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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.”

14 responses to “The Money Election”

  1. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    I got a nice candid of Larry Lessig, in line to speak, with mind churning… and then hearing a shout out to him and Creative Commons from Amanda Palmer onstage:IMG_8419 cropYarrr… Lessig on his Pirate Ship!IMG_8432reminding us of the recent SOPA opera… with a graphic from Republic Lost:copyright spending Lessig

    Reply
  2. seatonsnet Avatar
    seatonsnet

    I’m sure that someday future Chinese historians will enjoy studying this theme… Edward Gibbon could have riffed on it too.

    Reply
  3. js.brain Avatar
    js.brain

    Amazing point! Straightforward.

    Reply
  4. jgury Avatar
    jgury

    Looking at " the enemy doesn’t always march. Sometimes it simply shuffles" in full context directly from Republic, Lost. He has a really bizarre, naive notion that "the will of the people" is some kind of optimal state of government. Just how exactly is that going to free us from this tyranny of second rate exploitative minds? Or following his annoying style, "souls"
    Of course my solution for corruption in our Republic is much more sensible, replace as many of them with Ipads, Droids, and open web devices as quickly as possible.

    Reply
  5. seatonsnet Avatar
    seatonsnet

    What you are seeing here is the germ of a class consciousness that hasn’t existed in America since the 1930s. What is strange is that it has taken so long to germinate, as the USA has about the lowest social mobility, the highest inequality and the largest percentage of incarcerated citizens of all developed countries. You have to ask what it takes for people to see the "US vs THEM"… the "Lesters" and the rest of us.

    Reply
  6. jgury Avatar
    jgury

    From his Republic Lost book he has this notion about how "second-rate" minds are the problem: "The great evil 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" pg. 7 intro. That sounds like it is straight out of Ayn Rand. Ridiculous really. Who the hell then were guys like Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney? They were not exactly second rate bloodsuckers who could not make it in the private sector. Far from it. Same for Robert McNamara of the Vietnam war era. These major league military industrial princes of darkness guys are just that and of course perfectly tagged by Dwight Eisenhower in that famous address. 
    If you want to read somebody really good on this kind of money in politics dynamic as well as the big educational issues that this guy just takes the simplistic "it is all messed up" line, John Dewey is still the major league influential to address. I doubt this guy even mentions him. Is it possible for an educational system to be conducted by a national state and yet the full social ends of the educative process not be restricted, constrained, and corrupted?

    Reply
  7. seatonsnet Avatar
    seatonsnet

    [http://www.flickr.com/photos/jgury] I think that we are at a stage where the important thing is for the great mass of people to undergo a process I call "identifying the fucker and the fuckee"… and take sides. If that happens en masse then and not before, things will change and quickly.

    Reply
  8. jgury Avatar
    jgury

    [http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeany7] Many people have observed that campaign finance regulation is an endless game of Whack-A-Mole. Lessing brings up anonymous contributions in his book as beneficial but with a whacky revocation scheme. The reality is a trinity of dollar donation deities that is dealt with legally as an interesting mix of rights to privacy, along with protections of secrecy and anonymity. Of course the larger reality is that this trinity, much like in other domains, is ongoing fiction.

    Reply
  9. jgury Avatar
    jgury

    OMG, has anyone seen Lessing doing his Occupy the Courts and Wall street radical speaker schtick??? He has made it into my Chris Hedges "join us in the revolt" best of clips and without the flair and savoir-faire of Professor Cornell West.

    Reply
  10. jgury Avatar
    jgury

    Larry Lessig did not really get fired up for TED with his solution to corporate greed so you really missed out….
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOeeapxR9WQ&feature=youtu.be

    Reply
  11. Bruce La Fetra Avatar
    Bruce La Fetra

    The Founders–you know, the dead white guys that lived over a hundred years ago–built a remarkable system that *assumed* the government was run by second-rate minds. The decentralized control of Federalism provided a self-correcting device and an intentionally inefficient government with limited power meant that change was doable, but hard and slow. We screwed in up when we let government grow unchallenged. There is nothing to protect us from its misguided mediocracy now.

    The problem is less money in politics than it is that we have easily bought-off, second-rate minds controlling enormous power. If they didn’t have so much power, there wouldn’t be so much money spent trying to influence them.

    Reply
  12. jgury Avatar
    jgury

    [http://www.flickr.com/photos/blafetra] According to guys like Larry Lessig, Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, et al. corporations – as the embodiment of pure capitalist evil – have usurped the will of the people in legitimate democracy via the banal corruptibility of second rate petty bourgeois minds. Lessig is not so explicitly Marxist, probably because he never read any of it. Lessig has not made the great leap like Chomsky who sees private property as the great evil and that the entire capitalist system makes democracy a whorehouse of lackeys who wage war on everything and everyone in the world who gets in the way of them running things in support of the Jewish state. Meanwhile guys like Paul Krugman wage petty bourgeois intellectual war vs. anyone who thinks US government is too powerful and spending too much becoming a Keynesian super state powerful enough to vanquish everything and everyone who does not agree with him – including such diverse characters as the leaders of Estonia -in a soon to debut national opera – and the economics department at University of Chicago.

    Reply
  13. Kaets Ebut Avatar
    Kaets Ebut

    Man, have I seen that phenomenon first-hand. If Lessig has a PAC (or a posse), where do I sign up?

    Reply
  14. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    No PACs =)
    But here it is: lessigforpresident.com

    Reply

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