our bizarre blindness

@lessig in the NYT with a slightly brillant campaign finance reform proposal.

It’s really about our society. There are so many institutions that are suffering from the same corruption from moneyed interests.

Lawrence Lessig: Yes, and that’s not an accident.

…just a particular instance of a more general dynamic in accounting, financial services, healthcare, academics, the media—you can pick your field—and we can describe a similar dynamic of corrupting influences that we’ve allowed to seep into the institution that distract it from what we think the institution is for.

Barry Ritholtz:

In short, our new overlords are enormously well funded, well connected, relentless and perhaps most of all, patient. This new King was not appointed by primogeniture, or even Divine Right, but by acquiring enough profits in the free market that they can buy control over society, even as they thwart that free market ideal for their own ends.

We have become, in short, a Corporate Monarchy.