Kinja reply list

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medrawtHamilton Nolan
10/13/15 2:09pm
Lessig justifies the idea that he could get elected, say “mandate!” and make Congress do what he wants by appealing to the notion that every president gets a signature legislation passed early in their first term. He points to the example of Obama and the ARRA. Setting aside the very particular circumstances which prompted the legislation and passage of the ARRA, we can turn to the roll call and find how many Republicans voted for it, as a show of bipartisan support for a new president, under this “everybody gets one!” philosophy.

Oh, no Republican members of the house voted yea. And, only three Republican senators (one of whom switched parties later on) voted yea.

Hmm.
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  TheHumanHumanmedrawt
  10/13/15 2:33pm
  One of us is misinterpreting what he meant. The question was what he would do in the meantime. I think his answer meant that there really wouldn’t be a meantime- it would get addressed quickly one way or the other.
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  medrawtTheHumanHuman
  10/13/15 2:55pm
  No, I think we both correctly interpreted what he meant: he’s saying there wouldn’t be a meantime. He just happens to be wrong. If he’s adding in the codicil that if the legislation doesn’t pass he’ll just resign, then the whole schtick gets even dumber.
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kamla deviHamilton Nolan
10/13/15 1:42pm
CNN has made a BFD about saving a podium for Biden, who is not going to be there. So why not give it to this guy? Seriously, what the fuck is a Lincoln Chafee, and if he deserves a podium why not a Harvard professor?
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  SweetChelseakamla devi
  10/13/15 1:47pm
  Biden is such a joke. He needs to announce that he’s not running. All this flip flopping and teasing is childish and ridiculous. Whatever his personal beef is with Hillary, that’s for him to swallow like a man. It’s not like he’s going to take any votes from her. Seriously.
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  kamla deviSweetChelsea
  10/13/15 1:52pm
  I think that the DNC is waiting to see if Hillary totally implodes based on information trickling out from the e-mail scandal. Biden is a safe bet to wait in the wings and pick up the pieces, and follows the same bullshit status-quo approach that she does. But I’m tired of the “will he? won’t he?” headlines as well.
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Ben Carson's Missing SpongeHamilton Nolan
10/13/15 2:05pm
Two things:

1. The only place one guy can “fix the system” is in movies.

2. Beware anyone who tells you “none of them give a shit about you, but I’M different.” They are, at best, naive and at worst, looking to use you.
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  flamingolingoBen Carson's Missing Sponge
  10/13/15 2:13pm
  About your first point: Yes, Lessig is basically doing what a lot of liberals wanted Elizabeth Warren to do. Like him, she’s a lefty academic who is focused on achieving justice for ordinary Americans. But wisely, she decided that she can do far more good in the Senate rather than run for the presidency.
  
  The president isn’t a monarch. Electing the reddest communist in the world to the U.S. presidency wouldn’t translate to that much change on the ground if Congress remains in the control of Republicans. Lessig would have more impact if he used his money and resources and intellect to get himself and more liberals elected to Congress.
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  Jinxeflamingolingo
  10/13/15 3:13pm
  He actually has been doing that for awhile with varying degrees of success. His presidency bid is really more to get the issue attention. Not that he wouldn’t try to do what he said if he were elecred president. Just..not going to happen.
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armandthegreatHamilton Nolan
10/13/15 1:43pm
Honestly, Hamilton, posting this is a waste of your time, my bandwith, and Gawker’s server space. I want Larry Lessig to be president. Larry Lessig will never be president. He will never be the nominee. He will never even come close. I doubt he will be treated seriously, and he will have to fight to just get a spot in a debate. The establishment does not want a man like Lessig leading this country, and the citizenry is not nearly aware enough to know what is good for them.
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  BaggyTrousers3armandthegreat
  10/13/15 1:53pm
  I get where you’re coming from, but posting the interesting positions of guys who “don’t have a chance” often results in other “legitimate” candidates being asked questions on similar issues. Before Sanders became “legit,” his issues made it to the ears of the legitimate ones.
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  Gregoirearmandthegreat
  10/13/15 1:58pm
  I want Larry Lessig to be president.
  
