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> The current president promised them that there would be accountability for the torture, but that campaign promise went the way of so many others. That is the

by Crito 13y ago

> The current president promised them that there would be accountability for the torture, but that campaign promise went the way of so many others. That is the part that just kills me. One of the planks in Obama's campaigns (or at least the first) was anti-torture (at least that is how I perceived it at the time, and I believe that is how I was intended to perceive it.) So the public voted for a representative who would curtail torture, but the representative they voted for was a liar. I don't have much faith that the other major candidate was any more honest, so what really is the general public to do? Vote third party perhaps, but they would still lack any assurance whatsoever that their third party candidate was not a liar. How can a representative democracy function when all the candidate representatives are liars? They aren't actually representing the people that elect them, so my conclusion is that whatever our system of government may be, it is not actually a representative democracy. (Yeah yeah, technically we vote for people, not for platforms... except that the unbelievably vast majority of voters have never met these candidates, so they "know" the candidate only through the candidates portrayal of their platform. The reality is that the general public votes for platforms (or cynically, attractive faces...).)

a3n 13y ago
> So the public voted for a representative who would curtail torture, but the representative they voted for was a liar. They're all liars. All of them. Even "your" representative/Senator/guy you backed for President. Lying is the only way they can get elected. Would you have voted for anyone who campaigned on not prosecuting torture, but prosecuting Aaron Swartz to death? "If elected I will support any prosecutor who hounds Aaron Swartz to suicide." Because he does support Carmen Ortiz. Would you have voted for anyone who campaigned on increasing surveillance, foreign and domestic, to the limits of technology? Would you have voted for anyone who campaigned that "I will support the programs and personnel that cause drone strikes to target, inadvertently or otherwise, weddings, houses, schools and other facilities where innocents and children are killed. No. They take all those things, say the opposite (especially if the current occupant is doing those things), and then double down when they get in. They lie. Oxygen goes in, and lies come out.
- Crito 13y ago
  Well, ideally candidates that neither lied nor campaigned with those positions would be great. For reasons that I can only speculate about, they don't seem to exist. My least 'fringey' theory is that those who want to rule are almost by definition unfit to rule.
skolos 13y ago
By the end of the first term it was clear that Obama ignored a lot of his promises. What really surprised me that people still believed him enough to elect for the second term.
- bediger4000 13y ago
  eople still believed him enough to elect for the second term. I certainly didn't believe Obama by the 2012 campaign, but I didn't have a huge choice. I blame the other major party for nominating an obvious empty suit of clothes, and you should, too.
  - sigzero 13y ago
    Yup, Romney ugh. Don't get me started.
  - crusso 13y ago
    At very least, it would have been worth voting for Romney to get the media to do something like its job. This IRS scandal should have the press howling at the stonewalling of the administration and the suppression of the rights of Americans trying to participate in the election process. Instead, it's crickets. After all, they're only a bunch of "tea baggers".
    - mullingitover 13y ago
      > This IRS scandal should have the press howling at the stonewalling of the administration and the suppression of the rights of Americans trying to participate in the election process Which IRS scandal? This one[1]? "Further investigation revealed that certain terms and themes in the applications of liberal-leaning groups and the Occupy movement had also triggered additional scrutiny, though possibly at a lower rate.[3][4][5][6][7] The only known denial of tax-exempt status occurred to a progressive group." [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_IRS_scandal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_IRS_scandal
      - Floegipoky 13y ago
dmix 13y ago
> How can a representative democracy function when all the candidate representatives are liars? I'm happy more people are finally becoming aware of the fallacious nature of labeling it a representative democracy. When the implementation of a system is providing massive amounts of power to a tiny group of people, in exchange for non-binding promises. In the rare event someone is held accountable for lying, they get replaced by another politician who over time is indistinguishable from the last one. But everyone keeps trumpeting the idea that voting and replacing politician x with politican y is the solution to a broken democracy. I'm not buying it.
- crusso 13y ago
  by another politician who over time is indistinguishable from the last one It's worse than that. You can replace every politician in Washington DC and you'd still be left with a massive bureaucracy of unelected officials who will go right on doing what they're doing, oblivious to the needs of the voting public. Their numbers are legion, they have a great deal of power, and they are entrenched beyond comprehension.
- JulianMorrison 13y ago
  Democracy happens, it's just rather indirectly related to voting. The coin of political power is public passivity - a resisting public will seriously ruin a politician's day, democratic or autocratic. Elections have the effect of forcing politicians to rely on public opinion to create passivity, because using terror in the authoritarian style would get them ejected. Therefore democratic politics consists of efforts to push (or be pushed by) public opinion. (This democracy/autocracy contrast recurses to population subsets, cf: the civil rights era.)
chroem 13y ago
