A former supporter of President Obama, Harvard Prof. Lawrence Lessig presents a highly engaging thesis that Occupy Wall Street and The Tea Party need to find common ground in opposition to legislative stasis.
Without this populist fusion, Lessig argues that the Republic is lost. http://www.amazon.com/Republic-Lost-Money-Corrupts-Congress-/dp/0446576433%3FSubscriptionId%3D0EP44N4Z8Y93MBZ1ZC82%26tag%3Ddianerehm-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0446576433
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Lawrence Lessig: "Republic, Lost"
This photo taken Oct. 7, 2011, shows Barbara Diamond, 63, who is retired, and her husband Steve, a physician, who traveled nearly 100 miles from Bethlehem, Pa., to take part in the Occupy Wall Street protest at Zuccotti Park in Manhattan. They said they are concerned about the influence of corporations and wealthy people on politics and economic stress on the middle class.
(AP Photo/Eileen Connelly)
Recent polls show growing numbers of Americans have lost confidence in government. Occupy Wall Street protestors say they are against corporate greed and economic disparity, and their movement is rapidly spreading. In a letter to the protestors, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig urges them to unite Democrats, Republicans and Independants against what he sees as the root problem: a political system where only 1 percent of americans fund 99 percent of campaigns. He offers a plan to stop the corrupting influence of money on government, including the possibility of a constitutional convention.
Guests
Lawrence Lessig
professor of law at Harvard Law School and director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.
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Read an Excerpt
Excerpt from Lawrence Lessig's "Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress - and a Plan to Stop It." All rights reserved. Copyright 2011 by Lawrence Lessig. Reprinted here by permission of Twelve/Hachette Book Group:
Comments
We don't have a Government now, we have Wall Street manipulating the political process and picking who they want to have in office. Your next president will be Mitt Romney the Koch Brothers have already decided that.
2. Give money away to the majority of people
3. Have them continue to vote for you by expanding the programs and the number of people reached
4. Completely disincentivize the general populus to work
5. Self destruct as a nation.
Wall street is run by corporations and corporations are not people! Though Mitt thinks so.
So what kind of President will Romney be?
We already know…
1). A continuation of the Bush/Obama administrations.
2). The economic policies of the next administration will be geared to serve the wealthy and corporations
3). A downsizing of all social programs (if you aren’t successful, then die….).
4). Further assault on Social Security and Medicare (when are you gonna take care of yourself loser….)
5). Pandering to the Pentagon (helps with the dying and killing stuff, see above point 3)
6). Deeper attrition of civil liberties. (making it easier to do away with critical groups)
7). Unrelenting if foredoomed attempt to maintain American dominance in the world at all cost.
I probably agree with you more than you might think that I do. What I disagree with is the simple attitude that working hard and taking care of yourself is the end of the discussion. Holding that kind of attitude makes you far more suceptible to the manipulators. You say that you work hard, I may make a leap here and posit that you probably aren't wealthy by any stretch of the imagination. Wealthy people aren't on this board....wealthy people don't care to discuss this stuff, they aren't interested.
I don't think that anyone truly advocates for a wellfare state, no more than they would advocate for a condition where selfish people take everything. We need to be more than our black and white, left and right ideologies.
We need to face the fact that we truly are a nation in decline and Ayn Rand and a defense of selfishness is not a solution. Indeed people need to take responsibility for themselves but we need to stop being divided by the folks that like to yank our chains. At present all politicians/political parties are the enemy because their job is divide us and keep us from figuring out who the real enemy is. We need to start thinking.
Washington and Jefferson both wrote about the potential for future corruption of the government by the forces of big city (big money) forces, concluding it could destroy the nation.
Lessig parrots the three upper middleclass incremental myths:
Campaign finance reform will restore democracy.
Single payer will restore health.
Education (increased human capital) will fix the economy.
(There are also ill-defined myths surrounding energy and environment.)
Incremental fixes do not work on fatal systemic problems.
Global crony corporate capitalism is a private tyranny and a lethal problem.
Until we take a radical tack to devolve corporations and cap wealth and income nothing suggested will work. That is why Lessig is a radically meek apologist. Professor Lessig, the Oligarchs do not need you to defend them anymore. You are now superfluous. Your book is a fairy tale.
In 19th century England 90 to 95% of people worked hard but lived no better than livestock. That is the natural state of unregulated capitalism. Crying over the welcome end of corporate capitalism because you haven't yet won big is like attacking the phonograph operator at a cakewalk because you paid a dollar and got no cake. Your small-potatoes attitude is killing our entire species.
Michael Benton
If the voters are stupid enough to trade the possibility of democracy for a pizza
maybe humanity should go extinct.