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Lessig Campaign and the Change Congress Movement
GoldenShale wrote a follow up to last week's discussion about Lessig running for congress. He writes "Larry Lessig has created a Lessig08 website, and it looks like he is getting serious about running for congress. In his introduction video he proposes the creation of a national "Change Congress" movement which would try to limit the influence of money in the electoral and legislative processes. Having a technologically savvy representative and a clear intellectual leader to head this kind of movement is exactly what we need to counter the last 8 years of corporate dominance in government."
8 years? Corporations have been exhibiting control over the legislature for much more than the past 8 years... One only has to look at the copyright act extensions to see that.
Intellectuals make terrible politicians. You need a wheeling-dealing sort, not a thinker.
Anyway, the only way to change the game is to play it - if the congress is run by corporate types, then you need to become a corporate type to change congress. Revolution happens, but it's pretty rare - and frankly I don't think that Lessig has it in him.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Corporate influence over Congress has been way past acceptable levels for a lot longer than eight years, even in the sphere of intellectual property. Even the DMCA is ten years old.
I recognize the temptation to blame Bush, but this is too old and it runs too deep to pin on him alone.
The main point of my post was corporate control is not a liberal or a conservative problem, its an institutional problem.
It's not Walmart's fault that people shop there and buy so much Chinese stuff. It's not Toyota's fault that Americans would rather pay Toyota and get a nicer car than have a better standard of living for American auto workers. It's not just that a banker on wall street is greedy. It is that -every- American is greedy, and therefor, we got the institutions we asked for.
This is my sig.
Not to mention that when you try and "limit the influence of money" you will run into First Amendment problems. I'll agree that money in DC is contributing to corruption. However, the answer is not to limit the money; it's to punish the corruption.
Any time we allow our fundamental rights to be legislated away, we lose...
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
... heh? Did Y2K reset your counter??????
Yam, yam, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade
I actually disagree here. I think Europeans have taken the high ground in this. The only reason we are in Iraq is oil. The President, intentionally, is a seat to make peace and forge trade agreements... not to make war. The only role the President plays in war is to lead the armies when Congress votes it necessary to go to war. Other than that, the President's job is to kiss as much ass as possible.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
This gets modded Insightful?
Well, look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multinational_force_in_Iraq A lot of European countries have troops in Afghanistan.
Sorry for not fighting all your ill-concieved wars.
Read, refresh, repeat.
I think it is fallacious to say money is the problem in the congress. It's not money, its the sheer greed of all involved. Congress has too much power and therefor people want it too much. If you take away the money for elected officials, there will be other, more secret levers that will be unaccountably manipulated. Decisions will be made in stealth, in secret, like the smoke filled back rooms of the old days.
No, it is better, really, to just have money go to whomever and without restriction. That way, we can at least see whom is owned by who, and vote accordingly. Better a billionaire writes a million dollar check to a senator than the same billionaire indirectly invests into a bevy of people to work some foul valve of power in the furnaces of Washington.
This is my sig.
I think you're confusing the concept of "allies" with the concept of "vassal states". Allies aren't there to help you start wars of aggression, they're to help defend you if you're aggressed against.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
2. If the dumbest thing you can think of is to appease the largest economic power outside of North America, then you clearly haven't watched American politics for the last 50 years.
3. Europeans ARE fighting with Americans in Iraq. United Kingdom, Poland, Romania, Denmark, Bulgaria, Latvia, Albania, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Armenia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and Estonia (in decreasing number of troops) all have troops in Iraq. Not all of these are EU members, but some are, and all are part of Europe. Europe is not France and Germany, no matter what France and Germany may say about that. That said, Germany is a staunch US ally, host to US bases that are key in moving troops and equipment around the world, and a key member of NATO that helped us during the cold war. Discount such an ally at your own peril....
4. All of the above nations are quite concerned that they've done quite the opposite of what they intended (bring instability to the region rather than stability).
You know why we were able to bail them out? Because we didn't have our military spread to the four corners of the Earth trying to police the world. We were able to mobilize a fairly nimble economy into producing TONS of goods and support. All that is vanishing increasingly with more and more Socialist policies and our stretched budget.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
As to what the difference to the USA is, in case you have forgotten you were involved in a cold war with the USSR. The USA and Europe provided a counterbalancing force to the USSR and China. How long do you think the USA would have lasted if the USSR, Europe and China had been allies? US involvement in Europe, as in South-East Asia in the last century was all about national security.
[1] Yes, unlikely, I know.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm sorry, but that's pretty arrogant. I understand the notion, but you have to look at it this way. We are considered the evil war monger superpower now.