  He literally said he was going to resign though. So he wouldn’t be your president AT ALL. He’s literally running to troll government and he won’t be able to get done what he wants to do anyway. This is simply pointless.
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ReburnsABurningReturnsHamilton Nolan
10/13/15 1:53pm
Look, you want health care reform? You’re not gonna get health care reform until we deal with this issue. You want to deal with the problem of living wage, minimum wage? You’re not gonna get that dealt with until you deal with this issue.” Bernie Sanders and Martin [O’Malley] both talk about taking on Wall Street, breaking up the banks, passing Glass-Steagall. Wall Street is the biggest funder of Congressional campaigns! They’re not gonna get a Congress that’s gonna back them in fundamentally changing Wall Street so long as they depend on Wall Street’s money.

Well, even if they didn’t have that Congress, I don’t know that the popular support actually exists for taking a lot of the more progressive actions Sanders and O’Malley would propose.

Also on a tangential note, for the eleventy-billionth freaking time, the notion that the repeal of Glass-Steagall somehow had a material impact on the financial crisis is pure populist/progressive mythmaking. The way the subprime mortgage market operated, there was nothing that would have stopped banks from both sides of the so called walled established by Glass-Steagall from helping to construct and flood the trillion+ dollar deluge of subprime mortgage originations and the CDOs and the much more leveraged CDS that caused so much damage in the crisis.

Glass-Steagall not being repealed by GLBA would not have prevented Countrywide from being what it was, not have prevented Lehman from having such an astronomically high leverage ratio or AIG from writing highly leveraged CDS with total abandon. Anyone who thinks it would have mattered should probably just take a seat and stop talking about things they do not understand.

It’s a convenient target because you can look at it and yell “DEREGULATION CAUSED THE CRISIS!” but the fact is what caused the crisis was not deregulation, it was taking a lack of regulation that never existed, combining it with a little bit of regulation that was antiquated and incoherent when applied in the 21st century and mixing it in with some moral hazard, and taking that combination to it’s extreme logical conclusion that drove the crisis.
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  BurningSpearReburnsABurningReturns
  10/13/15 3:47pm
  But would it have kept the banks from gambling with the savings of the non-investor class consumers?
  
  Because all those institutions can feel free to be as wild and crazy with their money as they like, they can win big or lose big but it wouldn’t matter to the rest of us if they weren’t tied to the banks that we need for the day-to-day business of life. Because that was what Glass-Steagel did mandate.
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  ReburnsABurningReturnsBurningSpear
  10/13/15 5:44pm
  Nope.
  
  Banks were free to invest in those MBS bonds with the savings of the non-investor class consumers BEFORE the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Those were considered the types of “low risk” investments that Glass-Steagall was designed to force them to make and buy.
  
  They couldn’t do as much with participating in the issuance process, but there was plenty of investor money willing to invest on both sides of the wall that Glass-Steagall would not materially slowed the issuance pipeline at all. The firms that participated most heavily in the issuance process were already either on the investment banking side of the wall which meant they had unlimited ability to participate in those activities anyways, or nowhere under the scope of Glass-Steagall to begin with.
  
  Consider that both Barney Frank, a very liberal politician who spent a stupendously long career working to strengthen financial regulation, and Barack Obama, a man who’s had to deal with the aftermath of the most complex financial crisis in history, don’t see GLB as a major cause to the financial crisis, and Frank thinks it would be a bad idea to go back to Glass-Steagall.
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mmsfcHamilton Nolan
10/13/15 2:29pm
How about we start asking out politicians what they know, not what they believe? Journalists have to start asking candidates what they know about the issues they’re mouthing off about.

“What do you know about Syria?”

“What do you know about the history of Ukraine?”

“What do you know about the Glass-Steagal act?”

“Describe the dynamics of the economic crashes of 2008, 2001, 1929. What circumstances created the porbem and what happened in the aftermath of the bailout?”

“How were the boundaries of countries in the Middle East drawn?”

We start doing this, then we can hear plans like Lessig’s because we then become accustomed to having a context for our choices.
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  hntergrenmmsfc
  10/13/15 3:19pm
  I’m all for this. And not only what you know, but how you know it: what are your sources.
  
