Senator Wyden Demands ACTA Goes Before Congress 78
Fluffeh writes "As recently covered here, EU countries are starting to drop ACTA support. Now, long-time opponent of the secretly negotiated Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, Sen. Ron Wyden introduced an amendment to a Senate 'jobs bill' that would force ACTA to come before Congress for approval. His second amendment tries to force a change (PDF) in how the whole process around such treaties is handled. Right now, the U.S. attempts to keep its negotiating positions a secret. What vital national security interests could be at stake if the public knew USTR was promoting 'graduated response' laws or proposing changes in ISP liability? Wyden doesn't believe there are any."
Re:Secret positions (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Secret positions (Score:5, Funny)
It has been measured at 1.21 jiggawhacks, to be exact.
That's My Senator!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's My Senator!!!
And I couldn't be prouder!!
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That's My Senator!!!
And I couldn't be prouder!!
I wish I had the mod points to rep this... sadly I can't say the same thing about mine.
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Really? Are you sure he's not just mad that he didn't get to belly up to the trough for a 'yes' vote?
Re:That's My Senator!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously Wyden. Can we clone him about 15 times? (Don't want a complete monoculture.) I tend to agree with most of his positions and where I don't he has valid reasons to choose a position I don't necessarily back.
Re:That's My Senator!!! (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:That's My Senator!!! (Score:5, Informative)
Some times I wonder if Oregon congress critters are the only ones voted in for their surplus of intelligence.
Re:That's My Senator!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't the traditional purpose a the Senator from Oregon defined as "Drive the rest of the Senate crazy"?
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Re:That's My Senator!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
I had no idea we had any senators left that could think for themselves.. unless of course this is another 'I need more money to keep quiet' kind of thing. You can be sure MAFIAA has 'contacted' his office with all the noise he's making that sure to cost them billions. Regardless I find it heartening to see something actually being done FOR us in gov't instead of TO us, or AGAINST us. Us being 'those of them that are not on a BOD raping profits from individuals'.
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Re:That's My Senator!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Could you ask him to reintroduce it as a standalone bill, not just slap it on the side of an unrelated bill?
That's how you get something like this to pass, though- riders help bills that could not pass on their own merit (too many Senators will vote against it) pass by attaching them to a bill the Senate will pass. It's the same tactic used by the *AAs for Internet censorship- attach the rider to an anti-child pornography bill, and who will vote against it?
Re:That's My Senator!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Which is exactly the problem. Anything worth voting into law must be able to stand on its own merit.
Stand in front of who? Congress?
THAT is the problem.
Why do you think campaign finance reform is such a joke?
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As well meaning as he is, I'd place good money on Congress literally JUMPING at the chance to approve ACTA.
Do you know the average age of a Senator? Half of them would probably break a hip.
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...he shouts from the Anonymous mountaintop...
I know that place! I'm going there in November to drop off some kind of ballot thingy.
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A powerful government official proposes legislation that would grant more power to his branch of government, and hence himself.
A Senator demands that treaties must be ratified by the Senate, like the Constitution says? The horror!
Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
On the one hand I am happy to see anything that tries put sun shine on the political process. In a democratic republic I think its reprehensible that how much of this takes place in secret. The public has a right know.
OTOH
One of the biggest things I think is broken about our current political process is the lack of atomicity in the legislative process. There should be no such thing as "Job's bill" or "Omnibus", etc. It lets a few people tie unpopular ideas to the necessary business of the nation. Legislation should be simple and cover a single topic. That way each idea can be evaluated on its own merit. IE you don't have Financial Reform, you have bill to require minimum reserve assets value at a commercial bank, bill to classify assets that may be used as reserve assets, bill determine the rate adjustment that may be made on a revolving credit account within a reporting period etc. These bills could naturally be brought to the floor and each could get a quick upper or down vote. The public would be able to find who voted on what when by searching easily.
Unrelated crap would not be bundled as riders. It would prevent the I am going to veto/block any legislation that contains X, oh so we can't ever pass any part of budget kind of grid lock we haven now.
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That sounds like a really great idea in theory, but in practice I don't know how you'd implement it. Laws are like interpreted computer code: when it's ambiguous, it'll break at run-time. I can't figure out how you'd come up with a legislative algorithm for determining if everything in a bill is about "the same thing".
