaged in regulatory capture and were exerting unfair monopoly controls, slowly taking over more and more sectors of the economy.

Sound familiar? Strike any parallels at all to the incredibly abusive megacorporations of today that gobble up sectors at an alarming rate? Or did you notice - for instance, that of the "fast food chains" in the US, more than 50% of them are actually owned by ONE company, "Yum Brands", which is itself owned by Pepsi - which also owns Lay's potato chips, Ruffles, Lipton, Doritos, "Quaker" brand, and on and on...

Still think there's any real competition left in the bullshit "free market" the Republicans worship so much? Might as well melt your coins down to a golden calf right now, buddy. There's not a real christian left on the "religious right", they're worshiping greed instead.

We need STRONGER government and another major round of trust-busting. Not weaker government like the Retardicans keep shouting. They're all either fucking clueless, brainwashed Rushtards or their goal is complete regulatory capture of government and rule by their aristocrat masters.

Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)

[Eevee]

Would it really hurt to follow standard practices and explain what the acronym is the first time it's used?

Bad for everyone

[Djehuty3]

I admin a forum with a little over 30k members.

In the past, we've had a former member we've banned file a false DMCA claim against us and successfully take us down. We moved DNS and have been up since; For the record, 1and1 didn't even investigate, whereas our replacement, GoDaddy, kept a note of the circumstances and have notified us when that same person has tried to take us down again.

If this passes, our little forum is fucked. No two ways about it; Somebody will get butthurt about being banned and we'll get taken down, again - but this time, there's a risk of actual criminality behind it.

Don't tell me that this will be carefully used and no false claims will succeed, because we've been on the wrong end of that tale before.

Today, we're participating in the scheme being run by http://americancensorship.org/; If you run a site, regardless of mission, you should too.

Vote third party

[betterunixthanunix]

I said this yesterday, and I'll say it again today: the problem is that the "two" parties in power now both have the same agenda. It is time for people to start voting third party.

Re:Vote third party

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

I said this yesterday, and I'll say it again today: the problem is that the "two" parties in power now both have the same agenda. It is time for people to start voting third party.

This sounds great on the surface. But who exactly am I supposed to vote for? I am American by the way. I cannot in any way vote Libertarian. I totally reject the Libertarian Party. I truly believe that libertarianism is a fatally flawed political philosophy that cannot work. I see communism as a more rational political philosophy. That's really bad. The other parties are too small and too narrowly focused for my tastes so there is no real third party option for me.

Re:Vote third party

[Xest]

In the UK we had television debates before our elections for the first time last year they were attended by the biggest 3 party leaders.

In a setting where media bias couldn't help people the 3rd place party, the Lib Dems, started to shoot ahead in the opinion polls, at one point polling as the most popular party with a chance of winning.

Enter Murdoch et al. an expensive coordinated slander campaign in his papers and come election day they did no better than they usually do despite the high polls prior to that.

But there was another twist, neither of the other two parties won a majority, and so a coalition was required, the Lib Dems got at least a share of the power as a result of this.

Yet it didn't really matter, because they ended up getting swallowed up by the other party anyway, the times they've tried to pursue their own agenda out come Murdoch's attack dogs again, and so effectively they've just been forced to act as puppets to prop up the Tory administration.

The moral of the story is that a 3rd party is not a panacea, unless you can deal with the deep rooted corruption and media stranglehold on influencing national political leaning then the 3rd party will either get slandered out of existence or swallowed up to become one and the same as the other two anyway.

I've learnt that the only way to win is to not play, I've heard all my life about how important it is to vote, but this is really all part of the same game. It's actually not important to vote at all, by voting for a lost cause you're merely adding legitimacy to the corrupt powers that repeatedly win out because they can come out and say "Hey look, we got the highest share of votes on a turnout of 60%!". Better to let the turnout drop and let them try and claim legitimacy when less than half the population can't even see the point in voting anymore. It's only at this point when their foes on the international stage are laughing in their faces at their claims of democratic legitimacy that they will be embarassed into accepting change. It's only when this facade of legitimacy they've built has crumbled that they can't carry on as they have.

Really, it's the fundamental system that's the problem, and when you vote within that system whoever for you're merely giving the system a vote of legitimacy it doesn't deserve. Both the British and American forms of power designation need a root and branch change to be more proportional and more representational.

I've never understood American

[devent]

I've never understood Americans.

Your first amendment is the right of free speech. But you have the FCC and they can ban you if you show someone that says words like fuck on the TV. How can a government agency ban a private company if they try and use their most important right as in the Constitution?

Then you have the amendment that they shall no seizure of property without a proper warrant from a judge. But your country searches everything if you try and go on a plane. In not just search the bags, but it strip-search everyone, including children and babies.

The Americans claim to have the best democracy of the world, but you have only two political parties. Then you claim do be the most advanced civilization, but your poverty rate and child-death-rate is one of the highest in the western countries. There are a lot of cases in America that people die because of bad teeth.

And now you don't only have the DMCA law, that ignores the due-process and innocent-until-proven-otherwise rule, but you have soon the SOPA law.

I wouldn't care, but you try and export that anti-democracy laws to us in Europe, too. Just build a big wall around the USA, have your own internet and leave us in peace.