[jdjjdbne]

LOL, congress doesn't listen because it isn't in their interest to listen. Citizens without money are nobodies, congress fundraise 24/7, that's what they care about, saying anything else is either ignorant or maleficent.

What a complete waste of time, from idea to development to posting and commenting, truth sucks but congress does not care about your opinion unless it comes attached to a big check.

[toomuchtodo]

So let's stop wasting time on communicating to congress, and start building infrastructure to get people elected who represent the interests we want represented.

Don't listen to your constituents? We build the tools to get you shoved out of office next election cycle.

[jnellis]

That will never happen though. It's recently been shown that no matter how popular/unpopular the legislation is to the average american, there's a flat 30% chance it will pass. For the 1%'ers though, if they don't like a piece of legislation, there's virtually no chance it will pass, but if they like it, there's up to a 60% chance it will pass. The bottom line is that nothing the average american does affects congress.

In 1970 the Legislation Reorganization Act of 1970 passed. This piece of legislation forces committee voting records of congress to be publicly displayed. Because of this, lobbyists can now see and verify that congressmen are pushing their agenda otherwise the money doesn't flow. It's no exaggeration to say that lobbyists are in the gallery, within eyesight, giving cues to how congressmen should vote.

It's counter-intuitive for most people to think that they should not want to know how their congressperson votes on legislation but that's exactly what's holding congress back from voting their conscious. We insist and protect a persons right to vote in privacy for a large list of reasons that all boil down to ensuring an honest and fair accounting of the will of the people. But we don't hold those same lofty goals up for congress since that bill passed. And how do you put the genie back in the bottle when at the first whiff of doing so would bring in an army of lobbyists to shut it down. Remember elites who don't like a bill can effectively drive its chances of passing down to zero, and this would be a piece of legislation that affects all lobbyists.

[vezzy-fnord]

That's the core issue behind the whole situation, really. Electing people? That's totally backwards and unreliable. You should be voting on ideas and have people come in to fill the demand.

This is why I appreciate interest in systems like futarchy, even if the specific mechanics behind futarchy itself might be flawed.

Of course, one could say that moving away from this is just an unrealistic ideal. That's probably the case, indeed. But then "building tools to get people shoved out of office next election cycle" is pretty much doomed to be a perpetual rat race, not unlike trying to use a blacklist to catch an ever growing number of malicious ad networks, or keeping up with a reverse engineered implementation of a proprietary protocol from a vendor who has no qualms with constantly breaking API and ABI compatibility to leave you in the dust.

[simcop2387]

We should definitely be doing both. That way we can more easily measure which ones are listening so we know who might not be being as effective as they can be, and so that once we've got someone who will be in place they'll have the tools necessary to actually listen and get the proper information. There's no reason to do just one or the other since there are problems on both sides.

[prawn]

I sadly agree. I'd instead focus on tools that help people band together and make noise about an issue. If politicians catch wind of a strong enough grassroots campaign that might sway a vote, I imagine they're more likely to take action.

The wheels have to be very squeaky to get their attention over the money/influence.

Otherwise they just pretend to care.