White House Petition To Investigate Dodd For Bribery 596
Walkingshark writes "Chris Dodd's recent statements complaining that congressmen who receive donations from the RIAA and MPAA should toe the line has spawned a firestorm of anger on the internet. Among the bits of fallout: a petition on the White Houses "We the People" site to investigate him, the RIAA, and the MPAA for bribery! This petition gained more than 5000 signatures in 24 hours and is still growing. When the petition reaches 25,000 signatures the White House is obligated to respond to it in an official capacity."
Good fucking luck (Score:5, Insightful)
[comment goes here]
Its easier to believe in Santa Claus... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course nothing will happen. Since when do crooks convict themselves ?
I'm Chris Dodd (Score:5, Insightful)
And I DEMAND that once bought, you STAY bought!
By the way, the law is for you "little people".
What for will the response take? (Score:5, Insightful)
When the petition reaches 25,000 signatures the White House is obligated to respond to it in an official capacity.
Will this response be of a similar nature to how the UK government response to its equivalent petition site? i.e. the official response is to make it clear they are officially ignoring the petition?
Carlin - The Real Owners Of America (Score:5, Insightful)
Carlin - The Real Owners Of America
"The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying  lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else."
"But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.
"You know what they want? Obedient workers  people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club."
"This country is finished."
Losers (Score:5, Insightful)
As I post this comment, every comment posted in this thread before mine was an apathetic "signing the petition will do nothing". It would have taken just a few seconds longer to sign the petition, even if also creating an account to do so.
Signing the petition might indeed do nothing. But posting a comment here saying so is absolutely guaranteed to do nothing. The corrupt politicos like Dodd absolutely count on people insisting on doing nothing. Just as bribery is the oxygen for their corruption, cynical apathy is the 78% nitrogen that makes the air they breathe.
Sign the petition [whitehouse.gov], and at least have done something to strangle these parasites. Even if that's just being a small part of forcing the president to defend or deny them. It's better than nothing - certainly better than a loudly committed nothing.
High hopes, for sure (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yeah right (Score:5, Insightful)
Investigating Dodd is a good place to start. Even just getting Obama to refuse to investigate Dodd is a start. You're insisting on never starting.
Re:Its easier to believe in Santa Claus... (Score:5, Insightful)
Dodd isn't going to suffer legal consequences, but if enough stink is made he'll be a less effective mouthpiece. That's a worthwhile goal.
Audit Them All (Score:5, Insightful)
Every single conversation, in person or over media (phone, email, etc) that any elected official has with anyone should be recorded and archived in the Library of Congress. And noted in a public schedule, except meetings a subcommittee in the House or Senate votes can be hidden. Any investigation should be able to subpoena any recording. With no expiration or statue of limitations.
That kind of evidence generation would protect the honest conversations from the corrupt ones, and steadily improve the ratio.
Simple solution (Score:2, Insightful)
The less government involvement there is in business, the less business will want/need to be involved in government.
Simple logic, really.
For some reason, there are many who only complain about the corporate side of this without realizing the cause - which is the government's involvement in the first place (or the government's ability to be involved).
Limited government is a good thing. You don't get to require unending government involvement without paying the price of corruption. Never has happened in history, never will.
The irony of Larry Lessig voting for big government while decrying corruption is delicious - decrying the effects while supporting the cause is just craziness.
Bribery? (Score:5, Insightful)
How is this any different than a thousand donors to, say, Obama's last campaign saying, "We don't think you still care about [topic x] the way you did in 2008 when we supported you with cash, and if we still feel that way, we may not support your campaign next time around."
Saying that - because you don't like a politician's posture/policy on a topiuc - you won't give a campaign donation next time doesn't mean that when you did support their campaign in the past, you were bribing them. If that were true, then every dollar donated by every person or organization is always bribery. Which is ridiculous.
I dislke Dodd. He's an ass. But he's perfectly within his (and his employers') rights to say the same thing we can all say: "Mr. Politician: you're not committed to what I think is important, and so I'm probably not going to help your campaign fund next time."
Anger "on the internet" about him being that straightforward is just the usual anger at the fact that a trade association made of up people who run studios and labels puts a priority on protecting their members' works. Shocking, I say! But thousands of people calling it "bribery" is just an adolescent display of ignorance or a disingenuous display of pandering rhetoric aimed at uninformed people.
