Accountable to whom?

Accountable to whom?

In the USA, checks and balances are written into the US constitution and are designed to ensure the power is shared and controlled by the rule of law. One weakness in the constitution and the founders’ desire to control power is the development of the executive presidency and the growth in size of the United States. In order to win a presidential election one needs to put together a very large coalition, and when one takes into account that there is only one president, and the winner takes all nature of American politics, the checks and balances seem more translucent than expected as illustrated by the behaviour of the Trump presidency.

This tendency to monarchy is aggravated by the informal fashion in which the law and constitution regulates political parties within the United States and incidently the UK. A party cannot and will not hold a president of its own party to account and when one looks at the degradation of the Republican Party In Congress and the capture of the Supreme Court it becomes clear that US style constitutions cannot hold a rogue president to account.

Fixed terms are equally a problem, the electorate cannot change its mind. Political theory suggests that a parliamentary system solves this problem, but it would seem only if proportional voting systems are used. Proportional voting systems ameliorate the need for voters to participate within coalitions that they’re uncomfortable in and so don’t have to compromise as to how to cast their vote for a government,.

The Anglosphere’s problem is first past the post with a winner take all culture of government. This is replicated in most if not all Presidential republics.

If a major part of the problem is party capture, then it is clear the UK suffers from this as well, shown by Boris Johnson’s purge of the pro European wing of his parliamentary party, and by Starmer and Mcsweeney’s purge and intimidation of their internal enemies and opponents. I note that the Labour Government is going to make more Mayors, creating more power foci which can only be occupied by one person.

As voters, citizens, residents and party members, perhaps we should be asking for democratic guarantees, including term limits, by political parties within their candidate selection process and that they should be accountable to the public as well as to the party membership. …

Not a good day

Not a good day

Not a good day for progressive politics yesterday, Trump smashes Harris, and in Germany, Scholtz fires his finance minister, Linder, probably signalling the end of the ‘Jamaica’ coalition. I am with those that say the lesson for liberal centrists is not to piss off your base and keep your eyes on the real value of wages/household income. If “it’s the economy stupid”, then the economy is real wages !!! There are big lessons for UK politics here.

For more check out articles by Adyta Chakraborty, Bernie Sanders, and Phil Burton Cartledge. …

The 14th amendment and oath-breakers

The 14th amendment and oath-breakers

In the linked video, Michael Pocock, a lawyer correspondent on the Meidas Network expresses his delight at Baude and Paulsen’s white paper, “The Sweep and Force of Section 3” which argues that the 14th amendment to the Constitution prohibits Donald Trump from holding any federal office, including that of President as the clause forbids holding office by former office holders who then participate in insurrection or rebellion. Baude and Paulson are well known and respected judicial scholars and members of the Federalist Society and known supporters of the originalist doctrine of interpretation of the Constitution. The rest of this article, see overleaf, reproduces the powerful abstract and links to two further news commentaries. ...

Insurrectionists and the Presidency

Insurrectionists and the Presidency

In this video, Michael Pocock a lawyer correspondent on the Meidas Network expresses his delight at Baude and Paulsen’s white paper, “The Sweep and Force of Section 3” which argues that the 14th amendment to the Constitution prohibits Donald Trump from holding any federal office, including that of President as the clause forbids holding office by former office holders who then participate in insurrection or rebellion. Baude and Paulson are well known and respected judicial scholars and members of the Federalist Society and known supporters of the originalist doctrine of interpretation of the Constitution.They would seem not to be progressives and not natural opponents of the Republican Party.

The abstract is a powerful summary,

Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment forbids holding office by former office holders who then participate in insurrection or rebellion. Because of a range of misperceptions and mistaken assumptions, Section Three’s full legal consequences have not been appreciated or enforced. This article corrects those mistakes by setting forth the full sweep and force of Section Three.

First, Section Three remains an enforceable part of the Constitution, not limited to the Civil War, and not effectively repealed by nineteenth century amnesty legislation. Second, Section Three is self-executing, operating as an immediate disqualification from office, without the need for additional action by Congress. It can and should be enforced by every official, state or federal, who judges qualifications. Third, to the extent of any conflict with prior constitutional rules, Section Three repeals, supersedes, or simply satisfies them. This includes the rules against bills of attainder or ex post facto laws, the Due Process Clause, and even the free speech principles of the First Amendment. Fourth, Section Three covers a broad range of conduct against the authority of the constitutional order, including many instances of indirect participation or support as “aid or comfort.” It covers a broad range of former offices, including the Presidency. And in particular, it disqualifies former President Donald Trump, and potentially many others, because of their participation in the attempted overthrow of the 2020 presidential election.

They argue that election officials may if not should, refuse to put his name on the ballot.

This story was also carried by MSNBC, in the Reidout, which I recommend viewing for the poetic way in which Joy Reid introduces the interview, starting from the Hollywood strike, and its tales of fantasy, to the dangerous application of these fantasies to modern US politics.

There is not great originality in this post and I have learnt that foreigners comment on the US politics are often unwelcome, but I think this should be read. It’s hard to find politicians with principles these days and when we find them, they need to be congratulated.

