I’ll remind everyone of the Princeton study that proved our democracy is a sham. Policy outcomes are almost exclusively the product of the preferences of economic elites, not of the People. If you do get a legislative outcome you wanted it’s a coincidence that some big power’s agenda accidentally aligned with your own.
The Princeton study actually showed that when it comes to advancing policies, it was pretty much a wash.
Their difference came in when looking at getting policies blocked. If a policy was unpopular with economic elites, they were effective at getting it shut down.
It’s an important distinction, because there’s a clear way to see what causes this behavior. There are a myriad of ways that our systems make it easy to block things rather than get things done. And if people realized that, there’s a pretty clear path for reform.
If you click through to the (much better) article on The Markup, you can see that the lobbying group strongly advocating killing the bill entirely and apparently thought they had succeeded until was voted through and signed. Their request for revisions to be based on some genuine concerns that being obligated to sell every component off-the-shelf means they are telling competitors (and counterfeiters) exactly how to build their devices. It seems like it was just laziness on Hochul's part to just accept their terms verbatim instead of meeting in the middle. But the bill is still a first of it's kind and huge win for Right to Repair.
Idk what this means in this context. There are basically zero right to repair laws in America except this one. Prior to December, no company had any obligation at all. NY just created the window. Once this goes into effect, tech companies are going to essentially forced to comply in order to operate in NY. The other 49 states or the federal government can basically only make the rule broader.
Nope, thats what they want you to believe. It was always only about making the dame parts and schematics available that their own repair people habe access to
I mean it’s really about identifying rules that are anti majoritarian.
On the federal level, the filibuster is an obvious example of a an anti majoritarian rule that creates perverse incentives.
Going deeper, the way that the individual houses are structured gives significant power to committee chairs who gain power through seniority and fundraising for their parties, which creates centralized points of leverage for lobbyists.
What we’ve seen over time is that fewer and fewer bills get passed, and individual bills themselves get larger. This is a result of rules and customs changing within the house and senate themselves that have made it harder and harder to pass small bills, so everything gets rolled into monster packages and the process get more obscured to people who are on the outside.
The thing is that all of these rules get set by majority vote. Leadership elections happen by majority vote. Changing rules can happen without consent of the other house. The issue is that there’s very little understanding or focus on why they are important.
> it’s really about identifying rules that are anti majoritarian.
You say this as if anti majoritarian is a bug. It's not. It's a feature. The US system is supposed to prevent tyranny of the majority. That's why there are checks and balances in it. That's why the Constitution limits the powers of the branches of government, and why further limits were put in place in the Bill of Rights. The US system is not supposed to be a tool for the majority to enforce its will on everyone. It's supposed to be a tool for protecting everyone's basic rights and limiting government to certain particular functions, not to allow it to do whatever a 51% majority wants. That was the original idea of the founders of the US system.
I would say that, if anything, we have too much majoritarian thinking in the US today, and I would support amending the Constitution to put more roadblocks in the way of a 51% majority being able to simply run roughshod over everybody else.
> all of these rules get set by majority vote
Yes, and this is an example of too much majoritarian thinking; whoever has the majority in either house of Congress takes that as permission to gerrymander the rules however they like to favor their preferences.
There were a whole lot of things in the US system of government that were put there on purpose but have turned out to definitely be bad. The fact that an element is a "feature" doesn't mean it didn't turn out to be a bad idea, in practice. If a tiny minority of rich people & companies can leverage our "anti-tyranny-of-the-majority" features so well that their use of it is practically the only use... that's broken. "It's that way on purpose" isn't a rebuttal to "it's broken".
There's a reason we don't push our system on other countries even when we're the ones setting up a new government—it's basically a ho-hum fact among people who are into that kind of thing (so, the ones who tend to end up in charge of directing the creation new governments—at least in charge of the boring details) that the US system blows goats, but some of the ways that it's broken also mean that it's nearly impossible to fix without a revolution. This has been essentially regarded as a fact in poli-sci circles since... I dunno, probably the early 20th century I'd say (Germany and Japan didn't get our system after WWII, notably, and that wasn't by accident)
> There were a whole lot of things in the US system of government that were put there on purpose but have turned out to definitely be bad.
I don't agree that there were "a whole lot", but yes, some of the original features were bad. The founders knew they couldn't avoid that, which is why they included an amendment process. Which has been used to fix a number of the original features that turned out to be bad.
I also don't agree that the brokenness in the current US system is due to too much use of anti-majoritarian features. I think it's due to too little use of such features. (Well, that and simply ignoring the Constitution altogether when it is politically expedient.)
> The founders knew they couldn't avoid that, which is why they included an amendment process.
Our bad election rules make coalition-building to accomplish even very popular things really difficult if powerful interests oppose them, and it's getting worse the more sophisticated the game-playing within our set of rules gets. Moreover, a bunch of the reforms we need would threaten the power of those who could, realistically, work to effectively change the system (see again: broken election process) so they simply will not happen.
We have trouble accomplishing things with overwhelming popularity in the general population that don't need an amendment—amendments are all but dead under modern electoral and political game conditions, and fixing that would require... an amendment. Key reforms that would fix the very deepest problems are about as likely as a literal miracle happening.
> It's supposed to be a tool for protecting everyone's basic rights and limiting government to certain particular functions, not to allow it to do whatever a 51% majority wants. That was the original idea of the founders of the US system.