At risk of being called a crazy conspiracy theorist: At some point you have to realize that politicians have been reduced to little more than actors and the deep state is now the entity that's really in control. What do I mean by that? The Affordable Care Act is pretty much the primary political blockbuster over the course of the last several years. Still, it didn't do much beyond establish an online insurance exchange and eliminate discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. Not exactly what I would consider sweeping reform. Despite this, Republicans are constantly shouting to the public "Obamacare is destroying America!" and Democrats are saying "The ACA has made our nation infinitely better off", when the reality is that neither is true. The grandiose televised presidential debates seem quite indicative that these people are just acting for the public in order to get elected. Romney and Obama tried to paint each other in such a dramatic way that it really bordered on absurdity. Meanwhile, we have the three letter agencies getting into all sorts of trouble. Spying on the public, starting coups abroad, and all sorts of things that they will never be held accountable for. It seems far more likely to me that Obama was pressured into his present foreign policy by the members of these agencies, rather than him backing out on his promises so extensively. In the case of the NSA, and now apparently the CIA, they are in no way obligated to inform congress of their actions. They pretty much just do whatever the hell they want and then leave the politicians to rationalize it. So, while Republicans and Democrats may argue over petty issues, there isn't a whole lot behind their talk. The critical decisions about which countries we enter into conflict with, what rights US citizens have, etc., are really being made behind the scenes by completely unelected people.
- c0ur7n3y 13y ago
  The primary factor underlying these issues is that congress and the executive are beholden more to those who fund their campaigns than those who vote for them. Nothing gets through congress or is signed by the president without the approval of the top 100 campaign donors.
coldtea 13y ago
>I don't have much faith that the other major candidate was any more honest, so what really is the general public to do? Not wait until there is a candidate President to be presented to them, but join the parties they are interested in, and push and vote themselves for the kind of candidate they want to have? If people only vote at the last minute (just who will be president from 2 ready made choices by the Republican or the Democratic party) then it's not really a democracy, it's merely a popularity contest about two people put in front of you. There's no "representative democracy" without mass active participation. Voting every 4 years and the ocassional "letter to your Senator" doesn't count at all. >Yeah yeah, technically we vote for people, not for platforms... Well, in a democracy you're supposed to vote for the platform, not for the people. It's not about chosing a random leader that seems nice, it's about picking the representative to best move forward the kind of policy change (platform) you'd like to see. Making elections about individual people and their character (and even personal morals or looks) is, to my European eyes, a regression to non political attitudes.
- Crito 13y ago
  > "Not wait until there is a candidate President to be presented to them, but join the parties they are interested in, and push and vote themselves for the kind of candidate they want to have?" In a country of 300million people, I don't think that "get to know the person that you want to be president, so that you can personally endorse them" is a scalable solution. For most citizens, that would play out as "join a party, receive the newsletters in the mail, feel good about the direction the party is going, and get lied to every two years."
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >In a country of 300million people, I don't think that "get to know the person that you want to be president, so that you can personally endorse them" is a scalable solution. It's not about getting to know them as people. It's about getting to know their platform, and pushing for this or that platform inside party processes. >For most citizens, that would play out as "join a party, receive the newsletters in the mail, feel good about the direction the party is going, and get lied to every two years." Well, then you ain't gonna have a democracy. It's an off the couch thing. You cannot have a democracy if you're not concerned with whats going on and voicing that as part of a power process every day.
samstave 13y ago
>I believe that is how I was intended to perceive it. This should be all one needs to understand to pull back the veil of US propaganda.
czr80 13y ago
January 2009 - Executive Order 13491 - Obama restores policy on interrogations to pre-Bush norms (i.e., rolling back the instructions that resulted in US soldiers torturing prisoners) [1] January 2014 - Obama repeats call to close Guantanamo prison: "With the Afghan war ending, this needs to be the year Congress lifts the remaining restrictions on detainee transfers and we close the prison at Guantanamo Bay," Obama said in the address Tuesday night. Obama ordered his administration to empty the prison camps in the first year of his first term, by Jan 22, 2010. But Congress steadily thwarted that ambition by imposing escalating restrictions on transfers and blocking civilian trials of the captives.[2] What he did not do is to aggressively pursue judicial action against the previous administration. Was this right or wrong? I personally wish he did, but I can also see why he chose not to tear the country apart over that. So I'm curious - did you know about the executive order he signed? What else were you hoping he would do? Where do you think he lied? [1] http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/EnsuringLawfulInterrogations http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/EnsuringLawfulInt... [2] http://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/01/30/obama-we-need-to-close-guantanamo-prison.html http://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/01/30/obama-we-need-...
- Zigurd 13y ago
  > chose not to tear the country apart How is putting a handful of Dr. Mengeles and their thugs into prison going to "tear the country apart?" You are elevating that decision way beyond what it really is.
peterashford 13y ago
I live in New Zealand. We have an MMP parliament, which means that you get lots of different voices in government. IMO, the problem with the US is the FPP system - it lends itself to being monopolised by two large parties. When NZ had FPP, that is what happened here, also. I don't think you can have a working democracy without real choice in who to vote for. I would argue that FPP means that you don't have that choice in the US. Witness that people voting for Nader (left of the Dems) split the Dems vote and gave you a right wing government. The system works against anyone having ideas outside the mainstream. My strong opinion is that if you want a better democracy you must get rid of FPP. STV or MMP are both better alternatives.

