Occupy the debate

The notion of a surging Newt is pretty funny, if insupportable. The current debates tell us nothing.

Where is USian life, culture, reality, represented in political debates? Here are a few debate formats we'd like to see:

1. Have the candidates read a good piece of fiction - e.g. The Death of Ivan Ilych, The Metamorphosis, Michael Kohlhaas, The Overcoat, or The Queen of Spades. Require would-be surgers to speak about the story in some probing depth.

2. Have some fine ensemble perform a sonata or quartet. Each surger-in-waiting talks about its form, emotional range, complexity.

Fire Belly Newt

3. Arundhati Roy, Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, Stiglitz, Taibbi and semblables ask probing questions. See who's surging after that.

4. Eminem take them for a tour of Detroit, then asks more probing questions. Lady Gaga, JayZ, Yo Yo Ma, Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, Occupiers, join the panel, one by one. Kind of a countersurge. 

5. Bring in a sampling of hedge fund managers, big bankers, oil men, media moguls. The surgers take turns deciding either to grill these "job creators" or lick their scrota.

etc. Your suggestion here: ________________________

The US is Unconstitutional

"I'm Joe, I'll be your economic manager"

I'm not a worshiper of Larry Lessig, but do listen because he's got a lot more law knowledge than I have, etc.

His new book -- Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It-- makes a point that needs to be heard and not immediately ground into teabags: The idea of the good framers of the US was to defend the people from undue power, money and influence -- the Constitution says folks in Congress are barred from accepting gifts from kings, foreign sovereign powers, etc.

Alas, they did not envision the new kings of Wall Street and Finance.

The frame has been subverted, Lessig describes, as Congress people now spend most of their time sucking up to the .5% who fund Congressional campaigns -- this is mostly corporate wealth, sucked from consumer-taxpayers.

That makes nearly every human being in the US the other 99.5%.

So while we were watching Friends, or playing Wii, an actual coup a la X Files was taking place. Thugs with money reached around the defenses of the people and powned Congress and D.C.

As a dear friend put it a few years ago, "The pigs won."

We now enjoy a representational system that represents .5% of the "people." And, if representation means anything at all*, this suggests that the actual people have been left undefended against undue power, money, and influence. This would appear to be unconstitutional.

Because corporations have become the uncrowned sovereigns, economic planners, and socialist-too-big-to-not-bail-outs of the US. I'd wager that the only difference between the corporate state that is now US, and the totalitarian state of Stalinist Russia, is that our totalitarians are distributed behind a bunch of screens of economy-planners that say EXXON, MOBILE, Bank of America, Citibank, and American Express.

Nice work, "Dickie" -

"Dick" Fuld, Lehman Bro.

Express this: The current US political system is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has abetted this metamorphosis. Media has missed it only entirely. OccupyWallSt has not.

Another Lessig interview.

*The opposite of representation is the casino -- unsullied chance. This is the preferred system of Wall St., Las Vegas, and the Mob.

#occupywallst

It's not about articulating demands - that comes much later, after a new sort of cultural form actually stabilizes - this takes time. At the moment, we don't know what this is. But we can hope.

Why here, why now - one possible reason:

What the Germans lack:

4 ...

Culture and the state — one should not deceive one-self about this — are antagonists: "Kultur-Staat" is merely a modern idea. One lives off the other, one thrives at the expense of the other. All great ages of culture are ages of political decline: what is great culturally has always been unpolitical, even anti-political. Toti

If #ows is an actual cultural birth-thing,it would be absurd to present the newborn with a demand that it present a list of demands. #bloomberg #ows