Rampant corruption
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| helios Feb 02, 2012 8:49 AM EDT |
I honestly don't know what it's going to take to wake up the USA. I realize Beez is talking about his country and the EU at large, but just how asleep can an entire national populace be? Thanks for this piece Beez. For the Sake of Sam, the politicians are corrupt to the point where they don't even try to hide it anymore, Judges making copyright decisions for an entire nation are employed by publishers and the only people that can instigate the change needed are on the take in the first place. This isn't a party issue made up between Republicans and Democrats. It's an issue of an entire nation being abandoned by its leadership, and both sides of the Aisle are rowing the lifeboats. My fear is that people are frozen by inertia and just feel helpless and hopeless. My worst fear is that they just don't care. The people who have been elected to serve OUR best interests have sold the house and moved into another with richer masters. We are truly adrift without anyone at the helm. While the US Congress and the Entertainment Industry scheme on how to best turn the Entertainment Industry into the fourth branch of the US government, we sit at an almost record unemployment record and our national debt assures that our children will most certainly have to speak some dialect of Chinese. But it's ok.....As long as American Idol and Dancing With The Stars keep pumping out new seasons, all is well in AmeriKa. |
| jdixon Feb 02, 2012 10:31 AM EDT |
> My fear is that people are frozen by inertia and just feel helpless and hopeless. My worst fear is that they just don't care. Well, Ken, it's worse than that and better. :) What you're seeing is the total breakdown of respect for the law, at all levels of society. This means that those on the top ignore the law and manipulate it for their own benefit. But it also means that the populace at large also ignores the law. After all, there are only so many cops and lawyers, and they can only prosecute and jail so much of the population. The long term implications of this for society are not particularly good, but it's merely the return to the status quo for much of human history. |
| JaseP Feb 02, 2012 10:55 AM EDT |
This is not better or worse than it's ever been... It's just more observable than ever, thanks to the Internet. |
| jdixon Feb 02, 2012 11:13 AM EDT |
> This is not better or worse than it's ever been... It's just more observable than ever,... That's not quite true, JaseP, at least in the US. While this type of behavior has always been present, the current scale of it dwarfs anything in the recent past (say the past 50 years or so, which is all I can speak to). |
| Fettoosh Feb 02, 2012 11:51 AM EDT |
Greed is the problem. People stopped believing in "Out of many, one" and the more popular three Musketeers motto "One for all, all for one". It seems the more popular trend these days is "Everyone is for oneself" Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno |
| JaseP Feb 02, 2012 12:08 PM EDT |
@JDixon: Just do some research into the political machines, like the Tammany Hall political machine, and the Chicago Machine. Corruption has been there all along. |
| Fettoosh Feb 02, 2012 12:44 PM EDT |
Quoting:Corruption has been there all along. There is no doubt it will always be with us and JDixson doesn't dispute that. I agree with his point about the level of corruption, especially in government. It is at a very high level people are getting hurt while in the past, it wasn't so much noticed because it didn't impact people like is it now. I don't give much credit to the Internet, but rather to Cable TV & Radio instead. |
| jdixon Feb 02, 2012 1:34 PM EDT |
> Just do some research into the political machines, like the Tammany Hall political machine, and the Chicago Machine. Corruption has been there all along. I'm well aware of the history of corruption, JaseP. I live in West Virginia, after all. Like I said, it's the scale that's different. Well, that and the lack of concealment. They're not even bothering to try to hide it anymore. Our current administration openly breaks the law and acts like it's a badge of honor. |
| skelband Feb 02, 2012 1:36 PM EDT |
Law only works in a civilised society largely by consent. That is why, by and large, most people don't really care about copyright. The vast majority of people walk some kind of pragmatic line between fairness to publishers and the reality of what works on the ground. It's technically illegal to do lots of things with your DVDs, your CDs and your other media that is subject to copyright. The fact is, most people buy it and do what the hell they like with it after. It's just a shame the law can't come a little closer to real life rather than in entirely the other direction. |
| JaseP Feb 02, 2012 3:29 PM EDT |
@Skelband: Exactly!!! Just take traffic violations as another example. @JDixon: You kinda make my point then,... It's more visible, less concealed. I believe that it's due to the Internet. There's no privacy any longer,... even for the corrupt. I don't think people worked harder in the past to conceal corruption. It's just that we have this big giant spotlight now. |
| zentrader Feb 02, 2012 3:31 PM EDT |
There are many ways to vote and you must match them up. The way to vote on the copyright free-for-all is with your pocketbook (do you really __have__ to see that new movie). A drop in sales is the only vote that the corporations will listen to. |
| gus3 Feb 02, 2012 5:40 PM EDT |
Actually, Tammany Hall wasn't always corrupt. It started out as a decent institution, doing a lot of good things for new immigrants. Over time, with no internal checks on its power structure, the checks had to come from outside. |
| BernardSwiss Feb 02, 2012 8:44 PM EDT |
The real problem is that the system is corrupt -- it's like badly designed software, that acts exactly how you would expect, given how it's actually written -- rather than how you would expect, based on what it's advertised to do. The way our political systems are designed, and especially how our electoral process and campaign funding are designed. politicians are practically forced to put short-term campaign and campaign-funding considerations ahead of their own judgement, regardless of their official job-description. The lobbying process, the regulatory environment is equally perverted, and consequently the lobbying game is also badly distorted, and badly distorting. As for "The Press", which institution used to act as a necessary counterbalance to the political and economic vested interests -- it has evolved into the corporate, consolidated media industry we have today, is no longer all that interested in fulfilling its proper, traditional role, and perhaps no longer even able to (though it still talks a good game, sometimes even believes it's own propaganda) . |
| Khamul Feb 02, 2012 10:16 PM EDT |
