a curious Yankee in Europe's court

In his battle against financial corruption in the U.S. Congress  —  a fight that I support and track on this blog — Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig displays unwavering dedication, bi-partisanship, an open mind and a whole lot of patience.

Yesterday blogging for The Huffington Post, he brought all of these attributes into service in writing a surprising appreciation for the much publicized Tea Party movement in the USA. First pointing out his strong disagreement with some aspects of the movement, he then writes:

…I am a genuine admirer of the urge to reform that is at the heart of the grassroots part of this, perhaps the most important political movement in the current political context.

He goes to elaborate:

My admiration for this movement grew yesterday, as at least the Patriots flavor of the Tea Party movement announced its first fight with (at least some) Republicans. The Tea Party Patriots have called for a GOP moratorium on “earmarks.” Key Republican Leaders (including Senator Jim DeMint and Congressman John Boehner) intend to introduce a resolution to support such a moratorium in their caucus. But many Republicans in both the House and Senate have opposed a moratorium. Earmarks, they insist, are only a small part of the federal budget. Abolishing them would be symbolic at best.

This disagreement has thus set up the first major fight of principle for the Tea Party…

(Earmarks are, according to FactCheck.org, “government funds that are allocated by a legislator for a particular pet project, often without proper review.”)

Read the full post here:

Lawrence Lessig brilliantly explains once again how there’s serious trouble in river city — the river being the Potomac and the city, Washington D.C.

To learn more about Lessig and the campaign to reform Congress, go to Fix Congress First!

Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig gave a talk last week at the Yahoo! campus (“Innovation Corruption” May 20, 2010). He spoke about how corruption in government and business are blocking innovation in the U.S.

In case you think this has always been the case and isn’t getting much worse, Lessig explains how this isn’t so. The details he provides are more than a little disheartening to hear. But…

His plea to the audience was to not be passive – that the public is very much a part of the problem when clearly there are patterns but no one does anything about it. As a major player in the Internet world, he’d like to see Yahoo! pushing for competition in the IP world. As far as the government is concerned, Lessig would like to see a return to citizen-funded elections – a concept born during Teddy Roosevelt’s term in office. Such a system would eliminate money from the economy of influence – the underlying cause of corruption and ultimate roadblock to innovation.

If you really want to understand precisely how the system goes so incredibly awry, you will learn here.

And if you agree with Lessig, you can go to his website, ChangeCongress.org, and sign up to participate in helping him bring our political leaders back to serving the common good. Lessig’s organization is non-partisan — its sole bias is for the good of “we the people.”  I think Lessig has a great idea here.

From Lawrence Lessig today:

In a seven-minute interview on Thursday for The Washington Note, Nobel Economics winner Joseph Stiglitz prescribes good sense remedies for the USA economy:

And in a two-minute talk to the public this week, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig explains why  Congress isn’t listening:

Learn more about the work of Change Congress here.

A lot of fingers are pointing toward President Obama today, as the primary cause for the stunning upset victory of the Republican candidate in the Senate race in Massachusetts yesterday. But Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig says the culprit is elsewhere:

If your answer is no, Lawrence Lessig has some ideas on how we can change it. On Friday he launched Change-Congress, making the announcement at the National Press Club in Washington D.C.

Lessig said Change-Congress is a multi-partisan movement. In the presentation, he described how the organization will work, and what he sees as the first problem:

This problem that I’ve described is not the most important problem, it’s just the first problem. It’s the first problem that we have to solve if we’re going to solve other problems. There are no ends to extraordinarily significant problems that we face right now in this country. But we won’t be able to address those problems sensibly until we solve this first problem…

Lessig laid out the structure of Change-Congress in a 37 minute, 12 second slide presentation (apparently he doesn’t buy into the derogative conventional wisdom that most of us have an average attention span of only about three seconds):

Lawrence Lessig is, without a shadow of doubt, one of the good guys when it comes to fighting to preserve the democratic process in the U.S.

As to bio, currently he is a professor at Stanford Law School. Previously he was a professor at Harvard Law School. He is the creator of Creative Commons. Scientific American named him as one of America’s top 50 visionaries. He also has written four books, and he is a columnist for Wired magazine. So when he speaks, a lot of people listen.

Recently, he spoke via a video on Youtube (below) on why he is supporting the Democratic Party Presidential candidate Barack Obama. The talk is titled “20 minutes or so about why I am 4Barack.”