I don't disagree with any of that. That is why I am saying that the USA should not be military allies with anyone. We should bring all of our troops home from everywhere, cut down the size of our army, and focus on trade. We can sit fat and happy behind a mountain of nukes and a missile defense system for our own national security, plus with a sufficient navy to guard our waters and an air force for our air. But we don't need to be operating in 100 countries across the globe. Iraq is the least of our military perception problems.
This is my sig.
In high school, back in the 90's, as I watched politics, I made a fundamental observation about politics. You have third party candidates and independent politicians try to make a run for the Presidency every couple of election cycles, and they never get anywhere. Why? Because they *have no base of support*. Even if the third party/independent candidate did manage to win the presidency, it would be, to a certain extent, meaningless, because the other parties would still control Congress, and a President can't do much without congress (which is as it ought to be; the Constitution sets out a government where the parliament is the primary branch, and the executive branch is fundamentally supposed to be the servant of Congress, carrying out the will of the People).
You won't overcome the republicans or democrats in one big presidential election. Never gonna happen. If you want to make any progress, you will have to build from the bottom up. Start getting candidates into local and state positions, and build on a track record of good governance at the local and state level to leverage your party into the House and the Senate. Once you have enough support in the House and Senate (at least 1/3rd of each), and are nationally known as a party people like and trust, then you are in an excellent position to run a Presidential candidate as a true, meaningful alternative to the two establisment parties.
Otherwise, your just a flash in the pan.
The problem is the voters. As long as people let their decisions be swayed by what they see in the mass media (a situation which may never change), it's going to be impossible to keep money out of politics, because the money that buys tropical vacations is a drop in the bucket compared to the money that buys mass media exposure.
If the First Amendment wasn't an obstacle, what would you want to do? Limit political contributions, and all you do is restrict the power of middle class individuals' money (which must be pooled to buy a single commercial) in favor of the rich (who can afford to advertise without going through campaign middlemen. We've seen some of that in these primaries, where the $2,300 cap on ordinary Americans' contributions obviously doesn't apply to wealthy candidates who can "loan" millions of dollars to their own campaigns. Limit political advertisements, and all you'll do is force some of those advertisements to call themselves "fair and balanced news", concentrating power still further into the hands of media owners. Limit news that doesn't pass "Fairness" laws, and that just moves the power into the hands of the incumbent politicians and judges who get to write and arbitrate such laws.
The best we can do is encourage the dissemination of less corrupted political information, to inoculate people against the misinformation that money can buy. By the time a voter is watching the commercials that have been pushed at him rather than trying to pull information on issues and candidates for himself, it's practically too late.
And once the radioactive cloud drifts over your midwest and destroyes the agriculture there, you'll feel really stupid for doing so.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Europe is anti-america because it's the devil. It shows that, while lefty politics are failing all over the globe, policies to the extreme right, and extreme liberty amongst citizens largely holding the Christian faith is a working, stable state structure.
I think Europe is anti-American solely because of what they perceive to be American militarism. I think Europe is so scarred from the World Wars that anything that smacks of a risk of a war terrifies them. And, I think that is understandable. Everyone in Europe, especially Germany, has a family member that was killed on the Eastern Front. Everyone in Europe has families tales of occupation, the bombings, the postwar starvations, the homelessness. They have had enough war to last for generations and they see us as fools for seemingly seeking it out.
This is my sig.
The only reason we are in Iraq is oil.
Actually, the reason we are in Iraq is that for over a decade, Saddam Hussein flaunted and refused to comply with the terms of an armistice he himself had signed.
And then he added to that by doing far too good a job blustering and trying to convince people that he had an active WMD program - so good a job that the Russians, French, Germans, Spanish, Chinese, and even the Swiss thought he did still have it going. Why was he doing it? Because it was the only thing keeping Iran off his ass. Problem? He fooled everyone else too, and his history scared the crap out of people that he'd lob a nuke towards someone (Turkey, Israel, Kuwait, Iran) that he considered an "enemy" and touch off even more crap.
We're in Iraq today because the Middle East is ruled by a bunch of fucktards who use a 7th-century religion to justify barbarity and evil, towards each other just as much as towards the "dar al-harb" they profess to hate.
Last time I checked, it was the US government which tried to convince those countries that Iraq had WMD, and they used a significant amount of fake or exaggerated 'evidence' to do so. Look up Colin Powell's address to the UN, for example.
Europeans opposed the invasion of Iraq because they didn't let themselves be fooled by that. If the US had had a case, most Europeans would have supported the invasion.