Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works
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Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works
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Re: Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works
#2All you need to know, is that they take your money and force you to do things you do not want to.
Re: Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works
#3All you need to know, is that they take your money and force you to do things you do not want to.
That's not an accurate summary. A better summary comes in the last paragraph of the article:
It's no longer acceptable for us to not take responsibility for our Congress
anymore. If we want it to be better then throwing bums out, and replacing them
with new bums doesn't seem to be doing the trick. Let's work instead to
educate whomever is in Congress, and the professional class around them.Re: Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works
#4No, we are all very aware of how Congress works. Whoever has the most money to pay them (why it's not called a bribe, I'll never know) is the person who gets their ideas put into law. Congress hasn't been about the needs of the people they represent for some time now.
Re: Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works
#5All you need to know, is that they take your money and force you to do things you do not want to.
That is one side of it, yes. Congress takes your money to do a lot of horrible things, like the hundreds of thousands of documented civilians that were killed as a direct result of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
But Congress takes your money to do a lot of things, and some of them are absolutely important, like taking care of the medical problems that older people have.
Re: Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works
#6All you need to know, is that they take your money and force you to do things you do not want to.
That's not an accurate summary. A better summary comes in the last paragraph of the article: It's no longer acceptable for us to not take responsibility for our Congress anymore. If we want it to be better then throwing bums out, and replacing them with new bums doesn't seem to be doing the trick. Let's work instead to educate whomever is in Congress, and the professional class around them.
In particular, with law enforcement, it's not as much an issue of how much money is spent on law enforcement (though that also matters), but whether the right things are prohibited. There are some things that few people would argue for decriminalizing (say, driving a truck bomb into a building), but a lot more questions past that.
Re: Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works
#7No, we are all very aware of how Congress works. Whoever has the most money to pay them (why it's not called a bribe, I'll never know) is the person who gets their ideas put into law. Congress hasn't been about the needs of the people they represent for some time now.
That's the cynical take at least. It's a great way of telling yourself that trying is futile and therefore not worth the time.
It's one of the things I detest about politics in Italy: ordinary people are so convinced that nothing can ever change that they make zero effort to do anything, and, surprisingly, things do not change.
Re: Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works
#8With respect, "The Internet" also exists beyond the borders of the United States of America, so while we outside of the US can look on at this spectacle with a mixture of amusement and dread, it's just a little galling to be told to understand something we have little control over.
I'm not meaning to sound disrespectful, I'm just trying to explain this slow-moving car-crash of a situation has effects outside of your own continent..
Re: Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works
#9No, we are all very aware of how Congress works. Whoever has the most money to pay them (why it's not called a bribe, I'll never know) is the person who gets their ideas put into law. Congress hasn't been about the needs of the people they represent for some time now.
Dude, the amount of money that politicians get in campaign contributions is tiny compared to the amount of money that is spent on lobbyists. The problem is that we have this class of people who are personable, who are well informed, have spent years creating relationships with other people in Washington, and who are very experienced at providing simple, one-sided explanations of the issues to congress-critters.
If campaign contributions were entirely banned I doubt it would make much difference, because legislators are too busy to pull information on every topic that they feel they need to Do Something about, and its the people with lobbyists who succeed in pushing out the (fraction of the) information needed.
Re: Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works
#10No, we are all very aware of how Congress works. Whoever has the most money to pay them (why it's not called a bribe, I'll never know) is the person who gets their ideas put into law. Congress hasn't been about the needs of the people they represent for some time now.
More generally, this kind of legal corruption is an obvious and yet unacknowledged flaw in representative democracy.
By obvious, I mean in the game theory sense i.e a system of selfish rational humans acting under the rules of "democracy".
The U.S. system has some factors which make it worse e.g. "first past the post" voting leads to a two-party system from which the electorate cannot break out.