Big companies helped fund a secretive Alabama GOP nonprofit, report finds 13MAR14

MORE proof of the shadow government as described in +Mike Lofgren's +Essay: Anatomy of the Deep State http://bucknacktssordidtawdryblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/essay-anatomy-of-deep-state-21feb14.html

• By Niraj Chokshi

• March 13 at 8:30 am

FedEx donated $10,000 to the group, according to a leaked tax filing. (Charlie Riedel/AP)

A secretive Alabama Republican nonprofit group received $100,000 in 2012 from corporate, trade and other political organizations, according to a new report.
Sixteen organizations donated $5,000 to $15,000 each to the Alabama House Republican Conference, a social welfare nonprofit organization. (Another donated $2,500.) Such nonprofit groups — also known by the 501(c)(4) tax code under which they’re organized — played a starring role in the scandal last year in which the Internal Revenue Service admitted to targeting groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their names for inspections.
The list of companies that donated to the group, reportedly an arm of the Alabama House Republican Caucus, includes FedEx, Eli Lilly, Alabama Power Co., Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama, and Pfizer, according to tax documents obtained by the Center for Public integrity. The documents came to light because of an apparent mistake:

“[W]hen the Center for Public Integrity asked Rachel Adams, the communications director for Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard, for a copy of the group’s most recent tax form, she provided a version that is typically only delivered to the Internal Revenue Service and includes contributor names and contribution amounts,” the organization reported.
The $100,000 donated by 17 large donors, listed below, accounts for roughly half of the $204,000 total haul for 2012. A similar Democratic group raised just $2,400 that year, according to the Center for Public Integrity.

Name	Location	Amount
Alabama Wholesale Beer Association PAC	Montgomery, Ala.	$15,000
FedEx Corp. PAC	Memphis, Tenn.	$10,000
Eli Lilly & Co. PAC	Indianapolis, Ind.	$7,500
Alabama Education Association	Montgomery, Ala.	$5,000
Alabama Power Co.	Birmingham, Ala.	$5,000
Alabama Retail Association	Montgomery, Ala.	$5,000
Alfa Mutual Insurance Co.	Montgomery, Ala.	$5,000
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama	Birmingham, Ala.	$5,000
FGA PAC	Montgomery, Ala.	$5,000
Franklin PAC	Montgomery, Ala.	$5,000
Future PAC	Montgomery, Ala.	$5,000
JM Family Enterprises Inc.	Deerfield Beach, Fla.	$5,000
Manufacture Alabama	Montgomery, Ala.	$5,000
Medical Association of the State of Alabama	Montgomery, Ala.	$5,000
Steve Windom LLC	Montgomery, Ala.	$5,000
Trial Trust	Montgomery, Ala.	$5,000
Pfizer Inc.	New York, N.Y.	$2,500

Niraj Chokshi reports for GovBeat, The Post's state and local policy blog. Before that he had covered economic, budget, tax and transportation policy for National Journal, blogged at The Atlantic and reported on the business of the nation's largest law firms in California for The Recorder. Get GovBeat news in your inbox. Sign up for our twice-weekly newsletter.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/03/13/big-companies-helped-fund-a-secretive-alabama-gop-nonprofit-report-finds/?wpisrc=nl_pmpol 

CIA vs. Senate: Who Is Obama Protecting? 14MAR14

MORE on the US Senate-cia conflict raising the very important question, just who is Obama protecting? From TRNN, and more background at The Senate-CIA Blowup Threatens a Constitutional Crisis & Sen. Feinstein Accuses CIA of Searching Congressional Computers 11MAR14 http://bucknacktssordidtawdryblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-senate-cia-blowup-threatens.html
and Sen. Feinstein: The CIA Scandal Began Because the Agency Misled Congress About Torture & Feinstein: CIA searched Intelligence Committee computers 12&11MAR14 http://bucknacktssordidtawdryblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/sen-feinstein-cia-scandal-began-because.html

http://youtu.be/MOp9sVndn4Q

Elizabeth Goitein: President Obama is protecting senior CIA officials and himself -   March 14, 2014

Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: went to see Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore.In January, according to Dianne Feinstein, the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, that the head of the CIA, John Brennan, came to her and told her some of her staffers may have broken the law by getting access to secret documents that had been revealed to Senate investigators but, according to Brennan, shouldn't have been shown to Senate staffers, and that might be illegal. Why did he make this trip? Why did he tell Dianne Feinstein this? Because it led to Dianne Feinstein coming to the conclusion and finding out that the CIA had actually been spying on Senate computers, and had even removed records from those--and files from those computers.Now joining us to give us some background and discuss all of this and joining us now from New York is Elizabeth Goitein. She's codirector of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School.Thanks for joining us very much, Elizabeth.ELIZABETH GOITEIN, CO-DIR., LIBERTY AND NAT'L SECURITY PROGRAM, BRENNAN CENTER FOR JUSTICE: Thank you.JAY: So why the heck does Brennan go and say this to Feinstein? I mean, look at the hornets nest he let loose.GOITEIN: That's right. Well, he believes or the CIA believes that the Senate staff, the committee staff, may have committed a crime in some way, shape, or form. We don't really know the details of that, because John Brennan went to Senator Feinstein, he did not go to the American public. All we're getting is leaks, essentially, from CIA officials to reporters. But from what we can piece together, the CIA believes and it filed a crimes report with the Justice Department that Senate committee staff, while investigating the CIA's torture program, in some way it got unauthorized access to a document or a set of documents which was a draft CIA review of the very same torture program.And what's so interesting about all of this is that this draft review basically said a lot of the same things, it's been reported, as the Senate's own review, namely, the brutality of these so-called enhanced interrogation techniques were not justified by any security benefit. The CIA does not like the fact that Senate staffers obtained these draft reports, and the CIA believes that this was unauthorized.There's a very different story coming out of the Senate Intelligence Committee, though.JAY: Yeah. Dianne Feinstein, in her statement on March 11, essentially said this is actually all meant just to intimidate the Senate committee, never--and she also went on to say that much of it, of what the CIA has done is likely to be illegal. Here's a few quotes from her speech.~~~SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN, CHAIR, SENATE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE: As I have detailed, the CIA has previously withheld and destroyed information about its Detention and Interrogation Program, including its decision in 2005 to destroy interrogation videotapes over the objections of the Bush White House and the Director of National Intelligence. . . . My letter also laid out my concern about the legal and constitutional implications of the CIA's actions. Based on what Director Brennan has informed us, I have grave concerns that the CIA's search may well have violated the separation of powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution, including the Speech and Debate clause. It may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities or any other government function. . . . Besides the constitutional implications, the CIA's search may also have violated the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.~~~JAY: So she's straightforwardly accusing the CIA and the leadership, which means John Brennan, of breaking the law in what they've done in terms of trying to prevent the Senate from talking about, perhaps releasing this 6,300-page report the Senate has produced detailing the activities of the CIA's torture program. But many people think that that 6,300 pages also contains information that would also raise the issue of legal liability of various people in the CIA, and that would also, again, include John Brennan.GOITEIN: Right. Well, first things first. Senator Feinstein denied that her staff had in some way broken into the CIA's computer system or otherwise gotten unauthorized access to this draft CIA review. She says that the CIA actually provided these documents to the Senate staff. They may have done so inadvertently, but they did that. And so their access was in fact authorized.But in investigating how the staff actually got these documents, the CIA was monitoring or searching the staff's computer network, a dedicated computer network