Congressional gridlock

In a recent NBC/Wall St Journal poll, 60% of Americans want to replace every single member of Congress including their own representative. That is the highest ever figure received in that poll.

And according to the latest Associated Press-GfK poll the approval rating for Congress is at an all time low of just 5% with 83% disapproving of the job they are doing.

The federal government is currently shutdown, Congress was unable to pass a federal budget, the debt limit is once again looming and things look very bleak.

The American people are disgusted with Congress, all of the partisanship and endless bickering with nothing ever getting accomplished! No wonder Congressional approval rating is at its lowest point ever! This government shutdown makes the US look bad and could possibly affect our credit rating. No one wants to compromise, no one wants to work together; Congress only cares about giving out sound bites and appearing on cable TV news program scoring political points! I'm sick of it and so are most Americans!

Yet in spite of the overwhelming disapproval most Congress members seem oblivious to the criticism! It's truly galling. The American people expect their elected representatives to behave better than petulant spoiled children. Nothing ever gets accomplished. Hyper-partisanship and endless bickering rules the day. In the 1980s when Reagan was president you had deep ideological differences in Congress, yet Congress was able to work together with the President and get stuff done. Now we have rancorous mean spirited arguing and name calling. The object is to score a political point and give a good sound bite to use against the opposition rather than working on getting the business of the day accomplished! This blame game and paralyzing divisiveness must end!

SOPA/PIPA defeated!

SOPA/PIPA has been defeated! But we must not rest on our laurels. The greedy, amoral media companies will not stop until the law itself stops them for good. Sadly there is no short supply of corrupt politicians in Congress who put their own selfish interests ahead of the rights of We the People!

If SOPA/PIPA has passed it would have meant the end of the open and free Internet a we know it. The media companies and any copyright holder would not have even needed any proof to shut down a site, to have a person charged and facing 5 years in prison. All they would have to do is file a complaint and claim a rights infringement and your website/blog could be shut down.

The dirty little secret is that the media companies themselves are behind many file sharing networks. Further these companies like Sony, Viacom, Time-Warner engage in illegal activity. They use malware, aggressive port scanning, denial of service attacks, viruses and packet inspection to gain access to users computers and see what files they have.

By treating consumers as hardened criminals these media companies have alienated several generations against them. Not the best business model. The RIAA, MPAA will be stopped, they will finally be forced, by the law and by the market dynamics, that they cannot conduct business like this and will find a profitable and fair business model for digital consumption.

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson

Here's a good article by Dr.  Michael Ham on how SOPA/PIPA could have been used to arbitrarily take down websites, stifle business competition and silence scientific debate.