I’m at the National Press Club for the launch of Stanford Prof. Larry Lessig’s new project, Change-Congress.org. He’s here as part of Sunshine Week, and his speech is co-sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation (which I consult for) as well as the Omidyar Network. As you may know, last year, Lessig decided to shift his focus from the fight for free culture to the fight for a clean government. Here are my notes on his talk, paraphrasing as best as I can:
I want to talk about truth, trust and Title VII, Lessig starts. Let’s start with the easy policy cases that our government increasingly gets wrong. The consensus among policy-makers is that the only changes in copyright term should be prospectively, to help protect current or future work. But a host of experts, including Milton Friedman, have said that it would be ridiculous to extend copyright lengths for old works, since after all, George Gershwin isn’t going to make any new works–so he doesn’t need a retroactive extension. And yet they keep getting extended.
Or take another easy one. The consensus among nutritionists is that we eat too much sugar, and should not eat more than 10% of our calories from sugar. When the World Health Organization recommended that, the sugar lobby went ballistic, and got U.S. Senators to threaten to kill its funding. Now the WHO recommendation is to get 25% of your diet from sugar.
Most profoundly, the issue of global warming. There is a consensus that it’s real, we’re responsibly, the consequences are bad, we need to act quickly and its not too late to fix it. A review of 1000 scientific peer-reviewed articles between 1992-2003 found none that question this. A study of 600 articles between 1988-2002 found about half that question this consensus. The result, a critical delay in action.
In all three of these cases, easy government public policy went wrong. Why?
Many institutions in our society depend on trust: courts, doctors, academics. They need us to believe that their decisions are based on reason, not their personal or financial interest. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Example: an American Hospitals Association report citing a new anti-stroke drug mysteriously lost its dissenting section in between the draft and final version of a report on its safety. Lessig notes $11 million that was given from the drugmaker to the AHA.
Another example: the debate over what causes autism. Lessig emphasizes that vaccines are good and mercury doesn’t cause autism. But then he points out how many parents could come to distrust the public health authorities’ views on this issue since agencies like the FDA and CDC regularly waive the conflict of interest rules governing the doctors who help review their decisions.
Or take academics and the rise of “coin-operated experts.” He refers to colleagues who come to DC to opine on policy issues. Increasingly there is a presumption that when they do that, they are here because they’ve been paid by someone to do so. Cites an example of Sen. Sununu of New Hampshire accusing him of “shilling” for one of the company’s seeking net neutrality legislation, since of course it made sense from Sununu’s frame of reference that that was the only reason someone like Lessig could be so driven around the issue.
Finally, about Title VII of the Communications Act–which has only six titles in the law. The idea back in 1994, that came out of Vice President Gore’s office, was to combine telecom and cable (Title’s II and VI) to create a new title, covering all internet services, and for it to be deregulated. When Gore’s team took that to the Hill, they were told “Hell no–how will we raise money from the telecoms if we deregulate them?”
How does this apply to Congress? The Framers of the Constitution were concerned with independence, not from England, though. They didn’t want the members of the government to be dependent on outside influences, particularly that of money. Dependent people lacked a will of their own, they thought, and therefore didn’t deserve a role in public affairs. Dependence on money would lead to corruption. Their aim was to build constitutions immune from that influence. And they failed, Lessig says.
While Daniel Webster was in Congress, he was a paid representative of the Bank of the United States. Only in 1853 was bribery made a crime, in relation to Congress. Two hundred years later, we have radically improved on that. Crude corruption of the Duke Cunningham-sort is the exception, not the rule. But just because there’s little or no personal corruption, doesn’t mean that Congress is independent or not corrupted. Members may be personally secure and professionally dependent on the economy of influence, which defines the ways actions and ideas move thru Congress.
The economy of influence controls access and affects the results. the result, a 19% approval rating for Congress. Trust is at a very low level. The policy failures are all a function of an improper dependence on money. This is the most important political challenge of our time, to build a constitution of political independence that the Founders failed to build.
There’s an extraordinary movement already at work on this. It expresses itself in this election around the meme of Change. But Lessig wants to focus on Changing Congress. Various calls are gaining traction out there:
-from John Edwards, that members reject $ from lobbyists and PACs
-push for transparency in Congress by Sunlight Foundation and others
-from the Republicans, ban on earmarks until we can make sure they aren’t made for the wrong reasons
-push for public financing, mainly by Democrats
In responding to objections to public financing from the Right, which sees it as a big government intrusion in the political process, Lessig responds: Why is government so big?, he asks the Right. Because Congressmen must get elected. If we could remove their dependency on money, perhaps we could shrink the unnecessary parts of government. A big part of the FCC could go away, for example. $2 billion in public financing is a small price to pay, he argues.
Thus, today Lessig is launching, with Joe Trippi, the Change-Congress movement, to leverage and amplify the reform movement others are already doing. “A google mashup” of politics. For example, the home page of Change-Congress shows a map of every district in America coloring them by how much money the Member gets from lobbyists and PACs.