Baude, William and Paulsen, Michael Stokes, The Sweep and Force of Section Three (August 9, 2023). University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol. 172, 2024, Available at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4532751

Image Credit: From wikimedia commons, authored by shutterbugsage, English: 14th Amendment sign at the entrance of the Brown v Board of Education Historical Site in Topeka, KS. …

Just in hiding

I reshare this not to gloat, not to criticise the USA, but because of Will McAvoy’s sorrowful review of a great past, which offers insights that the world could learn from today

‘America is not the greatest country in the world anymore’,

We sure used to be. We stood up for what was right! We fought for moral reasons, we passed and struck down laws for moral reasons. We waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths were, and we never beat our chest. We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases, and cultivated the world’s greatest artists and the world’s greatest economy. We reached for the stars, and we acted like men. We aspired to intelligence; we didn’t belittle it; it didn’t make us feel inferior. We didn’t identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election, and we didn’t scare so easy. And we were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed. By great men, men who were revered. The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one—America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.

Will McAvoy – The Newsroom

That country doesn’t exist today, let’s hope it’s just in hiding

Words from here. https://speakola.com/movie/jeff-daniels-sorkin-newsroom-2012 …

Eternal vigilance

I have been pointed at China’s Social Credit Scoring plans via two routes. The first is this extract published at Wired from Rachel Botsman’s book, “Who can we trust”. This details the Chinese Governments plan to build a social credit scoring scheme, but the sources and incentives are horrendously comprehensive, including their leading match making agency. (It’s taken me some time to read this article, an I have bookmarked and annotated it in my diigo feed.) Worrying things about the Chinese scheme is that voluntary participation becomes mandatory; while rewards and incentives are at the forefront of everyone’s mind today, control and punishment is planned, in the Chinese case in the short term they are talking about foreign and domestic travel restrictions but as I note, the countries leading dating agency is one of the surveillance agencies. There is also talk of social investment loans (helicopter money) which become available on the basis of social scores.

The second route was an article on Medium by someone who got banned from AirBnB. He pointed at an article on Buzzfeed, “A Chinese-Style Digital Dystopia Isn’t As Far Away As We Think” where a series of regulatory decisions in the USA seem to be paving the way to something similar, a powerful illustration that the argument that surveillance is OK if it’s private sector is horrendously false.

One worrying aspect of the proposed Chinese system is that your reputation is as good as that of your friends and we have idiots trying to replicate it with peeple, and reading up on that has started me worrying about Linkedin and its competitors and we all know we should get off facebook.

The wired article came before machine learning and massive scale AI became a hot topic, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens to social credit scores when they let rip with the application of machine learning. The automated derivation of reputation scores also raises issues of safeguarding, libel and context. Safeguarding and libel laws require the machines to tell the truth, in fact safeguarding may require machines to hide the truth. Context requires a level of nuance that we are unsure if machines will ever have, but even if they get there, justice and judges must remain human and the code must be open; China’s & Facebook’s is not!. The GDPR gives data subjects rights, perhaps its time to revisit the seven principles.

Of course in the UK, we have our very own examples of machines and data sharing getting it wrong. Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary has suspended the intra-government and some of the other immigration data sharing as a result of the backlash on the Windrush scandal. (I wonder if this I an excuse to look again at the DPA Immigration Exemption clauses.) Much of what is happening in China and the USA is also happening in the UK, it’s just that the surveillance agents are the US owned datenkraken and the British State have legalised the hacking of their data streams.

What’s happening in China is terrible, but our governments are following suit! The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. …

Privacy and Big Data

I read Privacy and Big Data by Craig and Ludloff towards the end of 2013. The first chapter is called “The Perfect Storm”. The book lists a number of consumer and corporate computing trends, from Google’s search solution and their clustered file systems, the consumer adoption of cloud storage and the realisation of parallel computing models. There is no question that data is growing at an explosive rate and that new computational models are being developed to use these new volumes of data in timescales appropriate to the human. These new models are of interest to both the new internet companies and to Governments yet because of both social media and the distributed nature of modern computing raise questions of privacy. …

Citizens not Suspects

Citizens not Suspects

The Guardian reports that Privacy International are going to court to get the UK Government banned from using the USA’s ‘intelligence’ obtained via their Prism programme, and to suspend the UK’s equivalent programme, the GCHQ’s Tempora programme.

Privacy International argue that the UK agencies’ use of NSA supplied data is illegal since there is no warrant and no notification and no appeal; which is a problem when there is no ‘probable cause’. In order for GCHQ to intercept someone, they’d need a warrant issued under RIPA. This looks to be  an example of the two agencies outsourcing the surveillance of their own citizenry, since they are prohibited from doing so. i.e. GCHQ is spying on Yanks, and the NSA returns the favour by spying on Brits. Both agencies need a warrant to spy on their own citizens, but not on foreigners. …

Tuesday on the night of Obama’s election

I had travelled to the USA for some more training and so was in the USA for the day of the Presidential election. Last night was very quiet, I went to Kapps in Mountain View. I had left the office where a number of people were, oddly, watching the BBC web site report via a wall screen display. I had also enabled the facebook and multi-protocol chat applications on the ipod and discussed the elections with my son at home in the UK. This was pretty good  …