Inspired, perhaps, by Quentin Tarantino’s multi-part epic Kill Bill, auteur Larry Lessig has begun work on the not-dissimilar Change Congress Chronicles.
Volume 1, “Congressman Campbell is a Friend of the Auto Industry,” chronicles Congressman John Campbell, who is a friend of the auto industry.
The film quickly establishes the character of Campbell, who spent 25 of his pre-politics years working in the automotive industry. In the next scene, Campbell landlords for a bunch of used-car lots, earning somewhere between $600k and $6m a year. And a flashback reveals that Campbell has pocketed $170k in campaign contributions from the auto industry over the years.
At which point the film shifts gears to focus on the “Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act of 2008,” which (according to Lessig’s voice-over) is designed to protect consumers from the “shenanigans” of the “money-lending industry” (which everyone knows is a thinly-veiled euphemism for “Jews”).
The film does not delve into the bill’s merits or specifics, relying on astute viewers to infer that it represents an unalloyed good, based on both its opposition to “shenanigans” and its titular references to “consumers” and “protection.”
In an easy-to-guess plot twist, Campbell guts the bill by introducing an amendment that would exempt used-car dealers from its provisions, allowing them to continue their “shenanigans.” The film does not delve into the amendment’s merits either, relying on astute viewers to infer that it represents an unalloyed bad, based on both its opposition to opposition to “shenanigans” and its benefits to the used-car industry, which everyone knows consists primarily of dishonest, wicked people.
The movie ends with a three-fold call to action.
First, viewers are encouraged to “tweet” the Congressman, flooding his twitbox and letting him know that we’re onto him and his anti-anti-shenanigan agenda.
Second, viewers are encouraged to contact Congress, telling them to reject “this special interest legislation.” Presumably this refers to the Campbell amendment, which counts as “special interest legislation” on account of pertaining only to the interests of the “special” used-car industry, and not the original CFPAA, which pertains to the interests of the “unspecial” money-lending industry.
Finally, viewers are encouraged to demand public funding of elections. You see, if there were public funding of elections, then Campbell likely never would have spent 25 years working in the auto industry. And he certainly never would have gotten into the landlord-for-used-car-lots business. So he’d totally have no reason to take a particular interest in how proposed legislation affected the auto industry.
The film ends on a cliffhanger, as it deliberately avoids answering the obvious-to-the-viewer question “as long as Congress has the power to write laws favoring one special interest group at the expense of another, won’t these interest groups use any means they can (which obviously includes a lot more than campaign contributions) to get the laws to favor them and disfavor others?”
I’m excited to see how Lessig resolves this in his next film.
Seattle, in case you don’t follow our local politics, has got a mayoral election going on. (Technically it was last Tuesday, but they’re still counting the ballots.)
It’s a fairly interesting election, as elections go, if only because we junked the good-for-nothing incumbent in the primary, mostly on account of his failure (“think of the salmon!”) to remove snow from our roads last winter, which forced me to work from home for a week.
It’s also fairly uninteresting, in that the two primary-survivors, the Corporate Shill and the Ideologue, are both political neophytes. I actually met both of them, the former during an impromptu pre-primary baby-kissing session at Green Lake, the latter during a town hall at the local community center. They both seemed like, well, aspiring politicians.
And to be honest, neither is particularly appealing as a candidate. After losing their beloved incumbent, the city’s political and business “establishment” seems to have lined up behind the Corporate Shill. So I can’t support him. On the other hand, our douchebag alterna-weekly The Stranger hasn’t stopped tongue-bathing the Ideologue for months. So I can’t support him either.
(My preferred candidate was the former NBA player whose campaign platform seemed sensible. He came in 5th in the primary, I think.)
At last count the Ideologue is ahead by a few thousand votes, although there are still many left to count, so anything could happen.
Nonetheless, the aforementioned douchebag alterna-weekly makes the point that under either administration, the city council (and in particular its president) is poised to control an outsized share of the power in the city. This is probably the case, and I’m sure that any one of the three would continue the current policies of running the city into the ground.
There is one part of the article that leapt out at me as being, well, weird:
[City council president] Conlin sees the city pulling itself out of the gutter by embracing the most progressive elements of his environmental agenda. For example, a company called General Biodiesel—which uses primarily waste fats like cooking grease and tallow—was having a hard time getting permits, Conlin said, and by removing red tape Seattle was able to help that company (and, hopefully, laid down a marker that will help attract other green-job companies). “We should be targeting companies like that and asking, ‘What can we do to help you?’” he said.
I had to read this paragraph several times, because I wasn’t sure what part of was “progressive.” Nominally, it’s a story about making it easier to do business and in particular relaxing a permitting process. These are both pretty anti-progressive positions, so I can’t imagine that’s what he was referring to.
Instead, I figure, what he really meant was something along the lines of “let companies whose names contain green-sounding terms like ‘Biodiesel’ and ‘Renewable’ and ‘Sustainable’ ignore laws and regulations that apply to other, less-SWPL-friendly companies.” And indeed, this is the sort of Seattle “progressivism” I’ve gotten used to.
In anticipation of this new agenda, I’m thinking about renaming my publishing company to something more progressive, like “Compostable House,” “Biodegraded Books,” or “Post-Industrial Press.”