Three phases to CC’s effort. The first is modeled on the original CC–Creative Commons. A simple way for both candidates and citizens to signal their support for reform, around four separate possible pledges:
1. No $$ from lobbyists and Pacs
2. The abolition on earmarks
3. Public financing of elections
4. Complete transparency for Congress.
That’s layer one, the smallest step we can take. The second is to track the support for reform. We’re going to develop some wikified tools to support an army of collaborators to suss out what reforms each candidate is supporting, verify that, and then we’ll map that. The goal is to reveal how deep and strong support is for substantial change in how Congress functions.
Layer three is to fund these reforms, on the model of EMILY’s List, with a pledge form to fund and support CC supporting candidates. All three of these layers are being done in the web way, leveraging existing institutions. It’s also a Wikipedia-style approach. Take the problem and break it down into manageable, digestible and segmentable pieces, that people can contribute to on their own time.
Concluding: These are first steps, they are meant to be complementary to existing work, not competitive. Next steps: build the CC board in a non-partisan, cross-partisan way.
He ends with a quote from Reagan, who warned in 1965 that democracies often fall apart when the masses of voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury, thus they always vote for the candidate who promises them the most goodies. Lessig says, Reagan got it half right. But it’s not the masses who are plundering the public treasury, but the top 1% who are.
The challenge is whether we can get the public focused on this problem. Process revolutions have succeeded in the past (cites Watergate, the Progressive Era, and the Founding.)
Every one of us knows an alcoholic, Lessig argues. They all have problems with their job, or family. But they will never solve them unless they solve their alcoholism first. The problem of money and trust in government is like that–we have to fix our dependence on money in order to solve all our other problems. All the passion for Change today has to be directed at the one institution that needs it most: Congress.
Q&A: How do you balance public financing with free speech?
I don’t think the solution is to reduce speech. We need more. Lobbyists are spending $18 billion to influence Congress. The reforms Lessig supports, by Public Campaign or Just $6, don’t restrict anyone’s speech. They free people from their dependence on private money.
Q: About junk science. What’s the difference between a drug company funding a study and a foundation sponsoring your talk?
As an academic, Lessig has always disclosed who is compensating him. And when that happens, he doesn’t talk publicly about the topic. As for this talk, if Sunlight had invited him to talk in DC and told him “Here are the six things you have to say,” it would be obvious why he wouldn’t do that.
Q: What plans do you have for putting boots on the ground?
That’s the real test. Cites the Free Culture Movement as an example. First step is to give people real ways to engage, thru the web. Getting people to help track down who is being more transparent. Or getting people to monitor their own Congress Member and get them from saying they like the idea of public financing to actually taking a pledge.
Q: From Matt Stoller, who discloses that he’s done some consulting for the Sunlight Foundation. The hardest nut to crack is national security policy. Is it legitimate how secretive that is? What will you do when this movement bangs up into that wall? If everything else is transparent, then a lot of important decisions will be pushed into the national security arena.
I don’t know. I do know that if earmarks were banned, that would remove some of the pressure for special deals, in the first place. I don’t know how we’ll deal with transparency in secret expenditures. I think there’s a lot for me to learn, Lessig admits.
Q: Just a citizen, not a blogger, inspired by Lessig but who says that he’ll give any candidate $500 who signs onto the CC planks. Q: From Shaun Dakin, of the National Political Do-Not-Call Registry. He asks about gerrymandering and how most seats are not competitive. Q: From Andrew Lee, of Fantasy Congress. You are going to need people to join CC. But what if they join just to get $$ to their favored candidates? And how do you deal with candidates who support PACs because they help them get votes? Same with earmarks? Q: I went to run for Mayor of White Plains. The incumbent went out and in one night raised $40K from developers. And I said, forget it. I don’t wear buttons, but I would wear one saying I’m a “Change Congress” voter. Could you make a database saying who the voters are that will vote against candidates who are taking PAC money.
Lessig has the same concern. When he was considering running, he was looking at an extraordinarily safe seat, where the prior occupants have only left upon dying. Why do we structure our democracy this way, he asks. In his view, CC could eventually deal with a rolling set of problems. Public Campaign is actually extremely close to getting enough reps thru to pass a real public financing bill. Same with the earmarks fight. If we get thousands of people engaged, they’ll have an appetite for more reforms.
This is not all or nothing. You get to pick which of these four planks that you want to stand for. We found with Creative Commons that once you got people into the space, people within the movement got into an argument about how restrictive you should be. As for PACs or earmarks, it’s mainly an educational problem. So that more people seem them as dangerous rather than beneficial. Alcohol isn’t inherently bad, he argues, but to some people it’s incredibly destructive. We need better decision-making processes for directing local funding, than Congressmen deciding based on how it can help their fundraising.
The citizen pledge on the site will do that….Congress members are extraordinarily sensitive to even tiny threats. So we can leverage our passion in many effective ways.