Slashdot Mirror
White House Petition To Investigate Dodd For Bribery
Walkingshark writes "Chris Dodd's recent statements complaining that congressmen who receive donations from the RIAA and MPAA should toe the line has spawned a firestorm of anger on the internet. Among the bits of fallout: a petition on the White Houses "We the People" site to investigate him, the RIAA, and the MPAA for bribery! This petition gained more than 5000 signatures in 24 hours and is still growing. When the petition reaches 25,000 signatures the White House is obligated to respond to it in an official capacity."
[comment goes here]
Of course nothing will happen. Since when do crooks convict themselves ?
And I DEMAND that once bought, you STAY bought!
By the way, the law is for you "little people".
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
When the petition reaches 25,000 signatures the White House is obligated to respond to it in an official capacity.
Will this response be of a similar nature to how the UK government response to its equivalent petition site? i.e. the official response is to make it clear they are officially ignoring the petition?
Carlin - The Real Owners Of America
"The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying  lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else."
"But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.
"You know what they want? Obedient workers  people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club."
"This country is finished."
As I post this comment, every comment posted in this thread before mine was an apathetic "signing the petition will do nothing". It would have taken just a few seconds longer to sign the petition, even if also creating an account to do so.
Signing the petition might indeed do nothing. But posting a comment here saying so is absolutely guaranteed to do nothing. The corrupt politicos like Dodd absolutely count on people insisting on doing nothing. Just as bribery is the oxygen for their corruption, cynical apathy is the 78% nitrogen that makes the air they breathe.
Sign the petition, and at least have done something to strangle these parasites. Even if that's just being a small part of forcing the president to defend or deny them. It's better than nothing - certainly better than a loudly committed nothing.
--
make install -not war
The last time I saw a response to one of these petitions, it was one for the elimination of the TSA. The response was written by the head of the TSA. Not to say you shouldn't push the button anyway. If the Obama administration is going to ask for our input and then blatantly disregard it, we may as well have them on record as doing so.
Former US House candidate, TN-5
Investigating Dodd is a good place to start. Even just getting Obama to refuse to investigate Dodd is a start. You're insisting on never starting.
--
make install -not war
Every single conversation, in person or over media (phone, email, etc) that any elected official has with anyone should be recorded and archived in the Library of Congress. And noted in a public schedule, except meetings a subcommittee in the House or Senate votes can be hidden. Any investigation should be able to subpoena any recording. With no expiration or statue of limitations.
That kind of evidence generation would protect the honest conversations from the corrupt ones, and steadily improve the ratio.
--
make install -not war
I read his (Dodd's) comment to mean, essentially, "Don't expect to keep getting campaign support from people that don't think you're supporting their interests."
How is this any different than a thousand donors to, say, Obama's last campaign saying, "We don't think you still care about [topic x] the way you did in 2008 when we supported you with cash, and if we still feel that way, we may not support your campaign next time around."
Saying that - because you don't like a politician's posture/policy on a topiuc - you won't give a campaign donation next time doesn't mean that when you did support their campaign in the past, you were bribing them. If that were true, then every dollar donated by every person or organization is always bribery. Which is ridiculous.
I dislke Dodd. He's an ass. But he's perfectly within his (and his employers') rights to say the same thing we can all say: "Mr. Politician: you're not committed to what I think is important, and so I'm probably not going to help your campaign fund next time."
Anger "on the internet" about him being that straightforward is just the usual anger at the fact that a trade association made of up people who run studios and labels puts a priority on protecting their members' works. Shocking, I say! But thousands of people calling it "bribery" is just an adolescent display of ignorance or a disingenuous display of pandering rhetoric aimed at uninformed people.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Lobbying has some legitimate uses.
Let's Congress wants to open up part of a national forest for logging, oil drilling, or whatever because Congressman Joe Schmoe or his buddy happens to own a logging company. The Sierra Club and other environmentalist groups can lobby against it and point out the conflict of interest to other Congressmen.
Or we can lobby against corporate interests ourselves - grass roots lobbying - like with the SOPA and PIPA stuff.
OR we can lobby for something, like single payer health insurance. Because they millionaires on Capital Hill with their Congressional perks would never think of such a thing.
Or lobby for more national parks.
Or lobby for reduction in taxes.
Or ......
Because just having the Congress people left to their own devices would lead us down an even worse path that we are on now.
But what I think we should outlaw is corporate lobbying. A corporation should have no political voice at all.Neither should government employees lobbying to make their jobs easier - like law enforcement lobbying for our Civil Liberties to be taken away because they're too lazy to do their job or because they want more power: the wars on terror and drugs and child porn excuses have eroded our liberties too much. And keep in mind "law and order" conservatives, those will be used as an excuse to take our guns away so don't go for the lie of "if you do nothing wrong; you have nothing to worry about" bullshit.
Yep, this is exactly the way petitions in the UK worked when they were interested years ago, and still largely work today.
They were sold as a way of using the internet to help get people involved in democracy.
But what they really were was a way of using the internet to allow politicians to pretend they give a fuck about democracy.
Things like the Digital Economy Act were some of the most voted against, but just got pretty much entirely ignored, now the new government has revamped the petitions barely a couple of thousand people have voted, despite I think hundreds of thousands, possibly even millions having voted on a petition about that the first time around.
The petitions are just another way of pretending politicians care about the general populace, whilst doing quite the fucking opposite. The Whitehouse has obviously learnt from our successive governments what a useful tool they are for distracting people from the real situation.
You would like to think that? Well, go right ahead and think it. That won't make it true, but it might make you feel better.
CLUE: The corporates don't send their specialists to explain the real facts of life to congress critters. Instead, they send PR/HR/marketdroids with deep pockets. The specialists are kept at their desks, or in the shop, or out in the field, where facts are actually useful.
I invite you to read Allen Greenspan's recent remarks about banking legislation. Words to the effect, "We thought the banks could make decisions that were best for them - how wrong we were!"
Corporations never do anything "for the greater good". Today, they don't even do things for their own good. The zombies only have eyes for quarterly profit statements, totally unaware that those statements are full of lies.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I think what has gotten people so anti-lobbyist is that they don't just do that anymore. The lobbyist organizations don't just do to DC and say, "We have some concerned citizens (businesses) about this topic." They go to DC and say, "We have some concerned business about this topic, and, by the way, the businesses I represent have a ton of money that would love to donate to your election fund if you vote the right way. We could also probably use a person like you on our Board of Directors after your terms are up, if you get this bill passed, and, oh yeah, I got a winter retreat in the Caribbean that you can use this year. No expenses paid." That's the difference, and that's what not only makes it unethical at best but illegal at worst.
Actually I would argue that JUST lobbying is fine i.e. putting an argument to a politician that a law should be changed. It's when the lobbying involves large amounts of cash, fancy holidays and expensive gifts that it stops being lobbying and becomes bribery.
Lobbying = Right to Petition.
Contributing to a campaign = Free Speech.
Quid Pro Quo ( for contributing to a campaign ) = Bribery.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Yeah, that really pisses me off, especially when MPAA exec Michael O’Leary said that the agency “will come forward with language that will address some of the legitimate concerns." What??? I don't remember when he became an elected official. How is a lobbyist writing our legislation? This violates the very tenets that the US was founded on. So, now we have the corporations writing our laws, too.
He should have said:
The people running the banks most definitely did make decisions that were best for the people running the banks.
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment