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

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

I'm still baffled about how blind you are to the abundant evidence and data points there are to support this conclusion, choosing instead to grouse about those few cherry-picked examples that even slimly support your conclusions.

I don't consider myself blind. It's more that I see the accounts and are unconvinced, mostly due to it being tremendously anecdotal and too often pushed by those with axes to grind.

The reality of private wealth taking over public policy making is not rare, and evidence of same is abundant.

Not rare, no, but also not happening here. The movement has not been in that direction for a while.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

I don't consider myself blind.

That is the nature of blindness. Gather a bunch of color blind people together who have only known each other, have a "normally" sighted person walk in and magically select the red balls from the pile of green ones. The color blind will be none the wiser.

This blindness extends to philosophical interpretations. Yes, you are quick to dismiss those with "axes to grind." I have also seen you contort yourself into a pretzel trying not to see or to excuse folks grinding axes you regard as normal. Case in point: your very next utterance.

Not rare, no, but also not happening here. The movement has not been in that direction for a while.

The movement has absolutely been in exactly that direction since 1978. The OP cites evidence that it is "happening here."

And yet you go all Steely Dan with pretzel logic.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

The movement has absolutely been in exactly that direction since 1978. The OP cites evidence that it is "happening here."

Claims, not evidence. A significant point.

But you're giving me the Deacon Blues with this stuff.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Read the link in the OP, follow the links showing the evidence that, yes indeedy, financial and bank folks crafted some portions of the bill word for word (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/10/29/business/dealbook/29lobbyists-documents.html), and stop Chasing the Dragon of selective dismissal pretzel twisting.