M. David — Harvard Professor Says GOP Electors Are Close To Blocking Trump Win

Harvard University law professor Larry Lessig just said on Tuesday that 20 Republican Electoral College voters are seriously considering flipping to vote against Donald Trump.

That’s more than half the number of anti-Trump votes that are needed to stall the president-elect from being sworn into office in January....

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Harvard Professor Says GOP Electors Are Close To Blocking Trump Win
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Lawrence Lessig — NH considers a call for an Article V convention

Lessig explains what's involved in the calls for a "constitutional convention" through state legislatures and the likely outcome. Most of the conventional wisdom is wrong.

Lawrence Lessig's Blog
NH considers a call for an Article V convention
Lawrence Lessig | Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership, Harvard Law School

John Light — An Icy New Hampshire Walk Sparks a new Movement to get Money out of Politics (via Moyers & Company)

An Icy New Hampshire Walk Sparks a new Movement to get Money out of Politics (via Moyers & Company)

The temperatures started to drop Tuesday morning, and continued to plummet through the night, so by Wednesday at 8 a.m. it was 0° Fahrenheit in Concord, NH. In the lobby of the Marriott Fairfield Inn next to Interstate 93, noted activist Lawrence Lessig…

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Quid Pro Quo

It's a quid pro quo.  Only the most gullible rube ready to buy swampland in Florida could think otherwise.  The citizen's watchdog MAPlight.org found that congressmen who voted for TARP, the "Troubled Assets Relief Program," received nearly 50 percent more in campaign contributions from the financial services industry (an average of about $149,000) than congressmen who voted no. 

And House Energy and Commerce Committee members who voted yes on an amendment in 2009 favored by the forest products industry, to allow heavier cutting of trees, received an average of $25,745 from the forestry and paper products industry. This was ten times more than each member voting no. The pattern repeats itself over and over, ditto for why wars go on when polls show most of the population is against them.

Read the rest at War Is A Crime

Occupy Wall Street Descends on Congress, Says: Money Out of Politics!

By Ralph Lopez 

A choice piece:

A rather remarkable OpenSecrets.org report on Occupy DC covers an earlier speech by Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig:

Lessig emphasized corruption in our current government -- not of the bribery variety a la Rod Blagojevich, but rather in Congress' dependence on money, money that is mostly from corporations and a tiny proportion of the population.

"Forget 99 percent, we are the 99.5 percent," Lessig told the audience "Only .05 percent of America gave the max contribution of $2,500 to candidates last election."

Lessig's statistics are correct, according to research by the Center for Responsive Politics. Only .05 percent of the U.S. population gave the legal maximum to at least one candidate, which was $2,400 per election during the 2010 cycle.

In fact, only 0.26 percent of the U.S. population gave more than $200, the level at which public disclosure of contribution records is mandated by the Federal Elections Commission.

Yet these 818,700 or so donors accounted for 67.7 percent of the total contributions to federal candidates that election cycle.

Closes strong: "They only call it class war when we fight back."

Well written and well documented with numbers.

Investigative report exposes the deficit hawks

Groups like the CRFB and the Concord Coalition, founded by former Congress members in the 1980s and ’90s, have long presented themselves as nonpartisan, penny-pinching critics of wasteful government spending, when really they are anti-government, pro-corporate ideologues whose boards are filled with K Street lobbyists and financial executives. The goal of much of the austerity class is to see government funds redirected to the private sector. (Their ideology, which accepts the accumulation of private debt but opposes government debt, explains why the austerity class ignored the massive housing and credit bubble, which more than any single factor contributed to an explosion of debt worldwide.)

(emphasis added)

Read the whole article How the Austerity Class Rules Washington by Ari Berman at The Nation

It's the economic rent, stupid.

Berman has a one-two punch in this issue. See also Occupy Wall Street Hits K Street by Ari Berman at The Nation

If you want to understand how the top 1 percent have accumulated such power in American politics, look no further than Washington’s K Street lobbying corridor. Wall Street has long been the dominant player in the capital. “The banks,” Senator Dick Durbin said in 2009, “are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.”

The financial sector has spent more money on campaign contributions and lobbying than any other sector of the economy—$4.6 billion on lobbying since 1998, according to Open Secrets. This year, commercial banks andsecurities and investment firms have spent over $82 million on lobbying, employing over 1,000 lobbyists.