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Much agreed. Oftentimes this happens as a form of compromise, IE we'll give you law X, in exchange for law Y. Now, within the actual budgeting process this makes some sense, because you have to arrive at a fiscally solvent number, so oftentimes its tradeoffs of tax breaks vs spending, etc. But for law, as in "you could go to jail for this", there is no place for such negotiation. Something is either reprehensibly immoral and should be punished, or it is not. Whether or not you support ACTA should be en
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, within the actual budgeting process this makes some sense, because you have to arrive at a fiscally solvent number, so oftentimes its tradeoffs of tax breaks vs spending, etc.
Yeah I'm pretty sure that hasn't happened in a few decades. It's mostly been we'll cut taxes AND you can spend more. Recently it's been we'll raise taxes by 1% and you can spend 5000% more.
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What's interesting is that many states (both red and blue) have "balanced budget" or similar laws and/or constitutional requirements, and manage to get by just fine.
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Never going to happen. This corrupt mechanism is needed so politicians can pass laws their owners paid for, even if it's against the interest of the rest of the population.
Hmm (Score:1)
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The only possible mechanism to enforce that would be a body of legislators who insist on it and will block bills that include unrelated riders. Know any of those?
Legislation is a process of negotiation.
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You might not have liked the outcome but to me it sounds like the process worked.
The representatives and the executive were able to agree that raising taxes was needed.
They raised the taxes.
They were not able to agree that special tax rates for the poor were a good idea.
They did not create a special tax rate for the poor.
The idea that we need to levy a new tax or raise an existing one is a separate matter from should we provide tax relief to a specific group. They should IMHO be treated independently. We
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I don't see what the problem is (Score:1)
What's wrong with having a SAFE Port Act (keeping ports safe, gotta be good) with a rider that bans online gambling (UIGEA)?
Ports and gambling, everyone can see the connection there. And Bill Frist who added the rider got paid $50,000 by Harrah's (brick and mortar) casinos - purely coincidental that Harrah's share price went up 20% after the UIGEA was passed. Everybody wins ... er ....
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The problem doesn't seem to appear anywhere except the USA, so maybe look at other parliamentary systems? I think the big difference is that every amendment to a bill elsewhere has to be debated and voted on separately. This means that it's not much easier to get an amendment passed than it is to get a separate bill passed, and if an amendment is not related to the bill it will typically just be rejected immediately - someone will call for a vote as soon as it's proposed. I thought this was meant to happ
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you test it. you insert green M and M's (etc) to test if they read the proposed laws.
you know what I'm talking about, here.
problem is there's no IQ test to get into government. in fact, you have to fail one to get ahead.
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It might also serve to promote simpler laws. Who needs a 500 page bill? Who can understand a 500 page bill? Who can follow all of the 1000+ 500 page bills in their daily lives?
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You will just have to accept that there are only so many hours in the day and with the US governments penchant of putting everything through a legislative process including some of the most petty and nothing things. There is straight insufficient time to discuss everything individually.
It's the whole US capitalistic bullshit of performance based in everything (clearly a horrible failure in many areas), so politicians get measured by how many pieces of legislation they introduce and how many they get thro
Commie, islamofasicist, america-hating traitor! (Score:5, Funny)
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But that's the thing, they don't mind telling 'the world' at least in so far as that means 'foreign governments' - because what they're trying to keep secret is explicitly what they are talking to the rest of the world's governments about. It's the citizenry that they don't want to know.
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No strike necessary. All you have to do is to turn the cooling off.
Bert
corporate security (Score:5, Insightful)
For the many politicians who think the proper role of government is to prop up corporate profits, corporate income security interests *are* national security interests.
And certain corporations have determined that letting the public in on what's going on is definitely not in their interests. Those rebellious citizens might demand the politicians to make treaties that benefit citizens' rights rather than corporate profits. We can't allow that in a corpratocracy.
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Here here. Business should have *some* say in trade negotiations, however, it seems like they been writing them whole-cloth.
When the tariff schedule, when printed out, is the size of two Encyclopedia Britannica end-to-end, free trade is a bit of a misnomer.
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Why should they have any more say then the other voters? Do retirees get to write laws about social security benefits?
Subjunctive is a lost art (Score:1)
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Obtuse, ungrammatical and misleading headlines are par for the course. There's an army of morons writing them. Often the articles are almost as bad.
Why ACTA isn't going before Congress... (Score:5, Informative)
In these threads some guy usually says that the President has to send a treaty to Congress for it to be valid, therefore Obama is abusing his power, usurping Congressional Authority, and raping kittens by not sending ACTA to Congress. This is false, and based on the poster not understanding what's going on.
