I made a similar comment a few days ago - what we need is a crowd-funded lobbying platform for everyday people. A kind of Kickstarter for law and policy.
If a few thousand or even tens of thousands of people chip in a few dollars to lobby for a change in policy, we can compete with corporations who have bought their way into power.
While we're complaining on the internet big business is using pocket change to get what they want. It needs to be as easy if not easier to pay a few bucks for your desired policy as it is to complain about it in an online forum.
There are approximately 244,673,000 adults aged 18+ in the US: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html 318,857,056 * (1 - 0.233% of Persons under 18 years, percent, 2013) ~= 244,563,362
And according to https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/ , to match the $3.24 Billion spent on lobbying in 2014 you'd have to get absolutely everyone in the US 18 or over to give you 13$ and a quarter just to match what corporations are spending.
It's not the least bit realistic, and if the pre-2008 growth rate in lobbying spend picks up again it'll just get more and more out of control.
What's really necessary to get this absolutely incredible amount of money out of politics. The two presidential candidates shouldn't have to spend over 30 billion dollars on an election. The amount of money in politics right now is just insane.
Who says every dollar needs to be matched? If a corporation lobbies for rubber subsidies, no one will give a shit. If a corporation lobbies to make it a criminal offence to mention their brand online without a license, that crosses into free speech which might be worth a dollar or twenty to those who find that kind of thing important.
It's not the least bit realistic
You don't necessarily need to spend more than the corporations, you just need to make it lucrative to stand up for the good guy. If you can have $1m to be evil or $900k to be good, the $100k lost is more than made up for by the advocacy of those you served. It's free advertising.
There's lots of people who can see that money in politics is the problem. How do we solve it though?
Wait for a supreme court judge to die and hope their replacement aligns with our views on this topic?
Petition the whitehouse?
Fund a kickstarter campaign to get our own people lobbying for this?
That would of funded the current President as well... that is, until he was elected President.
Really? It's like you've never heard of a PAC before.
And regular PAC's really cannot compete with the unlimited funding a Super PAC can levy (PAC's have strict limits on contributions to parties and candidates; $5,000 per candidate, $15,000 per party per year).
Even the smallest of these are not small numbers. And, if you're interested in policy or political change, you've heard of all of them, and they all make it pretty damn easy to donate money[0]. It's just people don't care that much, and for the people who do care, there's often someone else on the opposite side of things who cares just as much.
It doesn't seem to me that a crowd-funded lobbying platform offers much. Maybe it makes it easier to start up an organization? Sure, I guess, but it doesn't give me any confidence that they'll use any funds I give in an effective way. At least major, well-known organizations have a brand to defend and have to be able to prove repeatable successes.
[0] The EFF, which I got to in 5 seconds by DuckDuckGoing "EFF donate": https://supporters.eff.org/donate
Within each Lobby Kickstarter you could outline which organizations would receive funds for specific goals, e.g. ACLU for particular civil liberties that are under attack, EFF to address dragnet surveillance etc. Yes you're adding a middleman but you have a one stop shop for initiatives that range far and wide. You could also keep score of which organizations have been successful so that you have an additional trust mechanism, much the way a company might keep track of its subcontractors when choosing who to use to get a job done.
How about https://www.iWouldDo.it ?
Obama likes to constantly state that he will act because Congress "refuses" to... which completely ignores the fact that Congress' "lack" of action is exactly what they are supposed to do when there is no agreement on an issue. Just because Congress doesn't execute the President's will doesn't mean Congress is wrong!
Now the Executive branch gets to unilaterally decide what trade agreements are good for the nation (and that usually means which big lobbying firm courted the Executive branch the best) -- that doesn't sound very democratic to me.
Congress surrendered the authority. They are the ones to blame.
What is going on was predicted by David Korten in his 1995 blockbuster, When Corporations Rule The World. Catherine Austin Fitts calls it a “corporate coup d’état.”
This corporate coup includes the privatization and offshoring of the judicial function [0] delegated to the US court system in the Constitution, through Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions that strengthen existing ISDS procedures.