for the staff. And that's where Senator Feinstein is saying that the CIA overstepped, constitutionally overstepped, violated the separation of powers by secretly spying on Senate investigators. And if her version of events is correct, she's absolutely right. I mean, that would be a crisis of constitutional proportions if that's really what the executive branch did. And, as you say, all of this kerfuffle is over a document that potentially reveals very serious, potentially criminal wrongdoing by the CIA. So you can see why the stakes are so high.JAY: And, again, John Brennan was part of this when he was in the CIA in the early 2000s.Now, this document, the 6,300 pages, if it went public, a lot of this would become clear. It's been suggested that President Obama has not declassified this document, because even though he claims or says he's in support of declassifying it, he seems to neglect the fact that he's the one that could do it. Of course, the Senate could do it, too, but it's a far more complicated process.GOITEIN: That's exactly right. I mean, the president without question has the ability to declassify the report in a minute. All he would have to do is sign a piece of paper, essentially. He could declassify the report.At that point, it would become very hard for the Senate Intelligence Committee to claim some kind of reason to continue to keep the report non-public. That would sort of remove any possible excuse for the committee to keep the report secret.But right now--but the president has not done that. Right now the Senate Intelligence Committee's rules allow it to declassify the document, but the president, the executive branch, does not recognize the committee's authority to do that. So that would be picking a huge fight if the committee were to do that. And, also, there are members of the committee who don't want this report to be public. And so it's not clear that there would even be the votes on the committee to get the report out there.JAY: Does it have to be unanimous?GOITEIN: That's a good question. I don't think so, but I could be wrong.JAY: Yeah, we're checking into that rule. But someone who was involved in it told us it has to be unanimous, so it makes it even more difficult.GOITEIN: Interesting. Yeah.JAY: We may be wrong. We're checking that.But let's go back to Feinstein in all of this. You know, people on the Hill and people in the know have practically considered Dianne Feinstein a mole of the CIA on the Hill because she's been so pro-CIA, protecting them on all the intelligence gathering and various things. Now she's--some of the language she's using couldn't be stronger. Why is she finally standing up to the CIA this way?GOITEIN: Well, the only thing that she defends more strongly than the prerogatives of the intelligence community are the institutional prerogatives of the Intelligence Committee. And I believe that she takes it quite personally--I think she may have even said that--when her committee is thwarted or lied to or misled or in other ways messed with by the agencies that the committee is supposed to be overseeing. And there are at least two examples of that that I think are relevant here. First, she mentioned in her speech that when the committee was briefed about the interrogation techniques back in 2006, they were not given the full story, and that later, when they found out, in 2007, that there was more to these interrogation techniques than they had originally been informed about, I think that kind of got her started. And then I think all of this has culminated with the alleged spying/monitoring/searching of the staff's dedicated computer networks by the CIA. I think that is a level of interference with the committee's activities that she is not willing to tolerate.JAY: But does it seem to you that she would have sat on all of this and let the report not be declassified if Brennan hadn't gone to her and taken up a stick and poked her in the eye?GOITEIN: Well, I'm not sure that that is the case. I think that she certainly wouldn't have gone to the floor and, you know, made this entire thing public. I think the issue of whether or not actually the report itself becomes public, it's really been a game of hot potato between the executive branch and the committee because it is such a loaded document. And the responsibility involved in actually getting this to the American public is something that, frankly, both the committee and the administration seem to be trying to take off the table.JAY: Well, I take your point that perhaps Senator Feinstein, as much as she does not want to weaken the CIA, even less does she want to weaken the Senate. And this goes to the core of whether the Senate is going to have the power to have some civilian oversight