The US Senate process to force an end to (previously unlimited) debate on an issue and hold a vote on the matter is not a feature put in place by the Constitution.
It's a rule put in place by the Senate in the 1900's.
> this is an example of too much majoritarian thinking; whoever has the majority in either house of Congress takes that as permission to gerrymander the rules however they like to favor their preferences.
This is literally how the Constitution specifies that the legislature will operate. The Senate sets it's own rules, by majority vote. This is how the "nuclear option" to change the Filibuster rule was recently implemented.
>Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) used the nuclear option Thursday morning, meaning he called for a vote to change the Senate rules by a simple majority vote. It passed, 52 to 48.
> This is literally how the Constitution specifies that the legislature will operate.
Yes, it is: each house of Congress is explicitly permitted to set its own rules of procedure. That is obviously not an anti-majoritarian feature of the Constitution. I didn't say every single provision in the Constitution was anti-majoritarian, or that the founders did a perfect job of implementing their ideas.
> The Senate sets it's own rules, by majority vote. This is how the "nuclear option" to change the Filibuster rule was recently implemented.
And also, of course, how the filibuster rule was put in place in the first place.
The alternative to majority rule is tyranny of the minority, specifically the minority with the most power/voice/money. I think what you're arguing for isn't against tyranny of the majority, but a limit to the power of the federal government/more local government.
For instance, the majority of the country wants universal healthcare and legalized cannabis, yet the tyranny of the minority keeps blocking these efforts for their benefit. Without majority rule, we have a ridiculously dysfunctional government that doesn't represent the people.
> The alternative to majority rule is tyranny of the minority
Being anti-majority doesn't mean pro-minority.
It is about decreasing the weight of merely being in the majority as an input feature to optimal decision making. It is protecting against pseudo-relevance majority can pose as an overemphasized decision making strategy. This doesn't mean all ideas that manifest as majority is irrelevant, not at all, it is protecting against the false positives.
Mind you a lack of steamrolling with majority alone forces a downstream integration of opponent thoughts.
Think it like a collective intelligence architecture that is trying to make sure we don't get stuck in local optima.
That’s all well and good, but when these issues come up, people seemingly turn their brains off and repeat “tyranny of the majority” without evaluating the empirical reality of how these systems function in practice.
I’m amenable tot he notion that there should be some guardrails on simple majoritarianism, but it shouldn’t follow that all anti majoritarian rules are good.
We do have guardrails. The constitution puts various things off-limits to any sort of majoritarian process of regular governing.
Should there be more things off-limits? Should there be less? Intelligent people could disagree, but the off-limits category already exists and there is a process to change what is in it.
> The alternative to majority rule is tyranny of the minority
That's one alternative, but not the only one. Another alternative is for the government to not have the power to tyrannize in the first place. As the saying goes, the problem is not that politicians can be bought but that they have something valuable to sell.
> the majority of the country wants universal healthcare and legalized cannabis
I don't think this is true. I think vocal minorities want these things.
If the government followed the constituion this wouldn't be problems:
1. Marijuana would never have been illegal at the federal level because an amendment wasn't passed.
2. Healthcare and any other federal welfare policies could be ennacted by passing an amendment.
If there isn't broad consensus across the country to pass an amendment then states can do it independently. There is no reason a state can't have single payer healthcare, except that they don't want to pay for it and want to just add the cost to the national debt.
You are ignoring the constitutional article granting congress the ability to make laws. Congress passed laws making weed illegal and hasn’t passed a law granting (or prohibiting) universal healthcare.
States can, indeed do it independently. There’s at least 3 states with a public option
Yeah, exactly - what can't be enacted under the commerce clause. Everything impacts commerce, growing wheat on your own land for your own use impacts commerce. It's not legitimate. Once that door was opened, it went from enumerated power to anything not prohibited.
The original founders didn’t design the current iteration of senate and house rules. You didn’t need 60 votes in the senate to pass anything in 1795.
But in a way you’re right. “The founders” created a government that protected aristocratic interests explicitly. Most states had property requirements to vote when the constitution was ratified, and even higher property requirements to hold office. So you can definitely say that they would have been fine with a system that allowed moneyed interests to block legislation they didn’t like.
Yeah one of the ways 17th amendment really broke things was the Senate went from an elitist organization representing the intrests of states and statesman like the UN in order to balance the ills of populist House but now it's got all the populist ills of the House but non of the bennifits of geographic or population representation.
Appeals to authority of dead people’s political documents is propaganda.
Just because we can invoke historical story does not mean we abide it today.
The majority inherently rules whether it’s US Constitution or the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. Not really sure how you get to a system of material comfort and logistics we have without majority buy in to not fight and kill.
I wish people would realize how silly they sound reciting the dead peoples chants when the literal world clearly shows majority rule is not so bad literally. For whatever reason quite a few folks prefer to fight over which vain elders hallucinations and diatribes are the one true social system when the reality is providing real stuff to survive is all society really is about.
> dead people’s political documents is propaganda.
Yours is no less propaganda.
People do cultural learning, pretty much everything you use from technology to medicine and yes politics is overwhelmingly based on dead people's ideas. That is the basis of us as cultural beings.
You're right with cultural learning we might inherit noise too, but you'll have to fight against the content of those ideas, not dismiss from mere historicity. If an idea has merit, it will be timeless.
Disagree I have to fight them. Every political system is eventually jettisoned by generational churn.
Medicines we keep using keep proving their value to the present through experiment. We have binned plenty discovered in the past but later revealed to be snake oil.
As ephemeral gibberish does not exist it is naturally lost to time as those who memorized it die off. What’s literally true remains always verifiable by experiment.
I can find academic papers, political arguments we are in violation of the old ideas today anyway. How do we know we even abide them as intended and aren’t just abiding arbitrary math for staffing institutions described by the Constitution? They are not like organic chemistry where cause-effect is obvious. Does “America” give rise to society or people engineering together casually referring to some old gibberish when pressed? How do you test for existence of political ideology except by populist poll? Democratic majority rule. But that’s anti-America which is to prevent majority rule!
What I advocate is more like forgetting they exist by not teaching them. We can teach how to create together versus destroy each other, without the history lesson, and measure for impact literally to avoid carrying forward snake oil.
The structure of the U.S. government was explicitly designed to be anti majoritarian. For many people, in fact probably the majority of the population this is a feature.
The ability for a small number of extremely wealthy people to dictate what laws should not be passed is not protection of the minority, and if it was intended by the founders (which in some ways it was, though not in the form it takes today) then it should be opposed.
The founders never even intended that the majority be able to vote.
Really, their core quibble with the Crown, and the sticking point that prevented any peaceful solution (because compromise would have seriously threatened the political power of the nobility in Great Britain), was that they wanted rich people to have the franchise and to be able to hold high-level offices, not just aristocrats.
The problem is, when the majority rules, the result is inevitably a shitshow.
The founders understood that, which is why they set things up the way they did. Nothing has changed since then. If anything it's even more true, given the new and extensive ways the elites have to manipulate majority opinion.
I think where the founders got it wrong is not expecting the population to be so ignorant and easily swayable. For instance, school voucher measures, which would benefit so many people, tend to get shut down due to lobbying efforts from rich and powerful teacher's unions: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2016/11/13/teach...
If people were wiser and did their research better, these kinds of campaigns would be ineffective and the rich would lose their sway.
The founders also probably didn't expect our government to grow so large and so corrupt. The richest and most corrupt entity in the United States is the government itself. The vast majority of the government is not even beholden to people at all in any way, shape, or form. This includes the tens of thousands of employees in the federal bureaucracies, as well as organizations like teacher's unions who are funded indirectly by tax dollars. Many, if not all, monopolies today are also artificially created by government policy, allowing for an unholy union of corporations and the government.
The pieces I talk about having nothing to do with the constitution, and they aren’t really a part of any explicitly planned design.
Now, do people claim that anti majoritarianism is good? Sure. Clearly there are people who benefit from this system. In addition, a lot of people do justify it who seemly don’t directly benefit economically, simply due to an ideological affinity.
Nothing about what I wrote had anything to do with what congress is authorized to do. It was about the internal rules of the house and senate, and the process by which they are made.
The Constitution specifies that the House and Senate make their own rules via a simple majority vote.
The Senate set a rule that they would require a vote to end (previously unlimited) debate and hold a vote on an issue. Originally, this required a two thirds majority, which was lowered to 60 votes later.
More recently, the Senate changed the rules again to only require a simple majority vote on some matters.
Nothing about the Filibuster rule was ever specified in the Constitution.
Thank you for writing that out, having a tangible example definitely provides more clarity to other readers.
I do want to push back though a bit. The filibuster isn’t the only rule I was referring to, and the entirety of the constitutions specification of the rule making process is literally “Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings”. So when I say rule making broadly has nothing to do with the constitution, it’s because it quite literally doesn’t.
> Nothing about what I wrote had anything to do with what congress is authorized to do. It was about the internal rules of the house and senate, and the process by which they are made.
If you genuinely don't understand how congress came about and why their actions are accepted by the other branches of government, I would recommend doing some reading of history.
It must be the case that I simply haven’t read enough, simply because my understanding differs from yours. It can’t be possible that my points are a result of careful study over several years.
Speaking of careful study. I suggest that you go back and actually read what I wrote and address what I said. Please inform me where in the constitution there is a prescription for what the house and senate rules must be.
You keep talking about congressional authority. I will reiterate, that is completely tangential to my points.
If you think my response was condescending, why did you provide a substantive reply?
Since it's quite rare, other readers will have the suspicion that something's up, either that the substantive part is not really so or that the alleged condescension is only imagined.
^ this. It turns out a government will more effectively avoid flagrant injustice if its structure makes it difficult to accomplish anything quickly without supermajoritarian agreement.
I’m not sure how higher supermajority requirement would have prevented the war on drugs from happening.
There was alignment both at the elite level and the popular level in support of those policies for a long time. It functioned because the minorities it target were politically weak.
It sounds like you are trying to justify an anti-majoritarian stance with majoritarian consensus. If you are against majoritarianism, you should probably find another way to make your case. Here, let me help you out:
It's better for a small minority of people to make the rules. A small minority of people agree with this, thus it is correct.
Right. It's like the argument that the 2 party system is an intentional brake on democracy, so we have to legislate reforms into being... with the permission of the 2 party system that determines whether legislation gets passed? The clear logical extension of the argument is that reform on the terms in which we have these problems is ultimately not very workable.
If a policy was unpopular with economic elites, they were effective at getting it shut down.
The push for Federalism is a good example of this. If you hear a politician claiming "states' rights", this might just be why. One material example of this is the NRA funding lawsuits against the Brady Bill, despite the gun control measures being popular with non elites.