Re:Lobbying vs Bribery (Score:5, Insightful)
Lobbying has some legitimate uses.
Let's Congress wants to open up part of a national forest for logging, oil drilling, or whatever because Congressman Joe Schmoe or his buddy happens to own a logging company. The Sierra Club and other environmentalist groups can lobby against it and point out the conflict of interest to other Congressmen.
Or we can lobby against corporate interests ourselves - grass roots lobbying - like with the SOPA and PIPA stuff.
OR we can lobby for something, like single payer health insurance. Because they millionaires on Capital Hill with their Congressional perks would never think of such a thing.
Or lobby for more national parks.
Or lobby for reduction in taxes.
Or ......
Because just having the Congress people left to their own devices would lead us down an even worse path that we are on now.
But what I think we should outlaw is corporate lobbying. A corporation should have no political voice at all.Neither should government employees lobbying to make their jobs easier - like law enforcement lobbying for our Civil Liberties to be taken away because they're too lazy to do their job or because they want more power: the wars on terror and drugs and child porn excuses have eroded our liberties too much. And keep in mind "law and order" conservatives, those will be used as an excuse to take our guns away so don't go for the lie of "if you do nothing wrong; you have nothing to worry about" bullshit.
Re:Losers (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry I don't have any mod points for you.
Re:Yeah right (Score:5, Insightful)
We need to start voting for different people -- people who are not connected with big business, people who will work for the benefit of their constituents. Would you ask a mafia boss to crack down on organized crime?
Re:Lobbying vs Bribery (Score:3, Insightful)
I know I'm replying to an AC but I would like to think that corporate lobbying was allowed because sometimes, a corporation made up of specialists in a field would know better how things in their expertise work as opposed to politicians (e.g. technology, education, environment, etc.). I am not a lawyer nor someone versed in law history so I'm not familiar with corporate lobbying's history but I would like to think that there was something good about it (as opposed to a shallow reason like the thinkofthechildren or LOSINGJOBS qualifier) when it came to exist.
If only there was a line that can be easily identified between "Corporation that knows what it's doing for the greater good" and "Corporation that is trying to abuse the hell out of the system and/or doing something stupid".
Re:Bribery? (Score:5, Insightful)
"If that were true, then every dollar donated by every person or organization is always bribery. Which is ridiculous."
I don't think it is ridiculous at all.
Re:They've already ignored one qualified petition (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, this is exactly the way petitions in the UK worked when they were interested years ago, and still largely work today.
They were sold as a way of using the internet to help get people involved in democracy.
But what they really were was a way of using the internet to allow politicians to pretend they give a fuck about democracy.
Things like the Digital Economy Act were some of the most voted against, but just got pretty much entirely ignored, now the new government has revamped the petitions barely a couple of thousand people have voted, despite I think hundreds of thousands, possibly even millions having voted on a petition about that the first time around.
The petitions are just another way of pretending politicians care about the general populace, whilst doing quite the fucking opposite. The Whitehouse has obviously learnt from our successive governments what a useful tool they are for distracting people from the real situation.
Re:Losers (Score:4, Insightful)
That is what we should be spending our energy on: getting rid of the Democrats and the Republicans, and replacing them with politicians who work for the benefit of their constituents. Asking the Obama administration to investigate Chris Dodd for bribery is like asking Billy the Kid to head a posse to catch bank robbers. The Obama administration already accepted bribes for Dodd and co.; now they have backed off a bit and Hollywood is saying that the bribes will be withheld. It will take "new blood," politicians who are untainted by a history of bribery, to end the cycle of lobbying.
Money doesn't buy influence? (Score:5, Insightful)
How many people don't think that money in politics is a bad thing? I believe the answer is 541.
435 members of the House of Representatives.
100 members of the Senate.
5 judges on the Supreme Court
1 President of the United States.
Re:Lobbying vs Bribery (Score:5, Insightful)
I could spend $1 on my own campaign, or you could spend $1 for me. If you spend it, you have $1 less and I have $1 more. It's true you didn't pay me $1 directly, but the net effect is pretty similar.
It doesn't always work exactly like that, but hopefully you get the general idea - well, unless you're really, really fantastically stupid (which I imagine you'll demonstrate very clearly in a response).
