Foxes in Charge of the Henhouse

[brother-dour.livejournal.com]

...and they are greedy foxes.

Ladies and gentlemen, please turn your attention to the Huffington Post article I found today via an anti-lobbying community I watch on Facebook (yeah, I know, talk about shooting for the moon):

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mansur-gidfar/theres-something-absolute_b_4177330.html?utm_hp_ref=politics

In a nutshell: there is a bill currently in the U.S. House of Representatives which eliminates key anti-speculation regulations in the Frank-Dodd Act which supposedly has 'broad bipartisan support'.  This is what is destroying the U.S., and by association the rest of the world: corporate lobbying run rampant.  Special interest groups which have essentially unlimited lobbying power in the U.S., to the point that U.S. politicians are allowing them to write bills.  Sure, there were other examples- SOPA comes to mind, being as it was pretty much exclusively written by MPAA and RIAA shills.  But in both cases, this is proof that the U.S. is no longer anything like a representative government- it is a plutocracy, plain and simple.

And while it is easy to say 'lobbying must stop', unfortunately I see three problems here (and two are fundamental with the U.S. system of governnance).  One, the very people who in the United States would be drafting and approving anti-lobbying legislation are the same people who benefit the most from lobbying - the foxes (U.S. Congresspeople).  You can hardly expect anyone to cut their own throats, especially career politicians!  Second, thanks to SCOTUS rulings on corporate personhood and campaign contributions, any kind of meaningful lobbying reform, will most likely require a Constitutional amendment. And who traditionally implements Constitutional Amendments? That's right: Congress.  The third and possibly most insidious problem, though, is public apathy.  We argue back and forth about Left versus Right, Conservative versus Liberal, with gusto here and all the time.  But really, those arguments are pointless while the system is fundamentally broken.  The fact that most Americans even are totally ignorant of how lobbying affects them and how much it has diluted the political power of the voter only makes the status quo more resilient to change.

EDIT: so we know what must change to prevent another 2008 housing collapse, or another 2013 government shutdown / borderline default.  The question is: given the above, how do we change it?

Comments

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

What are you talking about?!? Consolidation of media outlets since the early 1970s has worked wonderfully here! WONDERFULLY!!!

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Oh, we have *much* more consolidation of media than you do. 70% of daily newspapers sold here are owned by Rupert, and the commercial television news pretty much runs the headlines of the newspaper as news. There is only one non-Murdoch news organisation and that's the one Jabba has bought.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Yikes! Here, we still have a few laws that mandate some separation, but only for local markets. And yes, the telly here also parrots the papers. It's easier* than reporting.

*aka Cheaper.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

We still have cross media laws; Rupert can't buy the free to air TV stations (although he does own most of the cable network). I think there's also laws about how many papers in an area you can have, but the problem here is we have one national daily (The Australian, Murdoch), then we have one daily in both in Sydney and Melbourne that aren't owned by Murdoch, plus some other regional towns in New South Wales and Victoria, but the rest of the daily papers are Murdoch. So in most cities in Australia, if you want a morning paper, it has to be a Murdoch paper.


The joke here is that the company is called "News Limited" because that's what they sell.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

We're the same here. Air telly was controlled by the Federal Communications Commission; cable was never regulated. That's where he struck first. And for all the hype Faux News gets, it has a very limited viewership and should be ignored; the fact that it's constantly cited and emulated shows how colluded the other players are with Rupert.

We have no national paper of record (except maybe for USA Today, and it sucks balls, written for the shortest attention spans still allowable to control functional breathing).