The authors of that study started by filtering down a giant list of survey responses to those where there's a significant difference in responses between the "donor class" and everyone else. I forget exactly how often that happened, but it's a small number.
So, just in the premise the study, by needing to throw away almost all the survey responses where everyone agrees and get the policies what they want, actually goes a far way to debunking the populist premise that "economic elites" and "the People" are opposing factions with inherently different political opinions.
Further, the study considered the group as "disagreeing" if the margin in survey answers was at least 10%. So if 90% of one group wanted something and 80% of the other, that was considered as them disagreeing.
When a follow-up study further filtered responses to questions where more that margin spans the 5% mark, i.e. most people in each group disagree, then the effect completely disappears and it's more or less a coin toss which way policy goes.
> The authors of that study started by filtering down a giant list of survey responses to those where there's a significant difference in responses between the "donor class" and everyone else. I forget exactly how often that happened, but it's a small number.
> So, just in the premise the study, by needing to throw away almost all the survey responses where everyone agrees and get the policies what they want, actually goes a far way to debunking the populist premise that "economic elites" and "the People" are opposing factions with inherently different political opinions.
Help me understand, it sounds like you're saying that "when the poor people agree with the rich people, everyone gets what they want and democracy is proved to be healthy, nevermind that when they disagree, the rich people get what they want anyway."
> When a follow-up study further filtered responses to questions where more that margin spans the 5% mark, i.e. most people in each group disagree, then the effect completely disappears and it's more or less a coin toss which way policy goes.
So you're saying that when like, 90% of the rich people wanted A and 90% of the poor people wanted B, then it was a coin toss? That would make a good argument if so. Can you link to the study?
EDIT: Actually now that I think about it, it doesn't really make a good argument, because the donor class is so much smaller than the non- that if 90% of donors want A and 90% of the poor want B, B should prevail easily. So if it's a coin toss, that's extremely biased, no?
>Help me understand, it sounds like you're saying that "when the poor people agree with the rich people, everyone gets what they want and democracy is proved to be healthy, nevermind that when they disagree, the rich people get what they want anyway."
Not the GP, but I think that the interests of the general public are actually much more closely aligned with those of "the elite" far more than people would like to believe. If for 90% of the issues the elite are just as likely to disagree amongst themselves than with the general public, it would be absurd to conclude that "democracy is a sham."
When Roe v. Wade got overturned, a lot of people on the internet were proclaiming this was an act by "the elite" who want cheap workers. In reality, virtually every billionaire who has a vocal opinion on abortion is pro-choice, and several have donated hundreds of millions towards the cause.
> Not the GP, but I think that the interests of the general public are actually much more closely aligned with those of "the elite" far more than people would like to believe. If for 90% of the issues the elite are just as likely to disagree amongst themselves than with the general public, it would be absurd to conclude that "democracy is a sham."
Sure, that may or may not be true, but we're discussing a study that claims that when the two groups disagree, the smaller one wins.
> When Roe v. Wade got overturned, a lot of people on the internet were proclaiming this was an act by "the elite" who want cheap workers. In reality, virtually every billionaire who has a vocal opinion on abortion is pro-choice, and several have donated hundreds of millions towards the cause.
> the interests of the general public are actually much more closely aligned with those of "the elite" far more than people would like to believe
If that were true corporate lobbying wouldn't exist, so this theory is obviously false.
We're talking about the money here.
Issues like guns, abortion, gay marriage -- social issues -- are used to divide and distract the public from the financial issues which our uniparty in DC almost always goes the same way on, and which the public generally does Not support.
Big pharma, the banks, the arms industry, big agriculture -- I mean do we really have to list every industry? All of them profit by subverting the interests of the public and they do, to the tune of trillions of dollars. "absurd to conclude that "democracy is a sham" -- not absurd, obvious.
> In reality, virtually every billionaire who has a vocal opinion on abortion is pro-choice, and several have donated hundreds of millions towards the cause.
The first part of this is just false, you're being tremendously selective about which billionaires you're including. There are plenty of stinking rich anti-abortion people who have poured huge amounts into their cause.
Now, as to which group is larger, or richer, I leave that for someone with the time to look at the data, but it is not as open and shut as you're suggesting.
> Help me understand, it sounds like you're saying that "when the poor people agree with the rich people, everyone gets what they want and democracy is proved to be healthy, nevermind that when they disagree, the rich people get what they want anyway."
Democracy is working as intended. Voters prioritize how well politicians virtue signal about wedge issues, then short-term economic stimulus (e.g. bragging about jobs created by unnecessary tax incentives), then meaningful policy, and only then, do they care about technical details of this meaningful policy. It's no surprise that they outsource the last part of lobbyists.
Unfortunately the majority are to easily distracted and manipulated to concentrate on all the WRONG issues.That goes for both parties.
The CORRECT ISSUE and primary issue we need to be focused on is conflict of interest.
It makes no sense to try to get a group of people such as congress that have conflict of interest to fix the problems they created and are benefiting from , hence the result of the Princeton study.
The sad part is that BOTH individual republicans and democrats should want to reduce conflict of interest as it benefits both sides and everyone in general. However BOTH party are too successful in keeping them fighting with each other , blaming each other, and chasing their tails trying to fix the issues with the people that created them.