Re:Lobbying vs Bribery (Score:5, Insightful)
You would like to think that? Well, go right ahead and think it. That won't make it true, but it might make you feel better.
CLUE: The corporates don't send their specialists to explain the real facts of life to congress critters. Instead, they send PR/HR/marketdroids with deep pockets. The specialists are kept at their desks, or in the shop, or out in the field, where facts are actually useful.
I invite you to read Allen Greenspan's recent remarks about banking legislation. Words to the effect, "We thought the banks could make decisions that were best for them - how wrong we were!"
Corporations never do anything "for the greater good". Today, they don't even do things for their own good. The zombies only have eyes for quarterly profit statements, totally unaware that those statements are full of lies.
Re:Lobbying vs Bribery (Score:5, Insightful)
Lobbying wouldn't be such a problem if politicians were less lazy. If they heard from lobbyists and then did some real research on the topic, then lobbying would just do what it was meant to: bring issues to the attention of elected representatives.
- oh, the innocent naivety!
Do you know that the members of Senate/Congress can receive legal bribes in form of company shares but not as cash? Do you know that information on who is going to receive an approval on a new medical procedure/drug/device and who will not get that approval can flow from FDA office to a third party legally?
You think lobbyists will keep coming to a Senator/Congressman/White House occupant who will take their money and will not deliver?
You think Dodd would have been hired as a lobbyist (after explicitly saying he won't lobby) by MPAA/RIAA if he didn't play ball while back in Senate?
No, the only real solution is to take the power of regulating individual business activity, taxing income/payroll/corporations away from government and return the power to run businesses as they see fit to the people.
The real solution is to make the government uphold the Constitution for a change and not do what they are not authorised to do there. Only when you take away their power to steal your power, they will stop selling it, because they won't have it ready to be sold.
Re:Lobbying vs Bribery (Score:5, Insightful)
+1.
Lobbying just means asking a legislator to do something. At a basic level, lobbying is part of the process of having a republic with representatives. When you mail your representative about SOPA or some other issue, you are lobbying. If enough people do it, that's a grass roots lobbying effort, and could be successful. That's a good thing. It's how the system is supposed to work.
Of course, some people have more influence than others. When you, as an individual, mail your representative and say "this bill is bad for the computer business", the representative is probably not going to pay that much attention. If a major business person who lives in the representative's district/state -- say, Bill Gates calls Senator Murray -- the business person is much more likely to be listened to.
Another common type of lobbying is the professional. Various organizations hire lawyer specialists, former politicians/staffers, and other folks whose job it is to figure out how to get access to legislators or their staff and buttonhole them on the sponsoring company's issues. It's awfully hard to legally distinguish between private citizen lobbying and paid lobbyists. And it's not clear that paid lobbyists are that much of an abuse of the system.
The problem here is that lobbyists -- both paid and private -- can attempt to bribe politicians and staffers in various (legal) ways. These can vary from picking up the lunch tab to donations, and often is equivalent to bribery. But lobbying by itself is not inherently bribery.
Re:Lobbying vs Bribery (Score:5, Insightful)
Congressman shocks nation ... (Score:5, Insightful)
by acknowledging that big time donors are paying for legislation, rather than pretending they get nothing for their investment.
Now people want Dodd investigated. For what? For being candid for once about what *everyone* in *both* parties does?
Fine, but don't stop with Dodd, or the message becomes clear: pretend nobody does it, and be treated like you don't do it. Or tell the truth, and be treated like you're the *only one* doing it.
Re:What for will the response take? (Score:4, Insightful)
The media are not picking up on it but the "social media" is. The White House thought these petition were a good way to hoodwink the public into thinking someone cared but for the most part the serious ones like this one have been met with either "no comment" or some tired old saw we have been hearing for the last twenty years. No new arguments, no recognition times have perhaps changed, no attempt to justify why the old arguments still apply. Its all status quo, forever.
I think people are seeing it. My guess is they'd pull this We the People thing down in a hot second if they thought that it would do anything other than make them look even worse. Its backfired big. "Hope and Change" was a vapid and empty promise; the trouble the other major political machine is churning out equally empty and hypocritical pandering.