by Crito 13y ago

a3n 13y ago

> So the public voted for a representative who would curtail torture, but the representative they voted for was a liar. They're all liars. All of them. Even "your" representative/Senator/guy you backed for President. Lying is the only way they can get elected. Would you have voted for anyone who campaigned on not prosecuting torture, but prosecuting Aaron Swartz to death? "If elected I will support any prosecutor who hounds Aaron Swartz to suicide." Because he does support Carmen Ortiz. Would you have voted for anyone who campaigned on increasing surveillance, foreign and domestic, to the limits of technology? Would you have voted for anyone who campaigned that "I will support the programs and personnel that cause drone strikes to target, inadvertently or otherwise, weddings, houses, schools and other facilities where innocents and children are killed. No. They take all those things, say the opposite (especially if the current occupant is doing those things), and then double down when they get in. They lie. Oxygen goes in, and lies come out.

Crito 13y ago
Well, ideally candidates that neither lied nor campaigned with those positions would be great. For reasons that I can only speculate about, they don't seem to exist. My least 'fringey' theory is that those who want to rule are almost by definition unfit to rule.

skolos 13y ago

By the end of the first term it was clear that Obama ignored a lot of his promises. What really surprised me that people still believed him enough to elect for the second term.

bediger4000 13y ago
eople still believed him enough to elect for the second term. I certainly didn't believe Obama by the 2012 campaign, but I didn't have a huge choice. I blame the other major party for nominating an obvious empty suit of clothes, and you should, too.
- sigzero 13y ago
  Yup, Romney ugh. Don't get me started.
- crusso 13y ago
  At very least, it would have been worth voting for Romney to get the media to do something like its job. This IRS scandal should have the press howling at the stonewalling of the administration and the suppression of the rights of Americans trying to participate in the election process. Instead, it's crickets. After all, they're only a bunch of "tea baggers".
  - mullingitover 13y ago
    > This IRS scandal should have the press howling at the stonewalling of the administration and the suppression of the rights of Americans trying to participate in the election process Which IRS scandal? This one[1]? "Further investigation revealed that certain terms and themes in the applications of liberal-leaning groups and the Occupy movement had also triggered additional scrutiny, though possibly at a lower rate.[3][4][5][6][7] The only known denial of tax-exempt status occurred to a progressive group." [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_IRS_scandal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_IRS_scandal
    - Floegipoky 13y ago

dmix 13y ago

> How can a representative democracy function when all the candidate representatives are liars? I'm happy more people are finally becoming aware of the fallacious nature of labeling it a representative democracy. When the implementation of a system is providing massive amounts of power to a tiny group of people, in exchange for non-binding promises. In the rare event someone is held accountable for lying, they get replaced by another politician who over time is indistinguishable from the last one. But everyone keeps trumpeting the idea that voting and replacing politician x with politican y is the solution to a broken democracy. I'm not buying it.

crusso 13y ago
by another politician who over time is indistinguishable from the last one It's worse than that. You can replace every politician in Washington DC and you'd still be left with a massive bureaucracy of unelected officials who will go right on doing what they're doing, oblivious to the needs of the voting public. Their numbers are legion, they have a great deal of power, and they are entrenched beyond comprehension.
JulianMorrison 13y ago
Democracy happens, it's just rather indirectly related to voting. The coin of political power is public passivity - a resisting public will seriously ruin a politician's day, democratic or autocratic. Elections have the effect of forcing politicians to rely on public opinion to create passivity, because using terror in the authoritarian style would get them ejected. Therefore democratic politics consists of efforts to push (or be pushed by) public opinion. (This democracy/autocracy contrast recurses to population subsets, cf: the civil rights era.)