I'm more and more convinced that parliament or congress by lottery would be more representative and functional as well as the death of all political parties as they exist today.
Replace them frequently and have them assemble in a place without outside influence for the duration of decision making, essentially like a jury.
I mean if you really wanted to get futuristic about it you could even have a sort of crypto sortition where everyone is completely anonymous and representatives don't even know each others identity.
> Replace them frequently and have them assemble in a place without outside influence for the duration of decision making, essentially like a jury.
A jury also gets to hear arguments from both the prosecution and the defense. For complex trials this can last weeks/months. Presumably for the "jury" legislature that you propose, you'd want lobbyists/bureaucrats to plead their case. How do you prevent them from being hoodwinked by the lobbyists/bureaucrats? If you think that they shouldn't be able to hear arguments from lobbyists/bureaucrats, how do you prevent them from coming up with absolutely braindead policies like "haha tax cuts/spending go brrr"?
I should have been more precise. I don't have an issue with public information being accessible, in fact that's kind of necessary for any democratic deliberation. What I think is relevant is nothing going out. A lobbyist making their case openly to the public is fine, that's just speech essentially, although you can have a different discussion about the media around it.
But the important benefit of an anonymous sortition in particular to me is that there is no connection between individuals and lobbyists. You cannot trade personal favours down the line. The pernicious part to me is when the guy who regulates the arms industry gets a board seat ten years later.
Essentially what I think of as ideal is a sort of black box. Uncorrelated, impersonal, representative and random snapshot of the public opinion on an issue. Transparency is I think the worst celebrated value because it opens decision makers up for capture. If the policies are still braindead afterwards, well I think then we're democratically at our wits' end.
probably there would have to many kinds of concurrent reforms and adjustments to make something like that work...
some type of lobbying reform would have to take place, as well as some kind of basic reasoning/education tests for sortition... also perhaps candidates could be picked by sortition but you'd have to get a winning vote by a majority of people etc... i wonder if there are any studies/books about this kind of thing
Presumably, like in a court of law, there could be rules and restrictions about what sort of arguments you're allowed to make in front of the jury. Just like there's some evidence and arguments that are inadmissible in court, various things (Bribery, threats, ad-hominem attacks) could be inadmissible in Congress. I haven't thought through all the implications, and you'd probably need a "judge" to interpret and enforce those restrictions.
I think a bicameral system with a House of Representatives (with a much larger body, with the number of constituents per representative fixed) and the a other body (we could even still call it the Senate for continuity and familiarity) being selected by sortition the way you describe would work well, and be a good transition step
I don't think there is a benefit to any kind of bicameral system, regardless of how it is setup. A large unicameral system allows for more direct representation and should limit the influence of money when combined with term limits.
"Tyranny of the majority" seems like more of a problem for the rich and powerful, in my experience.
I dunno, I can definitely think of some times in our history when it impacted the poorest people.
I think there’s something very useful in the elections for representatives, in terms of it being an official poll of the people.
I think sortition is a really interesting concept and could work well, but I think it won’t work if it’s the only legislative body. I would be pretty starkly against that, but I would support reforms that made it the second legislative body.
If you really want a unicameral system as your top priority, I’d support a proportional representation House of Representatives.
Proportional does not work. Most European parliaments are proportional and has the same dysfunctions as the us system. The root is always the parties. They have to go.
> The root is always the parties. They have to go.
I don't really think sortition itself would kill the parties. It does seem like a good way to weaken them, but...I suspect they would find a way to survive.
I genuinely don't know of how to do away with political parties. Is there a good example of a democratic system (or a governance by the people) that doesn't have political parties?
That’s why you need to get organized, not “vote alone”.
> Our findings of substantial influence by interest groups is particularly striking because little or no previous research has been able to estimate the extent of group influence while controlling for the preferences of other key non- governmental actors. Our evidence clearly indicates that—controlling for the influence of both the average citizen and economic elites—organized interest groups have a very substantial independent impact upon public policy. Theories of interest-group pluralism gain a strong measure of empirical support.
I would say consumers should organize, and target a few of the biggest companies supporting this bill and boycott their products until the bill gets changed. If nobody buys another iphone for 6 months, I don't think they'll have any choice but to get the bill undone. right?
What it does show is that "the people" and "the elites" agree on almost everything, more than you'd expect them to. Pretty obvious, if you pay attention at all you'd notice most Americans don't vote for economic reasons!
If you're casting a populist distinction between "economic elites" and "the People" you've already fallen for an oversimplified, cynical, inflammatory framing of the issue that has always been used by demagogues throughout history.
I'm not sure what you mean by that? Isn't there a pretty obvious distinction between the interest and desires of the mass of people vs the interests of powerful special interest groups like corporations and the very wealthy.
I mean we have no problem looking at historical society and drawing a distinction between nobility and the masses. Why does that logic fall apart in modern day societies
Populists would love to convince you that "the elites" and "the people" are distinct groups that are pitted against each other in an eternal struggle. They do this in many cases to convince "the people" to adopt radical fringe views.
In the past (and present!) this false narrative has been used to push mostly bad things: nativism, xenophobia, and really dumb economic policy. By falling for this false distinction you are priming yourself to be susceptible to demagoguery and similar bad ideas.
If you look at reality you'll find that most distinctions between "the elites" and "the people" collapse and there is substantial overlap between both groups, both in membership and in their political self-interest.
