Chomsky: Fight back against NSA spying or be 'complicit'

[reACTIONary]

24. You ask very reasonable questions...

... and have a very reasonable perspective.

I don't think the administration is attempting to criminalize adversarial journalism. Holder just recently stated that Justice is not considering prosecution of Glenn Greenwald and doesn't think he committed a crime. The Justice department tapped the AP's phones, but did so to find and prosecute the government employee who divulged classified information, not to arrest and prosecute the reporters who published it. There is also serious consideration of a federal shield law, the Free Flow of Information Act, although I don't know what its current status is.

I'm as much in the dark about the content of the TPP as everyone else is, so I don't know to what extent I agree or disagree with it. I do, however, support the process that is being employed - this is basically because I support effective government, and unfortunately our government hasn't been very effective lately.

I consider this process to be an extension of representative government and majority rule. Nearly everyone realizes that it would be impossible to govern even a small country through direct democracy and universal consensus. Nothing would ever get done collectively. So we adopt majority rule, which means ignoring a lot of the dissenting voices, and representation, which means turning over decision making authority to a smallish group of experts and specialists. Even within the more restricted context of our legislative bodies, a division of labor is necessary, with committees focusing on narrow areas of expertise and making judgments about what the larger body even gets a chance to vote on.

And still it doesn't work!!!! Congress is not exactly a "can do, get 'er done" sort of institution.

Parliamentary governance seems to work more effectively, but we don't have that - instead, we have a deliberately adversarial system that doesn't work very effectively without a strong consensus across four different governing bodies. (I'm counting the house and the senate as two, and I'm including the SCOTUS even through its a bit weak and only gets a say after the fact.)

So, the solution has been to extend the "committee" idea further and further. A base-closing committee or a deficit reduction super committee followed by a general, but limited vote. The "fast track" procedure is a variant on this, and without it, we wouldn't have any trade agreements at all. Because we wouldn't be able to come to any agreement amongst ourselves.