#republic lost

Kiril reaches out to Professor Lawrence Lessig for guidance and mentorship.  Professor Lessig is author of Republic Lost, has launched the Mayday Pac, a superpac meant to help remove money from politics, and is one of the founders of Rootstrikers.  He has mentored beautiful visionaries before, and we feel he is one of the founder’s of the New Way.  

Can you help get this message out to him?

Last week, I had the privilege to witness the very first days of the NH Rebellion, a march throughout New Hampshire and initiated by Harvard Law Professor Larry Lessig. Below is the content of the interview I made there and published by Le Monde, in France. I will recount this experience in a story to be published in French in June.

Lawrence Lessig, 52, is a law professor of law and the director of the Center for Ethics at Harvard University. After a decade devoted to intellectual property issue on the Internet (and co-founding Creative Commons), since 2007 he has been focusing on the influence of money in Washington. After hundreds of conferences and a book, Republic, Lost (ed. Twelve, 2011), this Barack Obama’s former colleague and support is launching a movement, the New Hampshire Rebellion. By mobilizing the voters of this key state of the electoral process, he wants to place the issue of endemic corruption in Politics at the center of the next presidential campaign, in 2016. The end goal? A constitutional amendment that seriously reforms campaign finance.

Photo : Bruce Skarin

According to you, campaign finance is one of the main ills of the American democracy. Why?

The pervasiveness of money is making our country ungovernable. Whatever the subject to address (environmental or financial regulation for the Left, debt or taxation for the Right), there will be no major reform until we change the way we fund our campaigns. Today, those who finance them significantly are the only ones to see their interests represented in Congress - the House of Representatives and the Senate. Consider what just happened on firearms: 88% of the population was in favor of the legislation proposed by Obama. Yet, Congress went silent: nobody in Washington wants to be the enemy of the National Rifle Association.

The influence of money in Politics is not new.

Of course but everything has intensified since 1994, when, for the first time in forty years, Republican won the majority at Congress. Its President changed the rules: it shortened the legislative work-week to three days so that senators and congressmen had time to raise money home. The whole atmosphere in Congress changed. Since then, elected officials no longer have the time to know each other, they do not know how to work together. Both sides demonize the other. The only goal is to win elections, to block the opposite side. The government can no longer debate nor work. Besides, at the very same time, to recover the majority in Congress, Democrats undertook to seduce large Republican contributors. Robert Rubin, then the Secretary of the Treasury, sent unambiguous signals to Wall Street. A kind of implicit reciprocity settled with a clear result: financial deregulation laws signed by Clinton.

What is the mechanism involved?

According to Business Insider, in 95% of cases, the election result at congress depends on the candidate’s ability to raise money. To be re-elected (every two or four years), he or she therefore does not require to meet people’s demands, but donors’ ones. On average, he or she spends between 30% and 70% of his or her time to call people never met, ask them for money and what they would want or need in exchange. This activity transforms Congress people. They become hypersensitive and responsive to requests of this tiny fraction of the population that finance them. Only the major contributors (159 persons or entities, according to a Demos and U.S. PIRG study) decide what topics to be discussed, solutions to study or block, even candidates and their profile. Of course, these are the Kochs brothers on the Right, Soros on the Left. But beware that 31% of funds are of unknown origin! There is no moral sense that can resist the amounts involved. It is as if you open the door of an airplane while in altitude: any human being there would explode. This campaign finance process exacerbates the problems of our already weakened political system.

What is your goal?

It is citizens, on an equal basis, not lobbyists that must finance political campaigns. To achieve this, there are a myriad of pawns to move, but the goal is to amend the Constitution to change how campaigns are funded. This amendment can be achieved either through Congress itself, or through a constitutional convention called by a majority of States. One of the solution could be to rely on vouchers distributed to all citizens and taken from their taxes. Each voter would attribute his or her voucher to the candidate of his choice.

Why have you chosen to express yourself and this request through a March?

Because it is an action that gets people’s attention! According to Global Strategy Group, 95% of Americans believe that money has too big an influence in Washington. But 91% of them think that there is nothing to do ! This renunciation is what we are fighting by walking.

Why is New Hampshire key for you?

No major reform in the United States is possible without the support of the President. We need a President who wants this reform more than anything. And for that, we must force the 2016 candidates’ interest onto this subject, to debate it and to make their position clear. Everyday corruption in Washington should become the subject of 2016. This is our goal. Yet, for the U.S. primaries, both in terms of debate priorities and results, New Hampshire has always set the tone: if you do not win here, there is little chance that you win elsewhere (Obama was one of the few exceptions). In addition, New Hampshire is a very good soil for this topic. People here are fiercely independent and corruption, for both Republicans and Democrats, has always been a key issue. Note that this was with this theme that John McCain won the state in 2000, during the Republican primary. It is a peculiarity of our electoral system, a candidate spends time here, goes to barbecues, to small meetings among residents. Obama came here perhaps fifty times for his campaign. Citizens here have a lot of power. If a candidate wins here on this theme, so it will be debated everywhere.

Why walk in January, the coldest month?

First, because Primaries are held here in January. And we want to pay a tribute to two iconic figures. First, Doris Haddock, better known under the name of “Granny D”. In 1999, at the age of 88, this New Hampshire woman crossed the United States to advocate in favor of campaign finance reform. We wanted to do something around her birthday, January 24: this will be the last day of our journey. And then I also want to honor my friend Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide a year ago, January 11, 2013.

Who was Aaron Swartz?

Aaron helped me organize the Creative Commons movement and all my work on copyright. Self-taught, he started at the age of 14 years a multitude of projects around the free Internet and democracy that we still benefit of. It was he who told me that everything was intertwined, that as long as we don’t change the way we finance political campaigns, no reform can succeed.

What makes a Harvard professor start a movement?

I would love this issue to be addressed and discussed through a great debate in the newspapers. But this is not going to happen. For seven years I have made hundreds of presentations, showed thousands of Powerpoint slides. But we’ll never win with that. We need to bring these issues to each citizen, not only those who have thirty minutes, but to those who have only five seconds. For me, it’s like campaigning except that there is no mandate to win. This forces me to go on the field and formulate the problem in an intelligible manner, one that would be obvious to everyone. And walking is a good way to facilitate this discussion.

For fifteen days, you will be walk 185 miles, into the cold, ice and rain. Should we see a metaphor here?

Of course. A candidate serious about entering this field of campaign finance risks to slide, fall, to break a bone maybe. And there is no way for us, for me, for this to happen without taking this risk.

Errol, New Hampshire, January 12th 2014

Follow the NH Rebellion

Here is the french version of this interview :

Lawrence Lessig: Republic Lost