chroem 13y ago

At risk of being called a crazy conspiracy theorist: At some point you have to realize that politicians have been reduced to little more than actors and the deep state is now the entity that's really in control. What do I mean by that? The Affordable Care Act is pretty much the primary political blockbuster over the course of the last several years. Still, it didn't do much beyond establish an online insurance exchange and eliminate discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. Not exactly what I would consider sweeping reform. Despite this, Republicans are constantly shouting to the public "Obamacare is destroying America!" and Democrats are saying "The ACA has made our nation infinitely better off", when the reality is that neither is true. The grandiose televised presidential debates seem quite indicative that these people are just acting for the public in order to get elected. Romney and Obama tried to paint each other in such a dramatic way that it really bordered on absurdity. Meanwhile, we have the three letter agencies getting into all sorts of trouble. Spying on the public, starting coups abroad, and all sorts of things that they will never be held accountable for. It seems far more likely to me that Obama was pressured into his present foreign policy by the members of these agencies, rather than him backing out on his promises so extensively. In the case of the NSA, and now apparently the CIA, they are in no way obligated to inform congress of their actions. They pretty much just do whatever the hell they want and then leave the politicians to rationalize it. So, while Republicans and Democrats may argue over petty issues, there isn't a whole lot behind their talk. The critical decisions about which countries we enter into conflict with, what rights US citizens have, etc., are really being made behind the scenes by completely unelected people.

c0ur7n3y 13y ago
The primary factor underlying these issues is that congress and the executive are beholden more to those who fund their campaigns than those who vote for them. Nothing gets through congress or is signed by the president without the approval of the top 100 campaign donors.

coldtea 13y ago

>I don't have much faith that the other major candidate was any more honest, so what really is the general public to do? Not wait until there is a candidate President to be presented to them, but join the parties they are interested in, and push and vote themselves for the kind of candidate they want to have? If people only vote at the last minute (just who will be president from 2 ready made choices by the Republican or the Democratic party) then it's not really a democracy, it's merely a popularity contest about two people put in front of you. There's no "representative democracy" without mass active participation. Voting every 4 years and the ocassional "letter to your Senator" doesn't count at all. >Yeah yeah, technically we vote for people, not for platforms... Well, in a democracy you're supposed to vote for the platform, not for the people. It's not about chosing a random leader that seems nice, it's about picking the representative to best move forward the kind of policy change (platform) you'd like to see. Making elections about individual people and their character (and even personal morals or looks) is, to my European eyes, a regression to non political attitudes.

Crito 13y ago
> "Not wait until there is a candidate President to be presented to them, but join the parties they are interested in, and push and vote themselves for the kind of candidate they want to have?" In a country of 300million people, I don't think that "get to know the person that you want to be president, so that you can personally endorse them" is a scalable solution. For most citizens, that would play out as "join a party, receive the newsletters in the mail, feel good about the direction the party is going, and get lied to every two years."
- coldtea 13y ago
  >In a country of 300million people, I don't think that "get to know the person that you want to be president, so that you can personally endorse them" is a scalable solution. It's not about getting to know them as people. It's about getting to know their platform, and pushing for this or that platform inside party processes. >For most citizens, that would play out as "join a party, receive the newsletters in the mail, feel good about the direction the party is going, and get lied to every two years." Well, then you ain't gonna have a democracy. It's an off the couch thing. You cannot have a democracy if you're not concerned with whats going on and voicing that as part of a power process every day.

samstave 13y ago

>I believe that is how I was intended to perceive it. This should be all one needs to understand to pull back the veil of US propaganda.

czr80 13y ago

January 2009 - Executive Order 13491 - Obama restores policy on interrogations to pre-Bush norms (i.e., rolling back the instructions that resulted in US soldiers torturing prisoners) [1] January 2014 - Obama repeats call to close Guantanamo prison: "With the Afghan war ending, this needs to be the year Congress lifts the remaining restrictions on detainee transfers and we close the prison at Guantanamo Bay," Obama said in the address Tuesday night. Obama ordered his administration to empty the prison camps in the first year of his first term, by Jan 22, 2010. But Congress steadily thwarted that ambition by imposing escalating restrictions on transfers and blocking civilian trials of the captives.[2] What he did not do is to aggressively pursue judicial action against the previous administration. Was this right or wrong? I personally wish he did, but I can also see why he chose not to tear the country apart over that. So I'm curious - did you know about the executive order he signed? What else were you hoping he would do? Where do you think he lied? [1] http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/EnsuringLawfulInterrogations http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/EnsuringLawfulInt... [2] http://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/01/30/obama-we-need-to-close-guantanamo-prison.html http://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/01/30/obama-we-need-...

Zigurd 13y ago
> chose not to tear the country apart How is putting a handful of Dr. Mengeles and their thugs into prison going to "tear the country apart?" You are elevating that decision way beyond what it really is.

peterashford 13y ago

I live in New Zealand. We have an MMP parliament, which means that you get lots of different voices in government. IMO, the problem with the US is the FPP system - it lends itself to being monopolised by two large parties. When NZ had FPP, that is what happened here, also. I don't think you can have a working democracy without real choice in who to vote for. I would argue that FPP means that you don't have that choice in the US. Witness that people voting for Nader (left of the Dems) split the Dems vote and gave you a right wing government. The system works against anyone having ideas outside the mainstream. My strong opinion is that if you want a better democracy you must get rid of FPP. STV or MMP are both better alternatives.