Ron Paul is nearly 80 years old and he is the youth candidate this year! I tend to agree with him on philosophical level for the most part myself but I think he actually is getting quite allot of support this year from those who don't. Why would people support a candidate they don't agree with? I will tell you they recognize the system is broken, the nation is in serious trouble, and something has to change. What Washington is doing is not working, better to take chance on ideas they don't necessarily agree with than to simply continue, what they see failing all over the place each and every day.
Party affiliation missing from summary (Score:1, Insightful)
I can't help but notice Chris Dodd's party affiliation is missing from the summary. Why could this be? Could it be an inconvenient narrative that we'd all like to avoid?
I just checked Google and sure enough, he's a Democrat. Surprising, isn't it? If he were a Republican, you can be sure that the party affiliation would be mentioned up front and prominently featured as the reason he's corrupt in the first place. Sure, the natural response is "both parties are two sides of the same coin". That doesn't compute, however. Whenever an (R) is featured, the narrative is that all Republicans are uniquely evil. Whenever something bad happens to a (D) then it's both parties are the same. The technical term for this is "a double standard".
Re:Lobbying vs Bribery (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't forget "...and here's a printout of how we'd like the bill to read. No need for you to delve into the fine print; we've taken care of everything."
Re:Losers (Score:2, Insightful)
I've decided for myself to side with the prosecuters on this. New Zealand is asking itsself how a serial felon, business fraudster and all around fat gasbag actually made it into the country. Forget about Megaupload and look for things that are actually worth defending.
I for one will not use my activism to line the coffers of a man who by all rights should still sit in a German prison for the business frauds alone he comitted.
yeah. except that you are wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
dodd was on the fucking senate banking committee through the whole recession. he was part of the machine that pumped more and more money into fannie and freddie, and refused to look at the banks when they started acting like private versions of fannie and freddie, and he was asleep at the wheel through the whole subprime thing, the CLO thing, the CDO thing, the hedge funds inside of banks, etc etc etc. it was his job to regulate the banking system. the banking system collapsed. we all payed for it. trillions of dollars. we still pay for it.
and you and the moron apologists for these ass clowns have the nerve to lecture us about how they had nothing to do with the recession.
JUST lobbying is fine (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lobbying vs Bribery (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Lobbying vs Bribery (Score:5, Insightful)
They most definitely DID NOT make decisions that were best for them. Some of the largest banks in America were on the verge of bankruptcy. Were you not paying attention to current events just before the last election? The banks were FAILING. The only thing that saved many of them, was a special handout from the government.
Re:Cracked just did an article on these petitions (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a stupid article because any government petition system will always get 4 types of submission on a regular basis:
Show us the aliens
Legalize drugs
Bring back the death penalty (where appropriate)
Kick out all the foreigners
The problem with these types of submissions is that they're utterly unrealistic; anyone with half a brain (and probably even those submitting them) knows that no democratic government is going to do any of those things on the strength of a petition, irrespective of the level of support (for various reasons) and so they're a complete waste of time. The fact that this happens doesn't make the system any less useful, it just alters the SNR slightly.
Re:Lobbying vs Bribery (Score:5, Insightful)
It's usually OK to make a sizable donation to a candidate and give them a wink, wink nudge, nudge about what you want.
True but this should not be ok any more that it should be ok for lawyers to make sizeable donations to jurors in a court case and then give them a wink, wink, nudge, nudge about the verdict they should return. In both circumstances evidence and verbal arguments should be the only means of persuasion allowed. I'm not suggesting that lobbying should become as restricted and formalized as a court but some basic, ethical ground rules need to be enforced.
Re:Lobbying vs Bribery (Score:3, Insightful)
Short Term yes, Long Term, no.
Re:Lobbying vs Bribery (Score:5, Insightful)
Lobbying = Right to Petition.
Contributing to a campaign = Free Speech.
Quid Pro Quo ( for contributing to a campaign ) = Bribery.
Re:I'm Chris Dodd (Score:4, Insightful)
Bwahahaha the *AA should be able to exercise the first sale doctrine on bribed pollies but we, the customers, are increasingly being told that what we have bought is not actually ours to do with what we want.
Re:Lobbying vs Bribery (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Its easier to believe in Santa Claus... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you tell the executive branch, "Hey a whole bunch of D-bags in Congress are being bought and paid for," I'd bet they'd be willing to at least take a look.