I need to invent a time machine, so I can go back in time and talk to America's Founding Fathers, and teach them about mathematics and more-advanced election systems like Condorcet. This first-past-the-post/plurality voting system we have is a massive failure. |
| BernardSwiss Feb 02, 2012 10:53 PM EDT |
I really like the STV (single transferable vote) myself... |
| mbaehrlxer Feb 02, 2012 11:27 PM EDT |
how does condorcet help in the US? there are only two candidates/parties, so it would not affect the outcome. if you want a better voting system consider abolishing party affiliations, let each candidate stand on her or his own, outlaw campaigning/electioneering (which favors those with more resources). and better yet, abolish candidates altogether and allow everyone who can vote also to be elected. that is, from within your voting district you choose the person (or persons if you give multiple votes to everyone) that you believe to be most suitable for the task at hand. this method is transparent and easy to understand, it ensures that everyone has a fair chance and that the people chosen are not the ones who want to be chosen, but the ones the community wants to see elected. greetings, eMBee. |
| Khamul Feb 03, 2012 12:17 AM EDT |
@mbaehr: You've got the chicken and the egg reversed: we have two parties precisely because of the plurality voting system. It's pretty much a mathematical certainty that this system always devolves to only two candidates. You have to have a preferential voting system in order to have more than two parties. We don't have two parties, BTW; there's a bunch of other parties in every major election. The problem is they're so small that they almost never win a seat (sorta like Linux's marketshare). The Green, Libertarian, Reform (now defunct I think), Constitution, Natural Law, and other parties frequently put up candidates. Once in a while a Libertarian gets a seat at the state level; I think we have one or two here in the Arizona legislature maybe. You can never have fair voting with the current voting system. It's impossible. You'll always be voting for "the lesser evil", because if you don't think your favored candidate is likely to win, you'll vote for one of the two "frontrunners" (as declared by the media), to keep the other frontrunner you hate more from winning, instead of voting for the guy you really want. Once in a long while, the people get so pissed they do vote for a 3rd-party person, like when Jesse Ventura won the Minnesota governorship, but it's very, very rare, and it never happens at the national level. Instead, what does happen is a popular 3rd-party person will take some of the vote away from one of the two leading candidates, so that an unpopular candidate gets elected. That's allegedly what happened when Ross Perot ran, and again when Ralph Nader ran in 2000, causing Bush to win. Of course, it's speculation who voters would have voted for had Nader/Perot not been on the ballots, but it's probably a fairly safe assumption that Gore would have gotten a much larger number of Nader's votes than Bush, enough to give him the win in that close election. A preferential system eliminates this. There are other countries (and some localities here in the US) that do use such systems, quite successfully, either Condorcet or the flawed Instant-Runoff system. (IRV can produce some very bizarre results occasionally according to some mathematicians that did a full analysis of several different systems. I can't find the link now unfortunately. But anything is better than plurality.) |
| Fettoosh Feb 03, 2012 11:14 AM EDT |
We are debating which voting system is best to choose, but the question is, who is going to make the necessary change? Is it the mostly corrupt government we currently have? that will never happen. The politicians are happy with the status quo and as long as the parties keep alternating seats, they aren't going to change anything. they aren't going to change anything as long as the "officials" are happy and comfortable gaming the current system. It is going to take the people to rise up and unite to force something. That will not happen until the situation becomes worse and unbearable to endure what the country is going through. The politicians aren't naive, they will patch things up periodically just to avoid an uprising. Is it hopeless? I guess time will tell. |
| Khamul Feb 03, 2012 1:20 PM EDT |
That's the paradox. You're not going to change to a better voting system without the people in charge making the change, and you're not going to get better people in charge without changing the voting system. Therefore, I think voting (at the national level) is pretty much hopeless and a waste of time. You're never going to get good candidates. The best you can do is vote strategically in the Primaries and try to get someone like Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich the nomination, but that never works either for the exact same reason: the plurality voting system (now with Party removed as a factor) again fails you, because instead of people voting for the candidate they want the most, they vote for the "frontrunner" (according to the media, and maybe recent Primary results in other states) they hate the least. It's pretty much just like Egypt or Syria. Change didn't come to those countries by convincing the existing leadership to step down; they had to force the issue. In Syria, they're still fighting and dying in suburban streets. Is that what's going to happen here, American troops shooting American civilians in the streets of subdivisions? Probably. |
| skelband Feb 03, 2012 1:30 PM EDT |
@Khamul: I fear that you may be right. |
| Fettoosh Feb 03, 2012 2:13 PM EDT |
Quoting:Is that what's going to happen here, American troops shooting American civilians in the streets of subdivisions? Probably. Hold your horse a little, such things would NOT happen in the US, the US military, leadership and ranks, are in general more intelligent, intellectual, educated than you think. If you have said one group shooting at another, I would say it is possible but I am sure the military would stand in between. There is too much at stake to lose for everyone and everyone realizes that. The up rising I am talking about wouldn't be emotional like the ones happened in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen (I don't consider the uprising in Libya & Syria are genuine people uprisings). What I am talking about is civil disobedience on mass, may be best on the day of general election. There are so many voters who just don't vote and many more who vote, like you said, for the lesser of two evils. When these two groups wake up and unite under the leadership of renown intellectual scholars to demand a referendum, then we will be able to make the changes the people want. With that I stop to avoid running beyound the TOS. ___________________________ |
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