2. we have a nation of good souls who see that dependency, and assume the worst. – Republic, Lost – #lessig

dependence corruption – distraction w/o assuming evil/criminal souls at the helm – Republic, Lost – @lessig lesterland.lessig.org/pdf/republic-l…

 ch 4:

obesity-related disease costs the medical system $147 billion annually – a greater burden than the costs of cigarettes or alcohol

trade restrictions imposed in the 1980s cost consumers 6.8 billion a yr, while the value of govt subsidies received by the industry over the same period amounted to 30 billion

10% of the recipients of farm subsidies collect 73%of the subsidies – between 2003 and 2005 $91,000 per farm. the bottom 80% – $3000 per farm.

high cost of sugar (2-3 times as other countries) because us govt protects domestic sugar manufacturers w/tarrifs, there are 40 sugar co in us, 8 produce 75% of sugar. .5% of farms in america, 62000 workers.

increased sugar cost, decreased corn cost – for hfc (high fructose corn syrup) 1995-2009 govt spent 73.8 bill to ensure farmers produced more corn than market would otherwise bear – so then used to produce hfc at increasingly low price

since so cheap – corn fed to cattle, but cows 7 stomachs not able to digest corn.. so bugs grow in it while it’s trying to digest – so give cows antibiotics (with no oversight) – so superbugs – like e. col samonella.

so increase demand for corn.. ethanol – a political concoction interfering w/workings of marketplace. 2008 report: biofuel mandates of congress would cost the economy more than 100 bill from 2005-201o. 65 times the total amt spent on renewable energy r&d programs during same period.

govt protects sugar, subsidizes corn. more foods made with hfc, more cattle fed corn, more cattle fed antibiotics. hfc goes up in human diet, dangerous bacteria goes up – kids get fat and sick.

government distorts market, which distorts what we eat, which distorts our kids’ bodies/health

ch.. 5:

to say the something is a – public policy challenge – however, is not to argue for a govt program to solve it. neighbors are pretty good at working stuff out.

copyright – as way to protect artist..

?

power companies using coal to produce electricity.. according to pew center on global climate change.. cost of capturing /carbon produced by coal-fired power plants… in 2003 – cost to clean up between $280 and 840 billion in 2003 alone. profits of coal/petroleum industry combined in 2003 – 23.3 bill.

negative externalities.. most tangible – health costs – estimated to be 100 billion per year

copyright – govt has passed 32 laws over past 16 yrs – to protect artists (mole hill in comparison to cost)

carbon polluters – govt has passed 0 laws over past 15 yrs – to protect people (everest mtn in comparison to cost)

where the harm is almost certain – congress does nothing. where the harm is at best contested, congress races to the rescue.

pro-carbon reformers get wildly outspent by anti-reformers.

carbon issue – reform 22.4 mill in lobbying, anti-reform 210.6 mill (2009)

copyright issue – reform 1.3 bill in lobbying, anti-reform 1 mill. (1998-2010)

not: did he contributions and lobbying buy this apparently inconsistent result?

instead: do the contributions and lobbying make it harder to believe that this is a principled or consistent or sensible result?

ch 6:

on ed – disappointed that shared scoring/rating or math and literacy as assumed success. and that teaching was also assumed… as best for public

ch 7:

hard (for me) to follow – mostly skimmed – maybe later?

ch 8:

in both cases, (bpa, cell phones) i needed only to point to the money – money in (what was perceived to be) the wrong place – for confidence to weaken. not “money,” but “money in the wrong place.” describe the architecture of incentives, and people will infer the causation. with no good reason, perhaps. but with a reliable regularity that cannot be denied and certainly should not be ignored.

in a line: we don’t trust our govt. and until we crete the condition under which trust is possible – when in other words, the presence of money in the wrong places doesn’t inevitably make us doubt – this skepticism will remain. we can’t help it. it will follow psychologically even if it doesn’t follow logically.

between 1974 and 2008 – the avg amt it took to run for reelection to the house went from 56000 to more than 1.3 mill. in 1974 the total spent by all candidates for congress (both house and senate) was 77 mill. by 1982 – 343 mill – a 450% increase in 8 yrs. by 2010 – 1.8 bill – a 525% increase again.

this fund-raising in turn change what leadership in both parties would mean: if leaders had once been chosen on the basis of ideas, or seniority or political ties, now, in both parties, leaders were chosen at least in part on their ability to raise campaign cash. leading fund-raisers became the new leaders. fund-raising became the new game.