So last time this story made the rounds, the legislature had passed the bill. Then the mayor signed it into law - but not before adding some legalese that roughly amounted to "just kidding lol". Afaik nobody could explain why it was legal for the mayor to add arbitrary language without legislative oversight. Has anyone dove in to figure out how that happened?
By passing a new law, termed a "chapter amendment". These are agreed upon by the governor and the legislature in advance of the governor's signature and passed and signed rapidly thereafter.
The name of the bill is misleading. This is separate from the bill that passed and was signed into law last year.
The first few lines of the text describe it as "...to amend a chapter of the laws of 2022... as proposed in legislative bills numbers S. 4104-A and A. 7006-B" (A4104A + A7006B are the bills/now law from last year)
I downvoted this comment. The person you’re replying to seems to be using gender-neutral pronouns in good faith, and I don’t think this comment contributes to the discussion.
I think the article is incorrect on this point. The NY assembly and senate have both passed the bill that contains the changes: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2023/a1285 It hasn't yet been signed by the governor though.
I live in NY and actually reached out to both my state senator and assemblyperson multiple times in opposition to this follow up bill. I never received a substantive reply.
Laws are written in the US by the people who have time to write them: interns or lobbyists. Being a legislator is a crappy job where you have little time between fundraising and voting to read the laws you vote on, let alone write them.
If you want to make a change, show up and meet in person with state and federal legislators. And if you think, "there outght to be a law" get one written with the help of a few lawyers (who will do this usually for fun and for free) and give it to the the legislator's legislative director.
> My understanding is that you can't "show and meet with" them unless you are already a significant donor.
Very untrue. Very few US legislators will refuse a meeting with a constituent - even if you are a known donor to someone running for their seat! Most legislators have office hours in their home districts (one of my favorite Indiana senators does it at a Starbucks), and at the capitol when the legislature is in session. It may be hard (especially at the US Congress) level to travel to meet.
Where most people go wrong is trying to have an adversarial meeting where you have a big debate on some issue. Far better to get a meeting (even better if you invite friends who want to discuss an issue) to discuss how an issue is affecting you, or something you need help with. You may get pushed to a staffer and get a quick meet & greet with the legislator... A lot of people get insulted that the staffer is an intern. Remember, interns are one of two parties that write laws and interns are literally the bulk of most legislator's staff! Also, come armed with real stories, and real people who would like to talk to the rep about the same issue. You'll be amazed how approachable most congresspeople are on most issues.
That's not entirely true. It's more like if you are a significant donor your name is always going first on the schedule of meetings for that day. Local constituents will usually get scheduled over and over again until some random 15-min block that the politician usually just glazes over for. They will meet with you if whatever your issues is directly affects their ability to fundraise though.
> local constituents will usually get scheduled over and over again
I've had four US different congresspersons from both parties make a lobbyist wait when they found out it was four constituents. All of them said this: "I get so few visitors from home, and I already know what ______ is going to say." I've even ended up at lunch with senators because they are sick of talking to the same people over and over.
(I go to DC as a citizen every other year to advocate for things I care deeply about)
We can blame big tech (or economic elites more generally) for prioritising their financial gain (hence what they can claim from the rest of society) over e.g., ther sustainability and welfare of the very same society on which they lay these claims.
We can blame captured politicians for listening to powerful yet minority interests over the interests of the very people who appointed them to these roles.
We can blame citizens for making politics (literally) somebody else's business by either abstaining or re-electing people who are unfit for office. We can also blame (some of) them for eagerly contracting with said "big tech" and thus enabling it to have that oversized influence on society in the first place.
We can blame soft culture, formal educational systems and journalism for not educating, informing and enabling citizens to play the role that they need to play if the system is to function as it is supposed to.
There is plenty of blame to pass around. But there are also some people who cared enough to track and surface this [0],[1] and many other people in other walks of life that care enough to raise a voice, take a stance, or otherwise inconvenience themselves when facing similar malignancy elsewhere. Its a state of mind and it can be flipped.
Sure, but the point remains the same and it does not really change the validity of the argument itself. Weapons manufacturers have one goal and that one goal is satisfied by creating a better weapon. Even viruses have found somewhat unexpected uses ( stuxnet comes to mind ).
You get the politicians you vote for. If you hate this, vote for the other candidate next time you get a chance. People voting in corrupt, captured incumbents because they don't want to 'waste their vote', or because they only vote along party lines, is the reason this stuff keeps happening. You could count on the courts, but ultimately you have a responsibility as a voter and can only pass the buck for so long.
>If you hate this, vote for the other candidate next time you get a chance.
More like if you hate this, run for office yourself or get heavily involved in local politics and make sure someone worthwhile is running in the primaries for your chosen political party. Unfortunately without heavy local involvement by citizens who understand and care about the issues the process gets taken over by political machines and corporate money, just like Congress. Then you end up with a choice between (aside from mostly inconsequential culture war issues) two mostly indistinguishable establishment stooges to choose between in the general election.
That’s pretty normal. My ex worked at congress and she said that most bills are reviewed and changed by lobbyists before they are submitted. And a lot of their changes get adopted almost verbatim. Same happens with regulations.
> “We had every environmental group walking supporting this bill,” Fahy told Grist. “What hurt this bill is Big Tech was opposed to it.”
> A broad coalition of manufacturers opposed the bill in the spring, and its sponsors had to make significant compromises in order to pass it. “We made a lot of changes to get it over the finish line in the first day or two of June,” Fahy said.
