![]() In it, he wrote that a legislature “should be in miniature, an exact portrait of the people at large. We have, then, 535 people whose job ostensibly is to represent the people of the United States -or do they just represent the voters? In 1776, when states were writing new constitutions to replace state charters, John Adams wrote a treatise that he hoped would guide their efforts. The average House district has between 700,000 and 800,000 residents, but states range in population, for example, about 40 million for California to less than 600,000 for Wyoming. Note that the least populous states, like Wyoming, are guaranteed one representative and two senators regardless of their population. There are no term limits for either representatives or senators. It almost goes without saying that House districts are more uniformly populated than are the states-except in cases like Wyoming where the House district is also the state boundary. Under the original Constitution, senators were chosen by state legislatures rather than by popular vote, but they have been popularly elected since the Seventeenth Amendment passed in 1913. Senators have six-year terms, with one-third of them up for re-election every two years. The representatives are elected to two-year terms, and the entire body is up for re-election every two years. The United States Congress is composed of 435 representatives and 100 senators. ![]() ![]() –Michael Parenti (2) Who Are Our Members of Congress? A Committee Meeting in the U.S. “Plutocracy-rule for the rich by the rich-prevails in Congress for the most part.” “Poverty is the feeling that your government is against you, not for you that your country was designed to serve other people and that you are fated to be managed and processed, roughed up and handcuffed.” The degree of delegation is on occasion even more flagrant at the state and municipal level, where it occurs sometimes that the corporate leaders of a given area, have the right nominate their own personnel to licensing boards” The author sees in those practices, the emergence of a new kind of authority that he baptised “private-public authority”.Chapter 20: Who are Our Members of Congress and Whom Do They Represent? Parenti explains us for instance, that the Advisory Council was against the “inventory on water pollutants“ that was proposed by the Congress, so that the government decided that this one would just be on a “voluntary basis”, above all without any consultation of environmental organisations, as Robert Dietsch specifies it. Primack - who state that executive decision-making process too often sacrifices the safety and welfare of the public to the short-term interests of the government bureaucracy and the large industrial interest to which it has become allied”. Parenti refers to two scientists from Stanford University Dr. This kind of policy may sometimes put the lives of many US-citizens in danger, for example when it is not publicly announced that certain sorts of herbicides produce birth deformities although the Department of Health does know about that. The writer achieves rightly to synthesize some bias the people can have towards the bureaucracy in the following sentence: political process does not end with the passage of a bill but continues with equal or even greater intensity at the administrative level albeit in more covert fashion”. On the contrary, it is quite possible that their roles and missions are defined in a legislation, but in general this one “allows leeway in application” (Parenti). ![]() In truth, the agencies and departments can independently pass so-called rulings that often have the same enforcement value than the legislation. Or at least interest groups achieve to develop very cooperative or “constructive” relations with their respective “regulation-agencies”, which are in some cases even run by administrators directly appointed by the dominant corporate executives. In the case of the Interstate Commerce Commission they literally ran for the trucking and railroad companies. The principal result is that federal agencies at the time Parenti wrote Democracy for the Few, were at the service of the corporate interests, even sometimes at their “devotion” as Parenti explains it.
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