ch 9:

not grokking gift vs commodity. well getting the vs – but not getting the gift as obligatory – sounds like what befuddled me about eisenstein. that seems our problem perhaps – that we connect gift to obligation which means to measurement/comparison et al… no?

sen paul douglas: …what happens is a gradual shifting of a man’s loyalties from the community to those who have been doing him favors. his final decisions are, therefore, made in response to his private friendships and loyalties rather than to the public good. throughout this whole process the official will claim – and ay indeed believe – that there is no causal connection between the favors he has receive and the decisions which he makes.

this is the gift economy. as jake arvey, the man behind adlai stevenson’s political career, defined politics: politics is the art of putting people under obligation to you. obligation, not expressed in legally enforceable contracts, but in the moral expectations that a system of gift exchange yields.

oh my.

a gift economy is grounded upon relationships, not quid pro quo. those relationships grow over time, as actors within that economy build their power by developing a rich set of obligations that they later draw upon to achieve the ends they seek. in this world, the campaign contribution does not “buy” a result. it cements a relationship, or as kaiser describes it, it “reinforces established connections.” as one former lobbyist put it when asked why contribution s are made: “well, it isn’t good govt. it’s to thank friends, and to make new friends. it opens up channels of communication.”

it is within this practice of reciprocity that obligation gets built. and as economist michele dell’era demonstrates, the gifts necessary to make this system of reciprocity work need not be large. what is important is that they be repeated and appropriate within the norms of the context. what is critical is that they are depended upon.

whoa.

unlike traditional gift economies, however, washington is a gift economy not because anyone wants it to be. it is a gift economy because it is regulated to be. having banned the quid pro quo economy, the market makers have only one choice: to do the hard work necessary to build and support a gift economy. the insiders must learn a dance that never seems like an exchange.

lobbyists exponentiate

ch 10:

so in a single line, in a way that frames the core of my claim that ours is a corrupt congress, the framers gave us a “republic”; to them, a republic was to be a “representative democracy”; a “representative democracy” was to be “dependent upon the people alone”; a representative democracy that developed a competing dependency, conflicting with the dependency upon the people, would be “corrupt.”

1. weaken possibility of competing dependencies  2. strengthen dependency on people

a link. a dependency. a dependency sufficiently strong to ensure the independence of the institution.

independence in this sense simply means the proper dependence. – upon the people alone.

we don’t see it – is not the same as – there is nothing to see.

money as distraction/distortion/loss of trust

(just skimmed rest of ch 10 – maybe come back to it) – skipped to conclusion for now..

ch 14: two conceptions of corruption

ch 15: reforms that won’t reform

ch16: reforms that would reform

p. 284/268 –

if a substantial number of candidates opted into this system, then no one could believe that money was buying results.

this reform is the key to everything else that follows. regardless of what you believe america’s most important problems are, you need to see this as the first problem that needs to be solved.

well. unless you realized that say many/enough people don’t have the option of spending $100 of their jeans money on supporting campaign. or that perhaps – campaigning/voting isn’t the biggest problem (at least not in fixing it). perhaps its even a mechanism – on the wrong side of history. true – if we keep the system as is, ie: have a congress, then work on campaign money. but what if we question a congress at all. what if we question campaigning at all.

too much ness

p. 285/270 –

in 2009, the cato institute estimated that the us congress spent 90 bill on corporate welfare….. subsidies and regulatory protections that lawmakers confer on certain businesses and industries…. the welfare is the payback, indirect and legal, …

we’ve waged the longest war in american history to make democracy possible in iraq. the total cost of that war? more than 750 bill. and that’s just the money. put aside the 4500 patriots who have given their lives to that theory of democracy building ..

ch 17: strategy 1: conventional game

you don’t beat the british by lining up in red coats and marching on their lines, as they would on you. you beat them by adopting a strategy they’ve never met, or never payed. the forces that would block this bill work well and effectively on capitol hill, and inside the beltway. that is their home. and if we’re going to seize their home, and dismantle it, we need a strategy that they’re sure is going to fail. yet we need it to win.

ch 18: strategy 2: – unconventional (primary) game

to be credible, this must be seen as the act of disinterested citizen whose only objective is to change the system for others.

ch 19: strategy 3 – unconventional presidential game

Obama in 2010 – we were in such a hurry to get things done that we didn’t change how things got done.

the view “he can’t win” makes it likely ” he can’t win,” even if a majority of souls would support him were they convinced he could win.

