Lawrence Lessig Occupy Wall Street Could Bridge Left And Right. Harvard University-Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics: Public Lectures. Money Talks: OpenSecrets.org's Interview with Author and Professor Lawrence Lessig. OpenSecrets Blog: Your background is in law, specifically Internet law and copyright policy. How did you get into campaign finance reform? Was it a slow build-up of frustration or was there a distinct turning point?
Larry Lessig: Well, before I was an Internet lawyer I was a constitutional lawyer, still am. But when I was doing the Internet stuff what became overwhelmingly clear was that we weren't going to make any progress about these issues and about copyright regulation against crazy extremists until we dealt with this more fundamental problem with this political system, which is what I call this corruption. So at a certain point I just thought, I've written five books in the field, I've done as much as I thought I could profitably do, I didn't want to spend the rest of my life kind of fine-tuning a set of arguments that seems so obvious -- that everyone was getting except for congressmen. OpenSecrets Blog: You're now fully engulfed in campaign finance as an issue. Tom Ferguson: Congress is a “Coin Operated Stalemate Machine” Readers may recall that we discussed a Financial Times op ed by University of Massachusetts professor of political sciences and favorite Naked Capitalism curmudgeon Tom Ferguson which described a particularly sordid aspect of American politics: an explicit pay to play system in Congress.
Congresscritters who want to sit on influential committees, and even more important, exercise leadership roles, are required to kick in specified amounts of money into their party’s coffers. That in turn increases the influence of party leadership, since funds provided by the party machinery itself are significant in election campaigning. And make no doubt about it, they are used as a potent means of rewarding good soldiers and punishing rabble-rousers A new article by Ferguson in the Washington Spectator sheds more light on this corrupt and defective system.
Partisanship and deadlocks are a direct result of the increased power of a centralized funding apparatus. Ferguson teases out the implications: Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It. Welcome to Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. Lobbying Database. You can use the options on the right to search through our database in several ways: search by name for a company, lobbying firm or individual lobbyist; search for the total spending by a particular industry; view the interests that lobbied a particular government agency; or search for lobbying on a general issue or specific piece of legislation.
NOTE: Figures are on this page are calculations by the Center for Responsive Politics based on data from the Senate Office of Public Records. Data for the most recent year was downloaded on January 27, 2014. *The number of unique, registered lobbyists who have actively lobbied. Feel free to distribute or cite this material, but please credit the Center for Responsive Politics. Know What You’re Protesting - Economic View. Why I Protest: Dr. Arthur Chen of Oakland, California - Person of the Year 2011.
Why I Am Not Protesting at Occupy « AmericanPaki. For those who have known me, my keen interest in the Occupy movement comes as no surprise. For those whom I have met only recently know me as the researcher, freelance journalist and blogger who has been making it a strong point to let everyone know that I am merely observing protests from the sidelines and not participating as a demonstrator. Since the beginning of Occupy at Wall Street on 17 September, I have stood on the peripheries of encampments observing a democratic movement unfold before our very eyes: from marches, to GA meetings, to police raids, and even the arduous online activism that has now become part and parcel of the current movement. As a researcher and journalist, I have spent a lot of my time ranting about nothing but Occupy since its inception. It may come across as somewhat odd in case some wonder whether or not I have an actual job. There is a reasonable explanation as to why I have temporarily abandoned my project.
“She just wanted to get on a ride. Like this: The International Civil Rights Restart has been convened. The World Left After 2011 | Immanuel Wallerstein. By any definition, 2011 was a good year for the world left – however narrowly or broadly one defines the world left. The basic reason was the negative economic conditions from which most of the world was suffering. Unemployment was high and becoming higher.
Most governments were faced with high debt levels and reduced income. Their response was to try to impose austerity measures on their populations while at the same time they were trying to protect their banks. The result was a worldwide revolt of what the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movements called “the 99%.” It is not that the OWS, the Arab Spring, or the indignados achieved everything they hoped for. The question now for the world left is how it can move forward and translate this initial discursive success into political transformation.
To transform the world therefore, the world left will need a degree of political unity it does not yet have. These divisions are not new. I believe there is a mode of reconciliation. A (Very Very) Brief History of Occupation Tactics. Though many hope that the Occupy Movement is now part of history --Time magazine naming ‘The Protester’ person of 2011 seems to reflect a desire that she won't be in 2012 -- those of us organizing and protesting on the ground know that we are still somewhere in the movement’s beginning. It’s not because tents are still on the ground in many cities and college campuses, or because the Internet infrastructure and dialogue continues apace, nor is it some problem of navel-gazing movement mentality that confuses continuous meetings between committed organizers with continual progress. Occupy Everything is buoyed by the global revolutionary nature of the historical moment. Every week there’s a major development in a different nation’s mass movement.