Corporations don't vote on legislation! But the legislators are speaking as though they do!
This is where all the that money in politics has led us: the lobbyists are a proxy or litmus test for what is going to happen to legislator's campaign funding. Therefore, the lobbyists have to be pleased for legislation to go through. Effectively - corporations get to write legislation.
The whole process would be fine if the legislators listened to all lobbyists. But realistically they only listen to the lobbyists who bring in the most money.
I don't think the process will ever be fine until lobbyists have nothing to offer legislators besides the merits of their arguments. As long as corporations can make financial contributions to legislators' campaigns, the system is cursed.
It was my impression lobbyists usually write the bills themselves. I don't know if this is how it's always done, but my company recently worked with lobbyists and a senators assistant and the lobbyists wrote a paragraph that, once approved by this assistant, went straight into the appropriations bill. Perfect example of pay to play.
> It was my impression lobbyists usually write the bills themselves
Here's a fairly recent example:
> When the legislation that became known as "Obamacare" was first drafted, the key legislator was the Democratic Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus, whose committee took the lead in drafting the legislation. As Baucus himself repeatedly boasted, the architect of that legislation was Elizabeth Folwer, his chief health policy counsel; indeed, as Marcy Wheeler discovered, it was Fowler who actually drafted it.
What was most amazing about all of that was that, before joining Baucus' office as the point person for the health care bill, Fowler was the Vice President for Public Policy and External Affairs (i.e. informal lobbying) at WellPoint, the nation's largest health insurance provider
...as Wheeler wrote at the time: "to the extent that Liz Fowler is the author of this document, we might as well consider WellPoint its author as well."
To add insult to injury, the same lobbyist was later put in charge of drawing up the rules to implement the law.
>More amazingly still, when the Obama White House needed someone to oversee implementation of Obamacare after the bill passed, it chose . . . Liz Fowler.
Senators wouldn't even return our phone calls. So we had to resort to hiring a lobbyist who they would answer the phone for.
Anytime we'd have a call with the senators assistant, we'd have a call with the lobbyist first. He'd coach us on how to behave, dress, and what to say. We'd then call the assistant and perform our rehearsed parts just like any other theater production.
Access to our representative is gate-kept financially.
I can’t think of any punishment harsh for what Baucus did to the country during Obamacare. He basically singlehandedly f..ked it up. The damage he did will be felt for decades in the form of bankruptcies and people dying because they can’t afford care.
Even more recently, Texas, Oklahoma, Indiana, West Virginia all passed laws within the last year or two that deny state contracts to any company who divests from oil/gas. Just insanely unconstitutional and vague, and a good reminder of why there's so much astroturfing around ESG, but those laws were adopted largely verbatim from "sample" text written by oil & gas lobbyists and energy companies;
Here's how this works: billionaires and large companies pour billions into "think tanks", either directly or indirectly. Those think tanks represent a particular set of interests that align with the donors. Part of the job of those think tanks is quite literally to write legislation.
There have been cases of certainly state legislation where the legislator introducing the bill has forgotten to take off the think tank's logos.
We are in the era of money = political speech thanks almost entirely to 5 justices who voted for the opinion in Citizens United v. FEC [1]. The damage this has done and will continue to do is almost incalculable.
This sort of thing accelerated in the 80s[0] as businesses in the 70s saught to make lobbying gains as they have seen public interest groups achieve in the 60s an 70s.
Another shift, is that it was culturally considered bad practice to become a lobbyist[1] quote:
>In 1975 the rare hiring of a former member of Congress as a lobbyist made eyebrows rise
When you combine the two, along with the ever decreasing capacity of being a congress member, lobbying effectively supplants the duty of "law making" to a large degree, and thats how we end up with bills that are almost entirely written by lobbyists in the first place. Of course, this opens up the revolving door practice by lobbyist firms to retain their advantage by hiring former congress people, which deepens the entrenched nature of the power of lobbying.
Frankly, I don't see lobbyist language making it into bills as a problem, but which lobbyists language get into the bills.
Should you make a law without being informed? No, you would want to have a lot of information and understanding of a problem to make a law, preferably informed by history of attempts at reform and comparison to other countries attempts with critical assessments.
Do our political offices have the institutions in place to deeply understand problems and create potential solutions? I doubt we have the time or the resources at our politicians command to do that.
Would you be happy if the ACLU, EFF, or whatever political organization you donate to wrote the laws that eventually congress voted on? I think the EFF probably has a better grasp on tech issues than our representatives and I think they could write a better law than our senile stone age dinosaur politicians could.
This headline breeds cynicism and completely focuses on the wrong thing.
It's not that "a Big Tech lobbyist got language into a bill", but that "Apple, Google, and Samsung corrupted our legal process to benefit themselves over the public."
Look up your state's legislature and see how many people are employed as staff and analysts and then look at how many bills are proposed every session. Most bills are not written by the legislators or even their staffs, whether or not it's big business, activists groups, or whatever.
As for some of the over the top bloviating in this thread, that kind of nonsense just makes opposition useless because it's just not persuasive. "Democracy is a sham" whether or not you believe it in whole or in part or not at all won't help you get anything done and I'm willing to bet that the person saying that doesn't even know how to find what bills are pending in their state, let alone care except when a news headline makes them outraged. If you care that much do something, don't write revolutionary fan fiction.