Given these facts, it makes sense that the Occupy Wall Street movement has spread to K Street. Since October 1, demonstrators have gathered in MacPherson Square, their numbers and visibility growing in recent days....

A lot of this post is about Harvard professor Larry Lessig, "one of the pre-eminent advocates of true campaign finance reform."

“Forget the 99 percent,” Lessig said yesterday. “We are the 99.95 percent of people who have never maxed out in a Congressional election campaign by giving the maximum amount. It is .05 percent of America who have given $2500 in the last election to a Congressional candidate, .05 percent, and Congress listens to them.”

Beowulf on campain finance reform — from the comments

"Would campaign finance reform require a constitutional amendment?"

Short answer, it depends on what you mean by "campaign finance reform". Its like ex-Navy SEAL Richard Machowicz's great saying: target dictates weapons, weapons dictate movement.

If what you want is to limit free speech rights (which as the Supreme Court interpretes it) means, essentially the right of any individual or corporation to spend whatever they want on a political race, that requires a constitutional amendment. Which, to pass, requires 2/3rds of both Houses and 3/4ths of the state legislatures to approve-- THAT is like hand-towing a howitzer up and down a mountain.

The Supreme Court has allowed clean money schemes like Arizona's where candidates can voluntarily limit their own campaign fundraising and, in exchange, they receive a stipend from the state (or perhaps someday, the Federales) to fund their campaign. The idea is you can't turn down the volume of bought candidates, but you CAN turn up the volume of clean candidates. Passing a bill that appropriates money in this way must pass both Houses of Congress and to get through the Senate will need 60 votes. After which, the appropriation must be renewed annually. Now you're making progress, you have a mule train to haul the artillery piece.

A I suggested to Larry Lessig a couple weeks ago, you could turn the last proposal inside out and gave a tax credit to the campaign VENDORS of clean money candidates (e.g. TV station who ran ads at no cost to candidate would be given a tax credit equal to the fair market value of an equivalent ad buy). That bring you into the world of tax expenditures, which have two unique properties. 1. Tax bills can pass the US Senate with only 50 votes (plus VP tiebreaker) by using the filibuster-proof reconciliation process. 2. Tax breaks don't have to be renewed annually like appropriations. Once they're on the books the inertia of the system makes them tough to repeal. That route is like a helicopter hauling your howitzer over the mountain.

Clearly the first step is to figure out (if at all possible) how to achieve your goals through the tax code. The idea is tax activities you don't want (e.g. tobacco sales) and give tax credits to activities you do want (e.g. hiring disabled veteran).

Bingo — It's the corruption, stupid.

The protesters occupying Wall Street have been famously without a formal manifesto. But if they wanted one, firebrand Harvard Professor Lawrence Lessig's new book about how money has corrupted Congress might be a contender.

Lessig had hoped to lay the underpinnings for a popular mobilization in his book. Instead, on the day of the book's publication, he is headed to what could be that movement's nascent heart. "I'm going to go down there and hang out and do whatever I can," he told the Huffington Post on Thursday, from the train.

Lessig's contention in his book "Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress -- and a Plan to Stop It" is that Congress's overwhelming addiction to special interest money is at the root of the problems facing the country and the unprecedented levels of disillusionment with government.

In a Thursday morning blog post on The Huffington Post, Lessig cheered on the protesters. "#OccupyWallSt, Then #OccupyKSt, Then #OccupyMainSt," he wrote, calling the mass arrests on Saturday possibly "the first real green-shoots of this, the American spring."

But at the same time, Lessig said he is worried that the protest "will become too diffuse and not focused" on that root issue. "The key messaging strategy here is to try to get people to focus on what is the core problem," he said.

Similarly, for a protest to work, it needs to grow, he said. This one will only grow "if a wide range of people can be part of it." And that means coalescing around an issue "as fundamental as the corruption of the system," he said.

"People realize that it's a show; it's a charade," Lessig said of the modern American political process. "When you just look a little bit deeper, it's clear that what's driving both parties is whatever is the thing that's going to maximize the money."

Read the rest at The Huffington Post, Lawrence Lessig's New Book On Political Corruption Offers Protesters A Possible Manifesto by Dan Froomkin

Harvard redeems itself?