As explained in The Economist [1], ISDS gives foreign firms a special right to apply to a secretive tribunal of highly paid corporate lawyers for compensation whenever the government passes a law to do things that hurt corporate profits — such things as discouraging smoking, protecting the environment or preventing a nuclear catastrophe. Arbitrators are paid $600-700 an hour, giving them little incentive to dismiss cases. The secretive nature of the arbitration process and the lack of any requirement to consider precedent give wide scope for creative judgments – the sort of arbitrary edicts satirized by Lewis Carroll in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
To date, the highest ISDS award has been for $2.3 billion to Occidental Oil Company against the government of Ecuador over its termination of an oil-concession contract, although the termination was apparently legal. Under the TPP, however, even larger and more unpredictable judgments can be anticipated, since the sort of “investment” it protects includes not just “the commitment of capital or other resources” but “the expectation of gain or profit.” That means the rights of corporations extend not merely to their factories and other “capital” but to the profits they expect to receive. Just the threat of a massive damage award for impairing “expected corporate profits” could be enough to discourage prospective legislation by lawmakers.
0]: http://ellenbrown.com/2015/04/24/the-trans-pacific-partnersh...
1]: http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21623756...
The USTR, in contrast, has the sole responsibility of maximizing the benefit to the U.S. It's in our interest if people outside the U.S. have to pay us a bunch of money to get the drugs we invent.
That is not to say that we shouldn't be giving free drugs to people who need it. But that's a policy decision decidedly outside the scope of the USTR. We have agencies like USAID whose job it is to handle humanitarian aid.
No one here is getting drugs for free, just at reasonable prices that may not be available in the US
TPP as currently written will neuter this advantage costing us billions that will come out of my taxes
Currently, without the TPP, the large pharmaceutical companies make billions in profit every year even including the rampant "piracy" in countries like India and China.
Or, with the TPP, all of those generics go poof, billions lose legal access to modern drugs, and pharmaceutical companies increase profits by 30, maybe 40 percent?
Of course that slack will get taken up by USAID, like you said, which means that now American tax payers will be on the hook to provide medicine that is now more expensive because our own government made them so.
Doesn't really add up, does it?
As for getting "paid fairly" I disagree with the general notion that companies that make unimportant things should get paid "what the market will bear" while companies that make important things should get "paid fairly." I think that creates perverse incentives.
That all this seems to be happening behind closed doors doesn't inspire confidence.
I want both, so I want a balance...
Because he has the requisite knowledge to understand it and because he clearly hasn't been bought.
And they're certainly not struggling despite that; not sure why they need a treaty to 'protect' them.
> It's in our interest if people outside the U.S. have to pay us a bunch of money to get the drugs we invent.
Only if you think dollars are the only important thing. Plenty of people see welfare (including foreigners) as being a worthy thing in its own right.
"struggling" isn't the word I would use in this situation.
Things change, oil dries up. Doesn't mean we need to start making redflag laws to protect the old models.
I do hear what you say about the font drying up, but it's also no secret that medication is ridiculously expensive in the US. Big pharma is very wealthy, and very politically powerful, despite the low-hanging fruit being gone. The point I'm trying to make is that they don't need a treaty to protect them.
Correction -- that should read "benefit to the US companies".
That's quite an interesting interpretation of "without borders".
If you want a mutually beneficial trade agreement, you don't need secret meetings or a rush to get it through congress.
Whether the good in the TPP outweighs the bad is an open question that I don't have an answer to. I am just trying to provide some counter arguments to an otherwise one-sided discussion on here.
So you're going to commit is to something we didn't agree to? That's exactly why we need transparency.
And who decides who gets to make these deals? "Oh let us decide for you." No, you'll make a decision I don't want.
> Whether the good in the TPP outweighs the bad is an open question that I don't have an answer to. I am just trying to provide some counter arguments to an otherwise one-sided discussion on here.
Its not an open question, its a closed, hidden question we don't get access to, let alone any answers to.
This is a one-sided discussion because it is a one-sided situation.
> Economic modeling estimates that the benefits to the U.S. from the TPP will be $5 billion in 2015, rising to $14 billion in 2025
Yeah, its not worth it.
Btw US GDP is ~$16 trillion. This isn't going to move the meter at all. Its primarily about securing foreign IP rights for US companies, Obama's legacy, and strategic influence.
I love that the best defense unnamed "U.S. officials" can offer is that "major compromises" will likely still be made. In other words: yes we're acting as drug company lobbyists, but we expect some of these other countries to stand up for their citizens enough to get a few concessions.
Fantastic stuff. "Thanks Obama" (and Hillary)