I especially like this quote: “The proceeding was sparsely attended. None of the major media outlets, including The New York Times, covered it.”

The NYT news story has an audio recording of the meeting. I assume this was made by the SEC but haven’t confirmed that.

One potential locus for this information gathering to condense around might be Open Congress.

Yes, they do. But much of what becomes the focus of public discourse happens on TV, or in Internet video clips, and these are almost invariably divorced from their textual context.

There ought to be a canonical way to refer to a segment of video, and it should correspond to a canonical way to refer to the corresponding text. Either reference should be able to function as an anchor for commentary from any source that can form a URL. And that commentary should then be accessible from the points of origin in video and text.

It’s all doable. You see it happening in spectacular fashion in the recent NYTimes debate treatments.

I think we’re moving inexorably toward getting this done much more broadly. I have an interview later today with a company that’s working on making these capabilities available not only for Congressional proceedings, but for state and local proceedings as well.

John, this happened on the floor of the House of Representatives while Congress was in session. So we have a complete transcript of the exchange – the kids are calling it the “Congressional Record”. I think you’re right, that critical interpretation should be captured, but relevant critical interpretation occurs in very few places – legislatures, courtrooms, and perhaps writings in the press. Luckily, these venues all provide a record in text.

http://www.jockgill.com/

Nice blog BTW,
Jim

I’d say the public was screaming for relief, not for Plan B vs. Plan A. Unclear how ideological it (we) would have gotten about bank nationalization, but nobody’s squawking now that B is a contrast gainer relative to A.

Meanwhile, in hindsight, almost everybody wishes that more eyes had been watching the multi-trillion dollar gambling game that brought all this down on our heads and necessitated this choice between evils.

It’s free, but registration required.

If this was settled on the floor, it was likely because they were not able to sneak it completely by — e.g. its meaning wasn’t created on the floor but discovered before the vote.

Anybody who’s ever done committee work in business or higher ed knows precisely the sort of manuever I am talking about. Sometimes it *is* better if the law is given room to evolve. Laws aren’t source code, and the administrative branch is not a runtime, after all.

But I’ll have to read the Roubini article — is there a way to read it free?

The odd thing was how little was made of this — the pichfork wavers on the left, I know, were explicitly told to settle down because if it came to it Paulson could talk the action Krugman and DeLong and Galbraith had been pushing since the beginning (i.e. direct capital injection via purchase of preferred stock).

The thought then, though, I think was that Paulson would muddle around for 3 months, and use $150 billion for his buy bad asset nonsense, but that Obama would in January direct the money to be used to nationalize the banking system. That is — the idea was Paulson could stave it off and the key was to make sure Obama had that power when he stepped in. What’s extraodinary here is how little the asset solution bought — so that even this administration is turning towards nationalization.

There’s a scond piece Krugman is hammering on, which we have to watch — the other half of the Brown solution (and the Swedish solution etc) is to guarantee interbank loans. The government has inexplicably failed to do that yet, so keep crossing fingers. That has to happen by Monday or Tuesday, or things still go down the flusher.

What does all this mean for us Many Eyes people — that the American Public was screaming for something that could have brought us into depression? And that the fewer eyes papered over stuff to get a bill through?

I think it’s a good indication that voting is broken and that TV refuses to do it’s job. We have a system that allows participation without requiring communication (or education). That’s going to seriously screw with results. The equity/asset distinction can be explained in about 2 minutes. There’s a river of TV news on, and the closest I saw to anybody doing that was Krugman on his Olbermann and Maddow interviews. The crowdsourcing we need here is not on the bill — but some way of making sure the public understands the bill. Fix that, an lawmakers will write better bills.

“It is a sorry reflection of the state of the US democracy that hundreds of Senators and Congressfolks did vote for the biggest bailout ever in US history ($700 bn) without even knowing exactly what they were voting for. They effectively and rightly allowed for a partial nationalization of the US financial system (the only solution that will prevent a systemic financial meltdown) without even exactly knowing that they were voting for this.”

They didn’t, and we didn’t. I guess you can argue it two ways. One, that broader realtime awareness of what was actually happening would have calmed the panic. Two, that such awareness would have created a “too many cooks” situation that would have unacceptably slowed the process.

Tough call, maybe, but I think historical forces are pushing us toward the former. With many eyes (and many brains), all bugs aren’t necessarily shallow, but when you’re dealing with complex interconnected fast-moving systems — which is the nature of everything from now on — I don’t think we can afford not to harness the power of the collective.

Great point. One aspect of this hypothetical content management system would, therefore, be a way for anyone to publish a link between a piece of legislative text, and a segment of audio or video where critical interpretation of that piece of text occurs. That link would then become the focus of attention and discussion. In this case it is, literally, the “missing link” — although, in theory, we have the raw textual and video resources and could create it.

Accordin to Nouriel Rounbin the capital injection plan is based on Congress and the treasury verbally agreeing, on the floor of Congress, that the word “asset” can mean equity in addition to the distressed mortgage based securities that we’ve heard so much about in the news.

I think this points to the very important fact that the written content of the law, whether it’s captured in a content management system or not, is of equal importance with how all three branches of government choose to interpret the law. Sometimes this is a good feature, sometimes it is a bad feature, but it clearly seems to be a feature that we’ve had for a long time.

The point about financial transparency is also very compelling. Nobody wants to lend because nobody knows who is or is not lying about their ability to pay back.

> Thanks for your interviews with people
> like Micah Sifry

Although I’ve done interviews with people like Micah, and wish I’d done that one, I didn’t. Phil Windley and Scott Lemon did, for Phil’s Technometria podcast.

I want to believe that this sort of thing shouldn’t even be possible today with version control and our other collaborative technologies, but then I remember we’re talking about government, and that most politicians will fight accountability for as long as they can.

Thanks for your interviews with people like Micah Sifry, John. They’re important, and are making a difference.

Cheers,

Jason