of the CIA. But it seems to me President Obama is kind of so far avoiding being the target in all this. But if President Obama--and many people think he's been trying to protect John Brennan and perhaps other people in the CIA--but don't you think--at least I think, from what I'm learning of this, all of this, that there's someone else that President Obama is trying to defend, and it's more important to defend this person than to defend the principle of civilian oversight. And that person is President Obama, because if this thing goes public and people realize the extent of the illegality, who the heck has been protecting them and didn't--and who knew this, meaning the president, didn't turn this over to Holder, didn't prosecute, the same way he wouldn't prosecute Bush and Cheney, that this makes his whole lack of prosecution become greatly egregious, and he's protecting himself more than anyone, including protecting, as I say, the principle of civilian oversight.GOITEIN: I would agree that he's protecting himself, but for a slightly different reason. I think if this report were to be made public, there would be real issues of legal jeopardy for CIA officials, potentially, anyway, and, you know, far beyond the potential, you know, criminality that has come up before and the Justice Department has decided not to investigate. This report could sort of blow the lid on that. And to the extent that there might be legal jeopardy for CIA officials, the CIA is going to revolt, I think, if that is made public. And if President Obama's protecting himself because a revolt by the intelligence community is not something he wants on his hands, you can hardly blame him for that.JAY: Yeah. If anyone watched Scandal and--what is it? B13? The ones that are going to spy on and discipline the president. I'm not sure if I have the name of the agency right. That may be somewhat exaggerated, but one can imagine what Obama might be looking at if the whole intelligence community--. Yeah.GOITEIN: Yeah. I mean, the intelligence community is sort of the 800-pound gorilla in the room. It's--to mix my metaphors, it's sort of the tail that wags the dog of the government, of national security policy, and there's no president that wants to stand up to the intelligence community. It's too powerful, it's too--.JAY: Yeah. I take your point and I agree with you, but I would just add: knowing what's in that report--and more or less, President Obama has to have known all of this--he still appoints John Brennan to be head of the CIA. So, you know, there's political fallout here as well.GOITEIN: He's involved. He's trying to say he's not involved. He even said the other day, well, I'm not going to wade into this. He's in it. He's very much in it. It's his CIA. And the reason why--apparently, the reason why the CIA apparently believes that the staffers were not supposed to have this document is because it was subject to executive privilege. Executive privilege is a presidential privilege. It has to be asserted by the president. So this is all in his wheelhouse, whether he likes it or not.JAY: And when Feinstein says the CIA's trying to intimidate us, perhaps that's what John Brennan's visit was all about, to try to keep a lid on all this. And I guess one--it's very interesting. Knowing all of this, Feinstein does blow the lid off it.GOITEIN: Right. I mean, she thinks it's time for a confrontation. This has come to a head, and it has come to a head in a very spectacular and sensational way, there's no question.JAY: Alright. Thanks very much for joining us, Elizabeth.GOITEIN: Thank you.JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
Elizabeth (Liza) Goitein co-directs the Brennan Center for Justice's Liberty and National Security Program, which seeks to advance effective national security policies that respect constitutional values and the rule of law. Before joining the Brennan Center, Liza served as counsel to Senator Russell Feingold, Chairman of the Constitution Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and as a trial attorney in the Federal Programs Branch of the Civil Division of the Department of Justice. Her writing has been featured in major newspapers including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as prominent outlets such as Roll Call, the National Law Journal, Salon, POLITICO, Time, and the Huffington Post. She has appeared on national television and radio shows including the The Rachel Maddow Show, The Today Show, All In with Chris Hayes, Up with Steve Kornacki, PBS NewsHour, and National Public Radio's Morning Edition and On The Media. Liza graduated from Yale Law School and clerked for the Hon. Michael Daly Hawkins on the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

