Forum Post: Let's lobby our Congress by creating a virtual congress on the Internet
Posted 13 years ago on Oct. 7, 2011, 10:27 p.m. EST by Heliodorus
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You don't have a say in government because your voice remains silent in the Legislature while special interest lobbyists pack the hallways of the Capitol building and spend hours and hours and millions of dollars influencing your representatives to do their bidding. In fact, it is estimated that in many of our “public hearings”, most of the room is often filled to overflowing with lobbyists. All of this legislation is being passed without your knowledge and consent and much of it is even written by the lobbyists themselves or the organizations they represent.
As reported in a local newspaper, one of the lobbyists recently said, “people have to be vigilant in good times and in bad. If you’re not represented in the process you get what you get.” You might want to reflect on this for a moment. IF YOU'RE NOT REPRESENTED, YOU GET WHAT YOU GET. Or, to put it another way, because of our lack of a common voice, the Very Few are making decisions for millions of Americans in closed door meetings in the middle of the night. This is not democracy - not even a democratic Republic. It's an oligarchy. And it exists because our framers could not have possibly known about modern technology. They had no other choice because they didn't know about computers and the Internet, satellites in space, television, cell phones, jet airplanes, and the "30 second soundbite." But that was then and this is now yet we are all still living in the past.
One solution: Form our own virtual congress using the Internet and use it to gather public opinion on various issues (such as the efficacy of preemptive wars) and then hire our own lobbyists and send them to Washington to influence our own Congress on behalf of the American people. How's that for a novel idea? Let's lobby our own Congress (perfectly doable), monitor their votes, and then use our power of the vote instead of the billions in special interest money being lavished on our representatives to convince them of the errors of their ways. Let's remind them who they are being sent to Washington to represent. AND LET'S KEEP POLITICAL PARTIES OUT OF THIS! There's too much partisan hatred and it's being used against us to keep us divided.
And while we're at it, let's take back some of our own airwaves and create our own television network. Let Americans debate Americans on the various issues of our times. Basically Facebook on steroids. Yes YOU, on TV! Not the lawyers, not the politicians and pundits, YOU. Let's ask Americans what they think. Let's give Americans a voice and listen to what you have to say for a change..
Google or Bing "virtual congress" for more.
For a minute there, you almost had me at "hello." If you could dream as big as you dared to dream, a virtual Continental Congress would be that dream. And nothing gets the job done better. Obviously, we can't compete with corporate cronyism and bribery. And why should we try to beg to get someone to listen to us when we already own the joint? It's wasted money. And it also causes spiraling inflation. Why would we beg to get someone's partial attention when we can just take all their power and their job? We just need to do some house cleaning and get rid of a few problems. So we throw out the Congress, lobbyists, bad laws and wasted money traps. Problem fixed. Continental Congress are beautiful words. We start petitioning tomorrow.
As one of the 99% my one demand is… As one of the 99%, my one demand is… that everyone is fired. For the life of me, I do not understand why we voluntarily turn over our vote, our money, our freedoms, our civil rights and our lives to people whom we do not know and expect them to do anything differently from what they have already done. This blind notion of somehow it will all work out, comes from the tie back to feudalism when we all worked for the king, and that it, was just a given. A look even further back into the history of human thought and excuses, reveals the days of the ancient Egyptian religious beliefs, in that the Pharaoh had to get through the gates of heaven first before any of the rest of us even had a chance to. His salvation was simply, our own salvation. And we worked for his glory,trusting blindly, that he would do the right thing. And not much has changed. This is the basis of the sick theory called trickle-down economics and the modern day corporate-government-communist mess that we have today. Is it that we have that much trust or that much ignorance? Or are we all just really lazy in expecting that someone, somewhere will pull us through the gates of heaven by something we’re wearing? Scarves are a big fashion this year. But why? They serve no purpose other than remind us of our ties back to the same Pharaoh-goes-to-heave-first beliefs. It ought to be apparent by now that our indirect democracy does not work as intended by our founding forefathers. It may have worked in a time, long ago, when life was simpler and before our economy started generating enormous amounts of money. But we all know that money corrupts. It’s simply a natural phenomenon. The only way to circumvent this fact, is to simply take our votes back and bypass those who are so easily corrupted. All of the votes. On every single issue. And with control of every single dollar. There is no other way to restore the real power to the people and destroy the ravages of all of the corruption that has occurred over the years, than to fire everyone in Congress and employ ourselves to do the job of deciding exactly what is good for this country and what is not. The level of corruption that has occurred since WW II is so well-layered into our daily lives, that there is no way to untangle the webs of deception other than to take back all of the legislative and court authority and exercise these powers ourselves, by means of a simple review process concerning every law that has been passed by Congress and the Supreme Court since the 1950s and vote to retain or dismiss them. And while processing what has happened without our knowledge or consent over those decades, we will need to move forward on legislation that is pending. The bill summations can come to us for our approval via the internet or U.S. mail, with a one-month deadline for our review and vote. The summations of the past laws and the currently pending legislation would be written in a simple, one-page format, with a net affects reference and total dollar expenditure assigned to the law. We would simply vote to retain the passed legislation, to pass currently pending legislation or to dismiss with instructions for improvement before re-submittal. The Congress would be reduced to being our pages and paper shufflers. There would be sheer justice in making them re-read everything that they have written and then have to short form it into a simple to understand, one-page format, with the real dollar costs and the method of paying for the law and its changes. In this legislative utopia, there would be no more back room deals. Special interests and con-artists would just have to find a new profession. Maybe they could pass all their time defrauding and suing each other. Yet, more justice. And a lot of them, along with their legislative bed fellows, would end up going to prison. The ones who were found to have committing treason, as enemies of the people and the state, would probably be executed. And the wealth that this generation would generate would be unmatched in terms of bringing truth back to the legislative process, justice back to the law and liberty for all back to we, the people of the United States. October 7,2011 by GigiGigiK
this is actually a very interesting idea. everything is becoming crowd sourced for commercial gain - think groupon etc. What about crowd sourcing the government via the internet?
Already happening, just not here http://tiny.cc/63wbe
Also http://tiny.cc/e464m