Re:Lobbying vs Bribery (Score:5, Insightful)
The only way around that is to ban campaign contributions completely and require candidates to only use government provided funds for campaigning. Not that I disagree with that, I think it's the way it should be done.
Re:Lobbying vs Bribery (Score:4, Insightful)
But lobbying by itself is not inherently bribery.
When does it become inherently bribery?
Let me put it another way. Let's say we had no technology for contraception, and that men and women were so fertile that the act of fucking resulted in pregnancy 100% of the time.
At what point will the word fucking not become synonymous with the word impregnation?
While I understand your point, I would say right now that lobbying *is* inherently bribery in practice. In fact calling it lobbying is just disingenuous. It is in fact bribery.
Re:Lobbying vs Bribery (Score:5, Insightful)
The banks didn't do what was best for them long-term, but they definitely did what was best for the people managing them. If the bank posted a higher quarterly profit by engaging in stupid credit default swaps, the CEO did well, the manager who ran that division did well, and probably the people much further down who actually made the deals did well for as long as the music kept playing. Once the music stopped, the CEO, managers, etc could just take their $millions and retire very comfortably, or they could probably fairly easily find work elsewhere.
Consider a bank executive with this choice:
(A) don't approve a dumb deal - piss off those who wanted to make a deal, not make as much money now as possible, have a tough time convincing the boss / shareholders it was the right move, but it might make the company more sound so long as nobody else in the company approves similar deals.
(B) approve the dumb deal - rake in nice bonuses now, and it's conceivable that it might bust up the company some time in the future, but then you can always go with the old standby excuses of "nobody could have predicted..." and "I understand this better than you, so you need to keep me on board to fix it."
Suddenly it doesn't seem surprising at all.
Re:Lobbying vs Bribery (Score:5, Insightful)
The people running the banks most definitely did make decisions that were best for the people running the banks.
Re:Its easier to believe in Santa Claus... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, Obama will take a look to make sure he is bought and paid for by the same people. If so, he'll say he looked and everything checks out. Otherwise, he'll make a big stink about it until he receives just as much money from the same people.
Re:must be nice living in fairy land (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you have the money to rent an appropriate space inside the Beltway? To essentially purchase the Congressperson's time? Or even their staffers time? Getting the resources in place to do an extended (more than 2-5 day) lobbying effort requires a great deal of investment in both time and cash. And lets face it, do you pay more attention to your co-worker who you see every day, a friend you go drinking with, or to the person behind you at the grocery checkout line (who you will probably never see again)? Getting serious consideration (not just a wave in the distance) in that world is an entirely different level of action that requires a full-time job with a huge expense account just to get in the door. After that, the real bidding wars for the actual votes begin.
Re:JUST lobbying is fine (Score:5, Insightful)
The lobbyists trying to do something underhanded, against the better interest of the public, though (i.e. bribery). They will be running scared from this idea.
Re:Its easier to believe in Santa Claus... (Score:4, Insightful)
Everyone knows it was about old world mass media regaining control of what information the public gets, about shutting down every influential blog, forum and web portal not owned or controlled by mass media. Basically to shut down means by which Obama and quite a few Democrats got elected.
Hey, so... I just thought of us, but do we have a Plan B?
Let's assume the worst - the United States does some heinous shit and fucks over the entire Internet - either for their country or maybe for the whole world.
After some initial chaos Europe and other countries will probably get a handle on things, but what do us Americans do?
I imagine a bunch of us geeks could probably figure things out on our own - alternate DNS, Tor, whatever. But what about the regular folk? What about the geeks that would love to be able to do something but can't because they don't have that knowledge?
We need to make something like this [topatoco.com], except title it "Let's Say America Fucked Up The Internet" along with a host of possible options to try, and then we need to distribute the shit out of that motherfucker.
Re:Its easier to believe in Santa Claus... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now any attempt to pass those two pieces of legislation will come of as bribery and corruption.
SOPA/PIPA were the decoys and have now become bait for the slavering pack to tear at while the real work is being done.
The real legislation will be quietly passed as riders while you're patting yourselves on the back and preening over your fresh "kill".
Re:I'm Chris Dodd (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)