End

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=11598 

 

The founding fathers would approve of this remix &Lawrence Lessig: We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim A TED TALK FEB 2013 13MAR14

IT is disgusting, frightening and but not surprising only 132 people gave 60% of the superpac donations nationwide in the last election cycle. Rootstrikers lays out the problem and offers a solution, but that involves people becoming involved in the campaign, and unfortunately many Americans, too many Americans just like to bitch but not do anything to fix problems......
Check out the remix and the full Ted Talk and the essay about the Deep State below.....

 

The founding fathers would approve of this remix

The Action

Just over a year ago, Lawrence Lessig gave a TED talk outlining exactly how money corrupts our politics. He then threw down the challenge for us to join him in this fight, and part of that challenge was to take his TED talk and remix it. (You know, like the kids do.)
Here’s one of our favorites, courtesy of Jordan Harrison. In less than four minutes, Harrison takes the most salient excerpts from Lessig’s presentation and remixes them with powerful results.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/#!/project/remix
Rootstrikers TED Talk remix from Jordan Harrison on Vimeo.
Lessig's words--combined with Harrison's creativity--are exactly what we need every single American to hear. Share this video with your friends and family and we can move one step closer to fixing this broken system.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/#!/project/remix

Essay: Anatomy of the Deep State 21FEB14 

http://bucknacktssordidtawdryblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/essay-anatomy-of-deep-state-21feb14.html 

Lawrence Lessig: We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim A TED TALK FEB 2013

A TED talk on the damage the citizens united decision has done to our Republic. And then think about what you should be doing to fix it, and if the effort is worth it to you or if you are one of those apathetic bitchers that runs your mouth. DEMOCRACY IS NOT A SPECTATOR SPORT.

http://youtu.be/mw2z9lV3W1g
itpc://www.ted.com/download/podcast/type/talks/slug/LarryLessig_2013/ext/mp4/quality/regular/sf_format/xml

Once upon a time, there was a place called Lesterland. Now Lesterland looks a lot like the United States. Like the United States, it has about 311 million people, and of that 311 million people, it turns out 144,000 are called Lester. If Matt's in the audience, I just borrowed that, I'll return it in a second, this character from your series. So 144,000 are called Lester, which means about .05 percent is named Lester. Now, Lesters in Lesterland have this extraordinary power. There are two elections every election cycle in Lesterland.One is called the general election. The other is called the Lester election. And in the general election, it's the citizens who get to vote, but in the Lester election, it's the Lesters who get to vote. And here's the trick. In order to run in the general election, you must do extremely well in the Lester election. You don't necessarily have to win, but you must do extremely well.

Now, what can we say about democracy in Lesterland? What we can say, number one, as the Supreme Court said in Citizens United, that people have the ultimate influence over elected officials, because, after all, there is a general election, but only after the Lesters have had their way with the candidates who wish to run in the general election. And number two, obviously, this dependence upon the Lesters is going to produce a subtle, understated,we could say camouflaged, bending to keep the Lesters happy. Okay, so we have a democracy, no doubt, but it's dependent upon the Lesters and dependent upon the people.It has competing dependencies, we could say conflicting dependencies, depending upon who the Lesters are. Okay. That's Lesterland.

Now there are three things I want you to see now that I've described Lesterland. Number one, the United States is Lesterland. The United States is Lesterland. The United States also looks like this, also has two elections, one we called the general election, the second we should call the money election. In the general election, it's the citizens who get to vote, if you're over 18, in some states if you have an ID. In the money election, it's the funders who get to vote, the funders who get to vote, and just like in Lesterland, the trick is, to run in the general election, you must do extremely well in the money election. You don't necessarily have to win. There is Jerry Brown. But you must do extremely well. And here's the key: There are just as few relevant funders in USA-land as there are Lesters in Lesterland.

Now you say, really? Really .05 percent? Well, here are the numbers from 2010: .26 percent of America gave 200 dollars or more to any federal candidate, .05 percent gave the maximum amount to any federal candidate, .01 percent -- the one percent of the one percent -- gave 10,000 dollars or more to federal candidates, and in this election cycle, my favorite statistic is .000042 percent — for those of you doing the numbers, you know that's 132 Americans — gave 60 percent of the Super PAC money spent in the cycle we have just seen ending. So I'm just a lawyer, I look at this range of numbers, and I say it's fair for me to say it's .05 percent who are our relevant funders in America. In this sense, the funders are our Lesters.