Most laws don't affect you. If they do, support the people who vote how you want. It's not that hard and I'd be willing to bet that for the majority of people here the system is working out just fine for you.
In the scope of the changes made, it seems fairly innocuous, but does anyone have an idea why they may have cut the $10 minimum?
It seems bizarre for the lobbyists to have removed it for no reason, but I can't think of one except something like making cheap watches more expensive could make an Apple watch more appealing. Things that don't seem like realistic goals of the lobbyists.
It’s still a person. Stop buying into euphemisms for person like “employee” and groups of people like “company”.
Very militaristic, simplistic fake world with hierarchy. Not a shock many winners in the post-world war economy were also fighters in world wars and our job memes echo the structure they had foisted upon them. How were they to make sense of their business if they weren’t at the top of the hierarchy with a rigid chain of command?
Society still has plenty of embedded post-war shell shock and Cold War paranoia in its collective limbic system given all the folks running the world the last few decades were kids in those eras.
Just like with religion before, a lot of effort is put to validation and preservation memory of the elders.
Prior to world wars 90% of workers were self employed. Many economic truisms are driven by contemporary nostalgia. Whole lot of sunk cost fallacy backing why we organize as we do.
so i see a lot of posts about the nomenclature of democracy and its machinations of change in favour of elites but i think theres something people are missing here.
the amended text is blind and harmful not to the end user in the near term, but to the corporate entity itself in the longterm. as technologies like 3d printing and machining advance, and as the end users equipment becomes evermore cumbersome to engage and repair, it is a foregone conclusion that hackers can and will circumvent, override, and make obsolete the arbitrary controls and restrictions that forbid reasonable owners from performing repair and maintenance outside the confines of a rent-seeker. The sheer volume of people and groups this inconveniences makes this inevitable.
manufacturers had their chance to meet on common ground, to re-evaluate their profit strategies and predatory practices, and in the end they fell back on the simplest laurels and chose to poison the legislative assuming this was an absolute control. You cannot stop hackers by doubling down on the very policies they seek to amend, you can only slow them for a time and in the process discourage and infuriate your paying customers. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo could give a doctoral lecture on this, if agricultural farm equipment manufacturers cared to listen.
> You cannot stop hackers by doubling down on the very policies they seek to amend,
You're assuming their goal is to "stop" every hacker, it's not. It's to secure this revenue stream for ag tech farm manufacturers, which they've done. They don't care if a handful of hackers fix a few tractors; if any get too big the boot comes down hard and they're ruined by fines and jail time. These changes are meant to block serious competition, by ensuring the vast majority of farmers will need to get their stuff repaired in official shops, which they still will.
>Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo could give a doctoral lecture on this
On what? How to make tons of money all over the world for decades? Those are some of the most powerful and successful companies in history.
One doubts anyone can muster the energy even to pretend to surprise in this case. It's worth keeping details like this in mind, however, when discussing society-destroying disasters like stupid wars in other hemispheres or insurance-firm-directed health care. We hear lots of arguments that boil down to: "don't criticize democracy; if the'merican people wanted something else they would vote differently!" As we see more clearly in simpler cases like this, in USA we don't have representative government; rather we have an increasingly less convincing simulation of representative government.
>Political corruption was rampant, as business leaders spent significant amounts of money ensuring that government did not regulate the activities of big business—and they more often than not got what they wanted. Such corruption was so commonplace that in 1868 the New York state legislature legalized such bribery.
Historian Howard Zinn argues that the U.S. government was acting exactly as Karl Marx described capitalist states: "pretending neutrality to maintain order, but serving the interests of the rich". Historian Mark Wahlgren Summers calls it, "The Era of Good Stealings," noting how machine politicians used "padded expenses, lucrative contracts, outright embezzlements, and illegal bond issues.
ok - but you could see these things as persistent illness in any civilization of this size.. So, outrage at the existence alone is not constructive; instead treat the illness knowing that it will never completely go away. "checks and balances" you know?
there is a tendency to boil over and demand immediate change.. temper that, make longer commitments?
The first Gilded Age only gave way to the Progressive Era's reforms after an expose that got the general public completely pissed off.
>The Treason of the Senate was a series of articles in Cosmopolitan magazine by David Graham Phillips, published in 1906. The articles were each published a month apart, beginning with the forward in February and the last article, in July. The series is a caustic exposé of the corruption of the United States Senate
Phillips published this series of articles at the close of what is to be considered the Gilded Age, which is the period when money and politics became very interconnected. The expansion of the railroad industry combined with increased production of steel, iron, and oil contributed to a group of immensely wealthy businessmen that came to be known by the term tycoon. These wealthy tycoons used their wealth to influence the already contentious politics of the time.
I hope you're right. Please join us at the anti-war rally at the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday at 12:30. [0] If you can't make it to Washington, there are affiliated rallies happening in various locations around the world this weekend.
longer commitments are what entrench these patterns. the illness must be allowed to be terminal - we can plant good seeds in fresh ground sooner or wait it out as things get progressively worse and build the pressure of the ending catastrophe ever higher.
An analogue is controlled, regular burns. Look at California - we stopped allowing the dead matter to cull and now we have blazes that take out whole townships.
The only way to break an infinite recursive loop is a crash. That's where we are with money => influence => law => money
Bread and circuses[0] keep the population fed and entertained, and people will put up with a lot of bullshit from their government when those basic needs are met.
