Us Now HDTV 720p-VODO

i think that politicians should be held accountable for the promises they make during their
campaigns. if someone was promising that he will do something, and based on that you vote for him,
then if that politician didn't follow thru with what they have promised, they should be placed in
front of the jury that will decide if it was his fault why something he promised didn't get done.
i mean it's like a criminal offense. if you mislead one person for the purpose of personal gain, you
can be brought up in front of the judge. and now politicians are misleading millions, and what...
nothing?

so it would be great if we had the power to vote for every bill that is being passed... no lobby
could pay off everyone. now all the lobbyist have to do is donate enough money to few politicians
campaigns, and then they in turn will return a favor to those big companies lobbyist.
so it would be nice, but does anyone think that they are eager to give up their power? i don't think so!

one aspect of this film explores the idea of group sharing of resources and information on a mass
scale. it can be applied to business, advice, democratic governance, products, software and even
living space. it creates an market where you invest time/effort and in return are accepted into a
world of free products, services and information. i'd have to compare it with a ratio based torrent
tracker with an ebay for everything and your capital is your reputation and contribution to the
community. it implies this transaction/sharing medium to be the internet, for efficiency but there
is no reason it could not be transplanted to the meatspace (real world). a lot of applications of
this idea would be better served offline, the library for example.

the potential problems i can see in this model is hijacking of identity, spamming, censorship,
potential mass influence from lobbyists, special interest group, corrupt administration or corporate
interests used to sway opinion, votes or capital via block voting or multi-user accounts to
concentrate reputation capital. faith and trust are a backbone for many of the current projects and
in an ideal world that would be enough.

with reputation used a capital it can be exploited through a the many ways the current market forces
exploit money. lessons should be learned from the mistakes of usury, fraud, leveraging and
collusion. it would be more difficult though since you cannot realistically have a fractional
reserve of people but we should be wary of manipulation.

a primary issue i see is the fact information could be largely based on opinion and not proofs,
especially applicable to the long term or point of no return decisions based the tapping into the
public mind. majority opinions are not always correct and are often quite the opposite. we'd be prey
to groupthink in this model without proper regulation, identity verification and security. to avoid
an orwellian model taking this market over there would have to be absolute transparency and
accountability on all levels from the gatekeepers (isps, admins, etc.) to the users. if we can
achieve that then anything is possible.

it's a good basic idea, it is an old idea given new life and is applicable in many situations today
but by no means any situation. further thought into the pitfalls of such a system need to be
addressed before the agenda is pushed forward across the board.

they couldn't pay off everyone, but they could
spend a lot on advertising...

lobbying would still exist, it would just look a lot more like advertising. politicians lobby the
vot3rs every time they come up for a new vote. you'd still have the best funded people having the
loudest voice.

my issue with this film is that most of the examples they give are opt-in situations. the whole
world doesn't vote for the football club, the people who care enough about it do. i don't know a
thing about football...you wouldn't want me weighing in on who's playing what position.

with government, there's very little "opt-in". it's generally for everyone. you couldn't opt-out
of paying taxes for things you didn't support, otherwise there wouldn't be enough funding for all
the projects. we vote people into the government, then they have certain government employees focus
on specific things. am i supposed to make decisions on everything from road maintenance schedules
to the brand of plastic fork used in the veteran's hospital?

budgeting alone requires knowledge of very specific details...how does every citizen know every
detail of a budget's requirements?

they kept saying "the old way of thinking was that everyone is dumb, but that's not true." i'd love
to live in a world where everyone had a good head on their shoulders, but that's not the truth.
california is a great example. the citizens get to vote on a lot of specific things, and they
almost always vote for lower taxes, while still asking for lots of government programs to help
people out. so yes, they're being gracious in helping out others with programs, but they're being
short-sighted by voting against taxes to fund these things. now the state is broke.

thanks a lot for sharing this video. i personally loved it. the future is a very different place from anything
that's been seen before.

accountability and transparency via public scrutiny were very good points brought up in this movie.
there are too many 'closed door' meetings. government in of itself is a great thing to manage and
express the peoples' interests, that's what it was designed to do. a democratic republic is a from
of governance that allows participation from the citizens legislated under the rule of law. that
kind of country does not exist on this planet despite the push to 'democratize' the world. that
ideological system was hijacked by bankers and corporations and they leverage their power, which is
based primarily in money and law the democratic republic has transformed into a corporate oligarchy
which is the main form of governance today.

the idea of a reputation based aspect to the economy that would hold real currency is fascinating
and worth discussion and further exploration. the pooling of group knowledge can be good if it is
not infiltrated by corporate and special interests disproportionately. i point to wikipedia as a
good example of both the good and bad points to this model.

there is the illusion of democracy, banking and law but both are bought and paid for and the mirage
is wavering. lady justice leans no longer to the scales of justice but the scales of money. laws are
lobbied for and by and in many cases written by and enforced by corporations. our media is owned by
only six corporations and that manipulated public perception of this injustice because they work as
a collusive force in the broadcaster sponsor relationship.

the laws and systems need to be overhauled from their current state in order to shift legal and
economic powers back to the justice for the people and not the corporations.

corporate law, corporate business, corporate economy, corporate culture, corporate banking,
corporate health, corporate prisons and now we're seeing a an unhealthy rise in a more blatant
corporate military and enforcement sector.

i think we have identified the problem quite succinctly, and it asks the question "what will we do
to take our power and freedom back?". us now begins on that discussion but we need to know what is
broken before we can fix it and avoid making the same mistakes as the old system.

i made a conversion of the us now film to xvid/avi let me know if anyone would be interested in
downloading via bittorrent.

more on corporatism:

the shock doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism (2007)
http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine

movie: the corporation (2003)
http://www.thecorporation.com/

this film demonstrates some of the fatal flaws involved in computer based voting and should be
considered if a technological voting process for the people were to evolve:

hacking democracy (2006)
http://www.hackingdemocracy.com/

i greatly enjoyed this documentary! cheers to the op! 🙂

here is the review i wrote for it: strategies for revolutionaries: government 2.0
(http://sophrosyne.radical.r30.net/wordpress/?p=2484) .