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Lawrence Lessig

The only power on Earth that can defeat organized money is an alert mass movement, and this is exactly what Harvard law professor Lawrence “Larry” Lessig has completely ignored while throwing his hat into the ring for the presidency, nominally on the side of the Democrats. The largely unknown candidate first gained prominence among ever-fearful Libertarians who dreaded increasing legal restrictions on copyright and trademark amidst the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) deliberations. Lessig’s transformation to political activist was spurred by his petit-bourgeois belief that the bogeyman of “big money,” typified by the Koch Brothers, is the only thing standing in the way of a better American politics. He has also written a bestselling book on the subject and traveled the country delivering presentations on the pretentious TED Conference circuit to naïve sympathizers. Lessig is the archetypal liberal mushhead; he wants a clean government while ignoring the filth of Wall Street and offering no solutions for the life and death problems working families.

Lessig is affiliated with a number of domestic counter-insurgency operations seeking to gin up anti-establishment support. One is the “New Hampshire Rebellion,” a group of foundation funded mercenaries led by local oligarchs which is organizing inane “walks” across the country in order to call attention to the plainly obvious fact that most politicians are funded by moneyed interests. Their central demand is that campaign finance reform should be the leading issue addressed by the President on his or her first day in office- not war, not economic depression, not poverty in the developing world, not breaking the power of Wall Street. If you think campaign finance reform will break Wall Street, we can assure you that the money and power relationships will remain untouched as long as there is no militant mass movement.

Another Lessig fetish is the “Mayday PAC”, which ironically seeks to be the PAC-to-end-all-PACs. Its purpose is to petition Congressmen to sponsor legislation that will “reverse the corrupting influence of money on our elections.” This is sheer utopia. Most suicidal of all is Lessig’s attempt to convene a Constitutional Convention, which in our time would inevitably become the plaything of CIA, FBI, NSA, Libertarian kooks, foundation operatives, and gluttons of privilege from Wall Street. The result would be a monstrous parody of our existing Constitution, probably resembling the Confederate Constitution of 1861. This would mean the destruction of the United States as we have known it.

Over the past decades, we have seen presidential campaigns that actually aimed for national office, and we have also seen campaigns that were funded by wealthy interests primarily for the purpose of disorienting and demoralizing the masses while spreading toxic ideological poisons. Among the latter, we can count John Anderson in 1980, Herman Cain with his 9-9-9 program and of course the charlatan Ron Paul. Looney Larry belongs to this group.

Lessig has begun his foundation-funded campaign by ostentatiously seeking $1,000,000 from small time donors only. His campaign website byline reads “Fixing Democracy Can’t Wait.” The egghead Lessig should try telling that to struggling working families whose landlords are reminding them that they face foreclosure and eviction. According to his meager issues section, “there is only one issue in this country…the corrupt funding of public elections.” Has he never heard of the threat of nuclear war, unemployment, declining real wages, 50 million Americans in extreme poverty, foreclosures, or the evaporating safety net?

Lessig’s strategy is to win the presidency, then fight to enact campaign finance reform, and then resign in favor of his vice president! This weird plan blatantly violates the spirit of the Constitution and would clearly increase the power of the Wall Street financier oligarchy. The country would be adrift without real leadership for months or even years, and the intelligence agencies would run wild. Without even considering the unnecessary chaos and risk portended by such a maneuver, why would any reasonable Democratic voter choose him when every other candidate has already pledged support for his issue?

At this point, Lessig’s scenario becomes a nightmare of pure psychosis. Lessig has toldBloomberg that he would offer Jon Stewart the vice presidential nomination, allegedly because the comedian would “actually do a better job of rallying America to this than I’m going to because nobody knows who I am.”^[1] Recent political history all over the world suggests that whenever a comedian contends for power, they are acting as puppets of their well-heeled backers; Beppe Grillo of Italy and Dieudonne’ of France illustrate this rule. This is similar to making a simpleton like Ronald Reagan the president.

The vicious bankers’ boy Jon Stewart is no progressive hero, as Fortune reported in August 6, 2015^[2]. Stuart’s brother once owned a chair at the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange and was an expert in the type of flash trading that caused the 2010 Flash Crash; he has a worked at a number of the world’s top banks. Stewart is the court jester of Wall Street; his apolitical and impotent humor is a sop designed to keep the mushhead community amused while the world collapses. Lessig’s tapping Stuart as a potential Vice President, and then President is an obscene joke.

Some call Lessig “the Trump of the left” because of his constant propitiation of the billionaire bully. In Europe between the two world wars it was often noted that the petit-bourgeois was completely incapable of resisting fascism, and indeed furnished the fascist movements with a high proportion of their recruits. Today we see the petit-bourgeois Lessig openly endorsing the fascist thug Trump:

Lessig also wants Trump as his running mate on a third-party ticket:

Based on these statements, Lessig is unfit for the presidency or any other US public office. Lessig also shows his contempt for political ideas by neglecting education and program and making everything depend on money.

Program is what matters in politics, because no army of dollars, lobbyists, wreckers, and tired hacks can stop an idea whose time has come. From the Wall Street Sales Tax; to a nationalized Federal Reserve; to a permanent, protective tariff; the Tax Wall Street Party represents the demands that would galvanize American voters, but for which you will not see Lawrence Lessig or any other major party candidate fighting today. Bernie Sanders may pay lip service to some of these issues, but he has already proven to be incapable of fighting for them.

Lawrence Lessig’s intellectual profile reveals a gross misdiagnosis of leading American issues, namely those of institutionalized aggression abroad, economic depression and austerity. A focused plan of action is required to bring the United States and the world into the future. This includes massive projects of critical infrastructure, major commitments to scientific research, and a program to re-employ 30 million Americans at high wages. It is these programmatic demands, not process reforms, which will constitute the next revolutionary political moment in American history.

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