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Common Dreams reports:
Now that official debate has begun, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) wants to pass Fast Track bill before Memorial Day.
[...] The U.S. Senate on [May 14] approved a motion to begin debate on the Fast Track authority President Barack Obama needs to advance controversial trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The measure passed 65-33.
Senate Democrats blocked the first attempt to proceed on the trade legislation on Tuesday, but backtracked in the wake of further negotiations--and intense pressure from the White House.
Boing Boing warns URGENT: Senate backtracks on TPP fasttrack--call Congress to oppose the Trans Pacific Partnership
TPP is a treaty negotiated under extraordinary secrecy--Members of Congress were threatened with jail for discussing its contents--and virtually everything we know about it comes from leaks. One thing we do know is that it contains a provision to let multinational corporations sue governments for passing environmental and labor laws that undermine their profits (similar provisions in other treaties have been used by tobacco companies to sue the Australian government over a law mandating plain packaging for cigarettes). We also know that TPP hardens the worst elements of US copyright, trumping Congress's right to review the term of copyright and the scope of the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA (these are the rules that allowed John Deere to claim that farmers don't own their tractors, because of the copyrights in the software in their engines).
The Electronic Frontier Foundation needs your help to contact your Congresscritter to block this. TPP is a fragile monster, and it can really only pass if the Congress abdicates its legislative authority and lets the President make up laws and legal obligations without Congressional input. The Republican Congress--and many Democrats--is vulnerable to messages from voters opposing the extension of these powers to the President.
Related: Fast-Track Trade Measure Fails Key Test Vote In Senate
(Score: 1) by moondrake on Monday May 18 2015, @08:56PM
Agreed (and a silly mistake of me, having argued this exact point at some moment in the past).
My main point still stands though.
(Score: 2) by tathra on Monday May 18 2015, @09:55PM
i agree, democracy has problems. its basically just mob rule. what are the alternatives though (specifically the ones you say weren't possible 30 years ago)? authoritarianism/totalitarianism are pretty obviously bad; monarchies are hit-or-miss, depending on the individual ruler, and can fluctuate wildly; afaik, that just leaves us with various flavors of democracy (since i brought it up earlier, i'm pretty sure democracy would be the political equivalent of communism).
(Score: 2) by moondrake on Wednesday May 20 2015, @08:38AM
well, the "should write a book about it" was meant mostly tongue in cheek, but I do not think one can propose a consistent new political system in a few lines. Besides, I am a scientist, and never studied political "sciences", so I would have to do research.
A major problem with the current implementation of democracy in most countries is that it works by selecting representatives. If people were to directly vote, they made make stupid decisions, but it is much more difficult to make selfish decisions. However, the problem is that a lot of people select evil/selfish or incompetent representatives. Power accumulated in such people is never a good idea.
I think the world is currently connected well enough to move to far more direct forms of democracy. People can collect info on all kinds of things, and people can quickly vote on such things. There is much less need for representatives. Switzerland is a nice example of such a system, but is still mostly semi-direct. One of the problems that need to be solved is how to get a significant group of people interested in understanding complex problems, so that they can make a qualified decision on this.
Merging direct democracy with some kind of AI decision making could be interesting. There are fun little projects around (like this one [zemerge.com] that I think should be further developed and tested. To make a car analogy: humans can drive a car, but make mistakes because of being tired, emotions, limited capacities, etc. But we can, with a group of people, program a car to nearly always drive perfectly (at least, I think we can). Why could we not program a computer to make decisions that are always best for the country/city?
I am sure many of us would get nervous when hearing that I propose to let an emotionless machine (which may have bugs) control a country, but I actually think it would be not worse compared to some of the jokers that have power now. Machines are reliable though, they will never break the constitution, nor let emotions or money dictate policy. There needs to be a safety switch ("checks and balances") though, to take care of bugs and other unforeseen issues. It would be trivial to just allow all people to veto AI government decisions. And a system for updating the set of rules needs to be developed.
Rather than think and discuss endlessly about the pros and cons of such a system, I think it should just be tested on a small scale.