Now, what can we say about this democracy in USA-land? Well, as the Supreme Court said in Citizens United, we could say, of course the people have the ultimate influence over the elected officials. We have a general election, but only after the funders have had their way with the candidates who wish to run in that general election. And number two, obviously, this dependence upon the funders produces a subtle, understated, camouflaged bending to keep the funders happy. Candidates for Congress and members of Congressspend between 30 and 70 percent of their time raising money to get back to Congress or to get their party back into power, and the question we need to ask is, what does it do to them, these humans, as they spend their time behind the telephone, calling people they've never met, but calling the tiniest slice of the one percent? As anyone would, as they do this,they develop a sixth sense, a constant awareness about how what they do might affect their ability to raise money. They become, in the words of "The X-Files," shape-shifters, as they constantly adjust their views in light of what they know will help them to raise money, not on issues one to 10, but on issues 11 to 1,000. Leslie Byrne, a Democrat from Virginia,describes that when she went to Congress, she was told by a colleague, "Always lean to the green." Then to clarify, she went on, "He was not an environmentalist." (Laughter)

So here too we have a democracy, a democracy dependent upon the funders and dependent upon the people, competing dependencies, possibly conflicting dependenciesdepending upon who the funders are.

Okay, the United States is Lesterland, point number one. Here's point number two. The United States is worse than Lesterland, worse than Lesterland because you can imagine in Lesterland if we Lesters got a letter from the government that said, "Hey, you get to pick who gets to run in the general election," we would think maybe of a kind of aristocracy of Lesters. You know, there are Lesters from every part of social society. There are rich Lesters, poor Lesters, black Lesters, white Lesters, not many women Lesters, but put that to the side for one second. We have Lesters from everywhere. We could think, "What could we do to make Lesterland better?" It's at least possible the Lesters would act for the good of Lesterland. But in our land, in this land, in USA-land, there are certainly some sweet Lesters out there, many of them in this room here today, but the vast majority of Lesters act for the Lesters, because the shifting coalitions that are comprising the .05 percent are not comprising it for the public interest. It's for their private interest. In this sense, the USA is worse than Lesterland.

And finally, point number three: Whatever one wants to say about Lesterland, against the background of its history, its traditions, in our land, in USA-land, Lesterland is a corruption,a corruption. Now, by corruption I don't mean brown paper bag cash secreted among members of Congress. I don't mean Rod Blagojevich sense of corruption. I don't mean any criminal act. The corruption I'm talking about is perfectly legal. It's a corruption relative to the framers' baseline for this republic. The framers gave us what they called a republic, but by a republic they meant a representative democracy, and by a representative democracy, they meant a government, as Madison put it in Federalist 52, that would have a branch that would be dependent upon the people alone.

So here's the model of government. They have the people and the government with this exclusive dependency, but the problem here is that Congress has evolved a different dependence, no longer a dependence upon the people alone, increasingly a dependence upon the funders. Now this is a dependence too, but it's different and conflicting from a dependence upon the people alone so long as the funders are not the people. This is a corruption.

Now, there's good news and bad news about this corruption. One bit of good news is that it's bipartisan, equal-opportunity corruption. It blocks the left on a whole range of issues that we on the left really care about. It blocks the right too, as it makes principled arguments of the right increasingly impossible. So the right wants smaller government. When Al Gore was Vice President, his team had an idea for deregulating a significant portion of the telecommunications industry. The chief policy man took this idea to Capitol Hill, and as he reported back to me, the response was, "Hell no! If we deregulate these guys, how are we going to raise money from them?"

This is a system that's designed to save the status quo, including the status quo of big and invasive government. It works against the left and the right, and that, you might say, is good news.

But here's the bad news. It's a pathological, democracy-destroying corruption, because in any system where the members are dependent upon the tiniest fraction of us for their election, that means the tiniest number of us, the tiniest, tiniest number of us, can block reform. I know that should have been, like, a rock or something. I can only find cheese. I'm sorry. So there it is. Block reform.

