Awhile back, I asked why our Democracy sucks. Here’s a piece of the answer, and a hint at the solution.

As it’s on the agenda for Sydney’s cyber/info/tech law reading group tomorrow, I just watched this presentation by Lawrence Lessig. (I’ve long been a Lessig fan, you might know him as the guy who started Creative Commons.) In any case, I think he makes a very compelling point on issues I’d not previously considered to be all that important. And if he’s right it’s not so much that it’s the most important issue, just that it’s the first issue.

In the later post, I expressed a lot of dismay about the candidates in general, but I think that I can pretty safely endorse Obama. He’s made a lot of substantive statements since my earlier complaints, and as time goes by I find that I like the idea of an Obama presidency. I think it’s actually possible that he’s man of real character with positions on issues closer than most. As we’re quite potentially headed for the worst economic recession we’ve seen in a long time, we could use someone who talks pretty and could restore international confidence in the dollar–something that I don’t think any of the other candidates could do.

I’ve done some thinking about the looming “recession” in the last few weeks, and perhaps I’ll post about it later. There’s a lot of very loud speculation as to the cause, which I don’t think is terribly important. What’s more important is the severity, and there’s a few things that have happened lately that could make this very bad for us. For instance, since 1994 the rapidly expanding practice of financial institutions using sweep accounts to effectively lower the reserve requirement for demand deposit accounts has led to significant monetary inflation that may just now start showing up as price inflation. Couple that with festering international mistrust of US monetary policy, and we could be in for a rough time.

I’ll write more later, but I must sleep now and do some reading, since I’m going to class tomorrow. Again.