Moscow’s anti-government protests of the last week are the largest street protests since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Occupy Everything also has significant negative drivers. The economic outlook for 2012 remains bleak. The Shocking, Graphic Data That Shows Exactly What Motivates the Occupy Movement | Occupy Wall Street. October 23, 2011 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. What are the Occupy Wall Street protesters angry about? The same things we’re all angry about. Now is not the time for wonky policy solutions, as the media meatheads are calling for. 1. (click for larger version) The productivity/wage chart says it all. 2. (click for larger version) Actually the top tenth of one percent. 3. (click for larger version) As women entered the workforce, family income made up for some of the wage stagnation. 4. (click for larger version) To add financial insult to injury, the richest of the rich pay less and less each year as a percentage of their monstrous incomes. 5.
(click for larger version) When the rich become astronomically rich, they gamble with their excess money. 6. (click for larger version) We bailed out the big Wall Street banks and protected the billionaires from ruin. Parsing the Data and Ideology of the We Are 99% Tumblr. One of the most fascinating things to come out of the current We Are 99%/Occupy Wall Street protests is the We Are 99% Tumblr. At the site, people hold up signs that explain their current circumstances, and it tells the story of a whole range of Americans struggling in the Lesser Depression. It is highly recommended. The site features pictures of individuals holding their signs, and occasionally the tumblr reproduces the text of the signs themselves underneath the image as html text.
Sometimes the text under the image is blank, sometimes it is a different message, but often it is the sign itself. In order to get a slightly better empirical handle on this important tumblr, I created a script designed to read all of the pages and parse out the html text on the site. It doesn’t read the images (can anyone in the audience automate calls to an OCR?) It’s a fun exercise, pointing out things I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. What were the most frequent words? Like this: Like Loading...
The haves and the have nots - Counting the Cost. If you believe the protesters on Wall Street, there is a one to 99 per cent split between the 'haves' and the 'have nots'. The 'Occupy Wall Street' protestors chant is: "We are the 99 per cent", as opposed to the one per cent of society who make the big money while everyone else just gets by. The average American household still has an income somewhere between $30,000 and $80,000, which really has not improved since the Great Depression. Yet, today there is a top one per cent of earners with an average salary of $380,000 a year.
The spread between the two is quite alarming. So just what has happened to the middle class in the US? Also on the show, we talk to the head of SAP, the world's biggest business software company, about creating jobs and the Eurozone crisis. Bill McDermott, co-CEO of SAP, tells Counting the Cost how the German company has kept itself out of trouble and what he thinks about the Eurozone's attempts at recovery. Alan Moore – meet the man behind the protest mask | Books | The Observer. The comic-book writer Alan Moore is not usually surprised when his creations find a life for themselves away from the printed page. Strips he penned in the 1980s and 90s have been fed through the Hollywood patty-maker, never to his great satisfaction, resulting in both critical hits and terrible flops; fads for T-shirts, badges and shouted slogans have emerged from characters and conceits he has dreamed up for titles such as Watchmen and From Hell.
"I suppose I've gotten used to the fact," says the 58-year-old, "that some of my fictions percolate out into the material world. " But Moore has been caught off-guard in recent years, and particularly in 2011, by the inescapable presence of a certain mask being worn at protests around the world. A sallow, smirking likeness of Guy Fawkes – created by Moore and the artist David Lloyd for their 1982 series V for Vendetta. "That smile is so haunting," says Moore.
"I tried to use the cryptic nature of it to dramatic effect. We Are the 99 Percent. 14th October 2013 Question with 172 notes Anonymous asked: How can you claim to speak for 99% of people? We don’t claim to speak for anyone, we merely present stories. 14th October 2013 Photo with 186 notes I am 23 years old I am a female (not that it should make a difference, but apparently in our society it does…) From the day I moved out of my parent’s house, I’ve supported myself 100%, not because they don’t love me but because they can’t support my dreams financially.
For over two years I schlepped 2-for-1’s and shots to pay for my rent, a used car, and tuition at a community college. Now I’m attending the University of MN and I depleted all of my savings just so I wouldn’t have to take out a loan this semester. I’m majoring in journalism, a profession I consider a civic duty. I am the 99%. occupywallst.org 14th October 2013 Question with 12 notes Anonymous asked: We are the 99 percent- Why don't we RECALL these extremist NUTS that are in Washington, DC.??!!!! 9th September 2013 Thank you! Managing the 99 Percent. “And that,” put in the Director sententiously, “that is the secret of happiness and virtue—liking what you’ve got to do.
All conditioning aims at that: making people like their un-escapable social destiny.” – Huxley, Brave New World From: The McCourtny Consulting Group To: The Endowment for the Preservation of the One Percent Subject: Managing the 99 Percent Whether or not it is put in sound-bite terms of “class warfare”, the “one percent” pitted against the “ninety-nine percent”, the fact of the matter is that the data showing a widening of income levels are undeniable, as are the push of a segment of the middle class to the near poor, the realization of lower social mobility, income levels that have broken the string of increasing standards of living from parents to children, and new doubts about education as a road to opportunity.
We are witnessing a simmering backlash in the face of the widening class distinction. What to do We are just like you. Too bad, just live with it. Reality TV. Occupy Cafe - An open space for global conversation.