Coopting and corrupting the Constitution. Larry Lessig’s TED Talk just went live today, and I highly recommend it.
I have had a number of unusual encounters with Larry Lessig over the years, from Creative Commons to co-teaching a class at Stanford Law School, to a non-profit mission seeking influence in the White House =)
From TED: “132 Americans gave 60% of the SuperPAC money in the 2012 election.”
“The funders are not The People. This is a corruption. There’s one piece of good news; it’s bipartisan, equal-opportunity corruption. It blocks the left on a whole range of issues we care about (climate change, sensible health care, food safety, financial reform). It blocks the right too, as it makes principled arguments of the Right increasingly impossible (smaller government). Here’s the bad news; it’s a pathological democracy-destroying corruption.”
He uses the empty vessel of “Lester” at the start of the talk to forestall the cognitive dismissal of some, a technique that he has honed over the years.
And some quotes from Lessig’s latest book Republic Lost:
“The great evil that we as Americans face is the banal evil of second-rate minds who can’t make it in the private sector and who therefore turn to the massive wealth directed by our government as the means to securing wealth for themselves.”
“in the most critical cases, the vast majority of contributions to a congressional campaign are not even from the voters in that district. 79% of contributions to California state legislators came from out-of-district contributors. It is clear ‘the funders’ are not ‘the People.’”
“Everything our government touches— from health care to Social Security to the monopoly rights we call patents and copyright— it poisons. Yet our leaders seem oblivious to the thought that there’s anything that needs fixing. They preen about, ignoring the elephant in the room. They act as if Ben Franklin would be proud.”
“We must remember that harm sometimes comes from timid, even pathetic souls. That the enemy doesn’t always march. Sometimes it simply shuffles.”
Yarrr… Lessig on his Pirate Ship!
reminding us of the recent 
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