Because there is an economy here, an economy of influence, an economy with lobbyists at the center which feeds on polarization. It feeds on dysfunction. The worse that it is for us,the better that it is for this fundraising.

Henry David Thoreau: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." This is the root.

Okay, now, every single one of you knows this. You couldn't be here if you didn't know this, yet you ignore it. You ignore it. This is an impossible problem. You focus on the possible problems, like eradicating polio from the world, or taking an image of every single street across the globe, or building the first real universal translator, or building a fusion factory in your garage. These are the manageable problems, so you ignore — (Laughter) (Applause) — so you ignore this corruption.

But we cannot ignore this corruption anymore. (Applause) We need a government that works. And not works for the left or the right, but works for the left and the right, the citizens of the left and right, because there is no sensible reform possible until we end this corruption. So I want you to take hold, to grab the issue you care the most about. Climate change is mine, but it might be financial reform or a simpler tax system or inequality. Grab that issue, sit it down in front of you, look straight in its eyes, and tell it there is no Christmas this year. There will never be a Christmas. We will never get your issue solveduntil we fix this issue first. So it's not that mine is the most important issue. It's not. Yours is the most important issue, but mine is the first issue, the issue we have to solve before we get to fix the issues you care about. No sensible reform, and we cannot afford a world, a future, with no sensible reform.

Okay. So how do we do it? Turns out, the analytics here are easy, simple. If the problem is members spending an extraordinary amount of time fundraising from the tiniest slice of America, the solution is to have them spend less time fundraising but fundraise from a wider slice of Americans, to spread it out, to spread the funder influence so that we restore the idea of dependence upon the people alone. And to do this does not require a constitutional amendment, changing the First Amendment. To do this would require a single statute, a statute establishing what we think of as small dollar funded elections, a statute of citizen-funded campaigns, and there's any number of these proposals out there: Fair Elections Now Act, the American Anti-Corruption Act, an idea in my book that I call the Grant and Franklin Project to give vouchers to people to fund elections, an idea of John Sarbanes called the Grassroots Democracy Act. Each of these would fix this corruption by spreading out the influence of funders to all of us.

The analytics are easy here. It's the politics that's hard, indeed impossibly hard, because this reform would shrink K Street, and Capitol Hill, as Congressman Jim Cooper, a Democrat from Tennessee, put it, has become a farm league for K Street, a farm league for K Street. Members and staffers and bureaucrats have an increasingly common business model in their head, a business model focused on their life after government, their life as lobbyists. Fifty percent of the Senate between 1998 and 2004 left to become lobbyists, 42 percent of the House. Those numbers have only gone up, and as United Republic calculated last April, the average increase in salary for those who they tracked was 1,452 percent. So it's fair to ask, how is it possible for them to change this? Now I get this skepticism.

I get this cynicism. I get this sense of impossibility. But I don't buy it. This is a solvable issue. If you think about the issues our parents tried to solve in the 20th century, issues like racism, or sexism, or the issue that we've been fighting in this century, homophobia, those are hard issues. You don't wake up one day no longer a racist. It takes generations to tear that intuition, that DNA, out of the soul of a people. But this is a problem of just incentives, just incentives. Change the incentives, and the behavior changes, and the states that have adopted small dollar funded systems have seen overnight a change in the practice. When Connecticut adopted this system, in the very first year, 78 percent of elected representatives gave up large contributions and took small contributions only. It's solvable,not by being a Democrat, not by being a Republican. It's solvable by being citizens, by being citizens, by being TEDizens. Because if you want to kickstart reform, look, I could kickstart reform at half the price of fixing energy policy, I could give you back a republic.