  I remember when Obama was running, the right described him as “professorial” as a term of derision, as though explaining the state of affairs and providing context is a bad thing. We are indeed in the Age of American Unreason. I’m not sure when it started, or if it ever really was any other way, but we’re sure as hell there.
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  MeSoStuanchymmsfc
  10/13/15 4:03pm
  +1 My freshman Social Studies test shouldn’t have harder questions than what’s being asked to people who want to be president of the United States
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JustActSurprisedHamilton Nolan
10/13/15 1:40pm
What’s (sadly) hilarious is that Donald Trump is doing more than this guy to advance the conversation on Campaign Finance Reform, albeit in his brusque and unfortunate way.
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sui_generisHamilton Nolan
10/13/15 2:25pm
I agree with everything Lessig says in principle, and have been saying for years that there will never be a viable third-party candidate (or even genuinely-left-leaning one) until we get election reform.

However, he needs to get better strategists in his camp. As Democratic candidates have proven time and time again in our political system, Being Right Is Not Enough.

He also needs to do some minor branding work. For example, get rid of the word “vouchers”. That’s not only a poison word on the left (thanks to privatization efforts by Republicans), but it’s also way more complicated than what’s needed to produce the desired effect. Just a checkbox on a voting form is plenty.

Also, he didn’t address the canard of “money is speech” when Hamilton brought it up. We can’t run away from that, it needs to be charged at head-on and defused. Money is not speech. Speech is speech — money is AIRTIME. And airtime is a public resource that can be regulated for the common good, as the FCC proves every day.

Pulling the sleight of hand to slip the concept of “money equaling speech” into the public consciousness was one of the most clever and damaging things that the folks working for the 1% have done recently. People just accepted that nonsense, for some reason! Well, it’s time to push back. Free speech includes the right of an individual to say whatever they want to the gov’t — it doesn’t allow for them to use wealth inequities to drown out the free speech of anyone around them.

The groundwork for this sort of insidious nonsense was laid with the repeal of The Fairness Doctrine, in the late 1980s. This needs to be fixed, and it would eliminate most of the issues connecting money to speech causes, as well as some of the most egregious excesses of the right wing’s brainwashing factory, Fox News.

There are just a few keystones holding up this house of political corruption that our democracy is built around, and I think Lessig is doing a good job at pointing them out. He just needs to find a better way to package it and spread his ideas, unfortunately.

(Also, just because I agree with all this, doesn’t mean I think his whole concept of a one-issue Presidential campaign is workable...he needs to find another way to inject this into the public consciousness.)
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  Elumereresui_generis
  10/13/15 4:35pm
  Well said. Love the distinction between money as free speech and money as airtime.
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ennui is boringHamilton Nolan
10/13/15 2:31pm
I love Lessig with an almost schoolgirl crush.

And I agree with him on most of what he’s talking about here. I don’t vote anymore either. I used to, but really, there’s no point anymore, not with the current rules. We live in a country where big pharma charges us so much more money for the same drugs they sell so much more cheaply than they do in other places around the world. Because pharma owns politics. They own every damned Senator in Washington. And it doesn’t matter the political side of the coin. Republicans, democrats, it’s the same thing. And that’s just drugs.

Of course the Democrats don’t want Lessig at that podium. He would be making some very uncomfortable statements, asking uncomfortable questions. No one in politics wants that man up there. No one wants the American people actually looking at what our political system has actually turned into.
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Richard M TysonHamilton Nolan
10/13/15 1:59pm
It’s really a great idea, a “moonshot” as he calls it and it would benefit America, and restore some hope in our politicians, but god damn is it hard to get people to care about this. I try to bring up some of his points, and Bernie’s, to the people in my office and nobody takes notice because it’s more than a soundbite and people are too distracted with whatever the fuck they’re watching on their monitors. (Not work stuff) At best I’ll get a “Yeah, that does sound like a good idea, too bad it’ll never happen” and then they go back to whatever the fuck on youtube. Question - When Bush or Clinton gets the nod, can I request political asylum in another country? Maybe France? They seem open to it.
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