What's going on is that everything ACTA demands is already part of US Law. Obama can already seize your shit if he thinks it's counterfeit. It's called asset forfeiture, and it's already in the US Code. As is literally everything else in the treaty. When he does so the people judging whether the US is in compliance have to say "Yes, that guy totally had his shit seized because it was counterfeit." Therefore Obama doesn't care whether ACTA is formally ratified and made part of US Law, he already has all the powers he needs.
Thus Wyden has to resort to maneuvers like this if he wants to stop ACTA, and Wyden's maneuver probably won't be very effective at all. Because even if Congress does not vote to ratify the treaty we're still in compliance unless Congress also insists on amending all the copyright rules currently in place.
As a political tactic it has some uses. The biggest is that it establishes there's resistance to the business community's insane copyright/patent demands from some folks with clout, and future ACTAs will be designed to appeal to those other groups. It's unlikely (that ordinary Poles will understand the particular wrinkle of US Law I just explained, so Polish politicians are all answering the question "Why should we ratify ACTA, even the US didn't ratify ACTA?" The potential drawback here is that if Wyden gets his ratification vote he's likely to lose, because this isn't just about copyright. It's also about fake golfclubs, cars, etc. You don't want to be the guy on the side of fake chinese golf clubs/antibiotics/toothpaste/etc. in an election year.
But if you think there is literally any chance of ACTA not applying to your American ass, I have news for you: It already does.
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When you consider the implications of this becoming international law, it's not a little thing. We effectively legitimize using our military to "protect" the company who is selling a song in China or Poland, but that song got downloaded without payment. There is a HUGE difference between confiscating our own citizens' computers vs "police action" and confiscating property in other countries. Some might thing spreading our corruption to others isn't so bad, but it has significant impact on our attempts to
Re:Why ACTA isn't going before Congress... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Obama's not claiming the treaty is Ratified. That's a very specific Constitutional process which requires a vote in Congress explicitly saying "treaty x is ratified." None of his people ever have. He's claiming we've "Acceded" to the treaty because everything required to enforce was already on the books. That just means all the laws are passed so we're complying, and it's clearly true. The whole point of ACTA is to make everyone else hjave the same BS draconian laws we do, therefore it would be somewhat ast
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Attach something unpalatable to the main bill. Problem solved.
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A similar argument is often used in the EU ("it doesn't change anything"). There is however at least one very important extra things to consider: once you ratify ACTA and it enters into force, you no longer can change anything about your laws in a way that contravenes ACTA without unanimous consent by all ACTA signatories. You basically paint yourself into a corner.
Another point is that ACTA includes an obligation to encourage private enforcement by industry stakeholders (ACTA Articles 27.2 & 8.1). In o
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so, if they already have all this power, WHY ASK FOR IT AGAIN?
this does not make sense.
you don't go trying to get new laws made if you have all the teeth you need, already.
your post sounds informative but it is not. it does not pass the smell test.
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They AREN'T "asking for it again", they're asking for every other first world country to do it too.
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The AC's got it right. They aren't asking for more power to screw with Americans. They've got that.
They're asking for more power to screw with Poles.
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You argument is specious.
That I have closed my door does not give you the right to superglue my door shut without my permission.
That congress has passed laws does not give the president the right to sign a treaty that lock those (or similar laws) on the book permanently without congress' permission.
Stopping ACTA becoming a formally accepted treaty is a first step in making sure the laws in question can be fixed.
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Your analogy is specious. A US Law is not a simple thing to change, especially unilaterally. No single person or group can close the door unilaterally.
To make it work we need a bicameral door-opening committee, and a door-opening Executive Officer separate from the committee. Once the committee has voted to close the door, and the executive agreed, is the executive overstepping his bounds by telling everyone else "Don't worry, the door won't open?"
As for stopping ACTA, in the US that battle is lost. Wyden's
About three years late (Score:1)
I'm heartened by the fact that he didn't stop with having the treaty go before Congress, but also attempted to have the entire process reviewed.
In Australia, a Dept of Foreign Affairs and Trade official went before Parliament and defended what he called (wait for it -- ) an 'open, inclusive and transparent process' involving 150 stakeholders. 150 out of 22 million, go figure.
You CAN vote for Sen Wyden! (Score:5, Insightful)
Just send his re-election campaign money. Money = votes in a political landscape where advertising sways far more voters than actual positions (or even facts). The more money he has the more undecided (or unthoughtful) voters he can get to vote for his re-election.
Of course, you can't be the one to cast the ballot, but though the miracle of advertising you can have somebody who really doesn't care either way do it for you!