Okay. But even if you're not yet with me, even if you believe this is impossible, what the five years since I spoke at TED has taught me as I've spoken about this issue again and again is, even if you think it's impossible, that is irrelevant. Irrelevant. I spoke at Dartmouth once, and a woman stood up after I spoke, I write in my book, and she said to me, "Professor, you've convinced me this is hopeless. Hopeless. There's nothing we can do." When she said that, I scrambled. I tried to think, "How do I respond to that hopelessness? What is that sense of hopelessness?" And what hit me was an image of my six-year-old son. And I imagined a doctor coming to me and saying, "Your son has terminal brain cancer, and there's nothing you can do. Nothing you can do." So would I do nothing? Would I just sit there? Accept it? Okay, nothing I can do? I'm going off to build Google Glass. Of course not. I would do everything I could, and I would do everything I could because this is what love means, that the odds are irrelevant and that you do whatever the hell you can, the odds be damned. And then I saw the obvious link, because even we liberals love this country.

(Laughter)

And so when the pundits and the politicians say that change is impossible, what this love of country says back is, "That's just irrelevant." We lose something dear, something everyone in this room loves and cherishes, if we lose this republic, and so we act with everything we can to prove these pundits wrong.

So here's my question: Do you have that love? Do you have that love? Because if you do,then what the hell are you, what are the hell are we doing?

When Ben Franklin was carried from the constitutional convention in September of 1787, he was stopped in the street by a woman who said, "Mr. Franklin, what have you wrought?"Franklin said, "A republic, madam, if you can keep it." A republic. A representative democracy. A government dependent upon the people alone. We have lost that republic. All of us have to act to get it back.

Thank you very much.

(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

http://bucknacktssordidtawdryblog.blogspot.com/2013/04/lawrence-lessig-we-people-and-republic.html 

Speakers Lawrence Lessig: Legal activist

Lawrence Lessig has already transformed intellectual-property law with his Creative Commons innovation. Now he's focused on an even bigger problem: The US' broken political system.

Why you should listen to him:

Lawyer and activist Lawrence Lessig spent a decade arguing for sensible intellectual property law, updated for the digital age. He was a founding board member of Creative Commons, an organization that builds better copyright practices through principles established first by the open-source software community.

In 2007, just after his last TED Talk, Lessig announced he was leaving the field of IP and Internet policy, and moving on to a more fundamental problem that blocks all types of sensible policy -- the corrupting influence of money in American politics.

In 2011, Lessig founded Rootstrikers, an organization dedicated to changing the influence of money in Congress. In his latest book, Republic, Lost, he shows just how far the U.S. has spun off course -- and how citizens can regain control. As The New York Times wrote about him, “Mr. Lessig’s vision is at once profoundly pessimistic -- the integrity of the nation is collapsing under the best of intentions --and deeply optimistic. Simple legislative surgery, he says, can put the nation back on the path to greatness.”

Read an excerpt of Lessig's new book, Lesterland >>

"In [Republic, Lost], Lessig ... details how money came to corrupt our government, how our broken system hurts both the Left and the Right, and what it will take to return American democracy to its rightful owners – the people."

Rolling Stone blog, October 5, 2011

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Quotes by Lawrence Lessig

• “[Conservatives] go to church, they do lots of things for free for each other. They hold potluck dinners. … They serve food to poor people. They share, they give, they give away for free. It’s the very same people leading Wall Street firms who, on Sundays, show up and share.”
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• “[Conservatives] understand: There are places for the market and places where the market should not exist, where we should be free to enjoy the fellowship of others. They recognize: Both of these things have to live together.”
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• “All of the great Disney works took works that were in the public domain and remixed them.”
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• “[The U.S. has] an economy of influence — an economy with lobbyists at the center, which feeds on polarization. It feeds on dysfunction. The worse that it is for us, the better that it is for this fundraising.”
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• “When the pundits and the politicians say that change is impossible, [we must say,] ‘That's just irrelevant.’ We lose something dear … if we lose this republic, and so we act with everything we can to prove these pundits wrong.”
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• “You don't wake up one day no longer a racist. It takes generations to tear that intuition, that DNA, out of the soul of a people.”
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