pluralistic ignorance ness

losing the president as an agent of change is a huge loss. president elections are important to focus america..

however – becoming much like the classroom.. about irrelevant things.. or at least.. locked up in a system where things that matter will not be able to be carried out… addressed even.. by people – who in their hearts would love more than anything to address them.. do something about them.. (ie: remember who the enemy is.. not the people.. the system)

in our multitasking way, we’ve become quite good at picking up a lot in tiny bites over extended periods of time. the presidential primary system was made for just such an attention span. presidential primaries were made for twitter.

we must find a way either to make a transformational candidate for president credible, or to get america to engage in politics outside the ordinary cycles of ordinary presidential elections.

the first: how could she make that the only issue that mattered? or more precisely, how could she frame the issue so people recognized that though there were a million other issues that mattered more, this issue must be resolved first?  one path – if elected 1) hold the govt hostage until congress enacts a program to remove the fundamental corruption that is our govt, and 2) once that program is enacted, she will resign…….. her terms ends when congress ratifies the changes that the people have demanded. … she is a regent president, holding office until the democracy grows up.

ch 20: strategy 4 – convention

so our founding fathers decided to break the rules….convinced those present to meet in secret. windows were shut. … for almost 3 months framers banged away at a document that we continue to revere today….the too to this exceptional path because the recognized that sometimes an institution becomes too sick to fix itself. not that the institution is necessarily blind to its own sickness. but that it doesn’t have the capacity, or will, to do anything about it.  sometimes an institution, like an individual, needs an intervention, from people, from friend, from outside.

who sets the rules for the convention? how are delegates selected? what defines the agenda? are there any limits to what it can decide?

James Wilson put it – the framers conceived of themselves as “authorized to conclude nothing, but.. at liberty to propose anything.”

how likely is it that the proposals of a runaway convention… would be ratified by 3/4 of the states? not likely . at all. but if it happens, then it would happen only because that runaway convention had come up with the same sort of world-changing brilliance that our framer did. if an “illegal proposal” were so strong as to overcome its own illegitimacy, and rally the support of 38 states, it would have to be an incredible proposal.

the hard work would be building the movement to support a convention.

and at that point – would we even need govt as is? let’s see.. no?

such a movement needs to live beneath the radar at first. like the internet itself, it needs to develop in a world where all the experts say that it’s impossible, so that those who understand the world only through the experts ignore it as it develops. .. it needs to develop by exercising the civic power of ordinary citizens. we’ve seen people devote endless hours to a single person; we need the same devotion to an ideal. or a cause.

the platform need not be heavily staffed. indeed, it needs to grow with the discipline of our own revolutionaries: small, apparently disorganized citizens fighting for liberty.

so, ignorant we are. but we’re not stupid. indeed, for all the reasons this book has collected, remaining ignorant about politics and our government is a perfectly rational response to the government we have. the question isn’t what we know. the question is what we’re capable of knowing, and doing…

ch 21: choosing strategies

i feel the dismissive impatience of those inside the system whenever i talk about changing the system. i can almost feel them roll their eyes as they hear about a fight to change the status quo. – but i also know love. and i know what love says to the rational.

conclusion:

they recognize that in a democracy their power is wrong. not their wealth. their power.

our republic (representative democracy) is ours to save. or better, it is only ours if we save it.

it won’t be billionaires. it won’t be geniuses with brilliant code. and it certainly won’t be politicians.

for our politicians are teltsin. their problem is an addiction. this magnificent republic melts away, and they can’t stop themselves long enough to save it. they can’t stop themselves because they are being pulled in a way that they can’t yet control.

so think about that harm. recognize its nature. think about the alcoholic and his plight. he might be losing his family, his job, and his liver, each of these is a critically important problem, indeed, among the most important problems a person could face. but we all recognize that to solve any of these”most important” problems, he must solve his alcoholism first. it’s not that alcoholism is the most important problem. it’s not. it is just the first problem. 

we won’t solve these problems (health/economy/climate/education/..) until we solve our first problem first: a dependency that has corrupted the core of our democracy.

_________

july 2015

http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/123982586642/my-nhrebellion-july-4th-talk-wheres-the-plan

yes. let’s not be insane. let’s do something different.

our insanity… that the hero can maintain when they get to the capital… the system is rigged.. until we can unrig it..

let’s unrig the rigged system. ie: we are the plan – a nother way. on our time.

______________

aug 2016 – Lessig 2016