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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."
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Of course nothing will happen. Since when do crooks convict themselves ?
Seriously, what's the difference between lobbying and bribery?
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..."
The petition to take the petitions seriously (AKA the "calling shenanigans on "representation" petition) gained the required number of signatures already and was subsequently completely ignored.
Link: https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#%21/petition/actually-take-these-petitions-seriously-instead-just-using-them-excuse-pretend-you-are-listening/grQ9mNkN
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."
I mean that.
Sincerely,
Signature # 7,023
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
a corporation made up of specialists in a field would know better how things in their expertise work as opposed to politicians (e.g. technology, education, environment, etc.).
The experts really think that an issue is important, then they can lobby as individuals for that issue - whatever it may be.
If only there was a line that can be easily identified between "Corporation that knows what it's doing for the greater good" and "Corporation that is trying to abuse the hell out of the system and/or doing something stupid".
Yes there is a line.
Corporations always do what's necessary to bolster their bottom line and it is always at the expense of people.
By all means, post an example - just one would be more than sufficient since I stated an absolute - of a corporation lobbying on the behalf of the public good AND that is detrimental to their profits.
Just one to blow me out of the water and I'll kiss goatse on the ass.
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.
I actually worked for a period of time with a former deputy counsel at the Federal Election Commission - What most people don't understand is that the definition of "bribery" here implies that the recipient was doing something illegal - which representatives weren't. By the legal standards, absolutely nothing wrong occurred (the ethical part is another matter). The sad fact is that it's perfectly acceptable for someone to tell a congressman that they will "give you X amount of money" if they vote a certain way, introduce a bill, etc.
I know a decent amount about this stuff because I spent a number of months pursuing a concept that was right up this alley - it allowed average people to band together to help influence legislation by providing a way to collectively say something like "20,000 people will give you $10 dollars each if you introduce legislation to save the whales and vote yes". The idea was to balance out corporate and special interests (in an admittedly sort of perverted and crazy way. The money would actually leave donors hands and sit in a pool until some conditions were met to release it). Was serious enough about it for a while, and we actually ended up interviewing as finalists in Las Vegas for TechStars (not 100% sure why they were interested lol, but they invited us out, although we ultimately didn’t get in). I eventually decided the whole thing was probably too crazy and I needed a real job.
I worked with the lawyer to vet the whole thing and make sure we wouldn’t end up getting sued by the FEC. He had concerns, but the idea of holding money over people’s heads in exchange for votes wasn’t one of them. He didn’t even bat an eye about it. I honestly have no idea what actually counts as a “bribe” anymore after working with him. Maybe there are still ethical concerns (violating congressional ethics rules, that is, not general ethics), but legally, I’m pretty sure this isn’t even remotely a concern.
The website is still up as it was when we applied to TechStars and such if you care to look at the concept – http://oltest3.heroku.com was the testing site. The site’s name was OpenLobby (openlobby.com will just bring you to the landing site. ) Shame it didn’t work out. :)
If you want a great read on how fcked up campaign finance is, check out "Unstacking the Deck: A Reporter's Guide To Campaign Finance". A bit outdated now, but I found it hard to read without thinking that half of congress deserves to be thrown in jail.