In America 2% of the people control the other 98%. Our democracy no longer represents the people according to Lawrence Lessig, who is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, and founder of Rootstrikers, a network of activists leading the fight against government corruption. He has authored numerous books, including Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Our Congress—and a Plan to Stop it. Lester Lawrence Lessig III is an American academic, attorney, and political activist. Lessig takes a clear-eyed look at what this crisis is—a crisis of equality—and how we arrived at it—how fundamentally good people, with good intentions, have allowed our democracy to be co-opted by outside interests, and deny citizens the basic equality of a representative democracy. There is a corruption at the heart of American politics, caused by the dependence of Congressional candidates on funding from the tiniest percentage of citizens. That's the argument at the core of this blistering talk by legal scholar Lawrence Lessig. His big idea isn't to eliminate money from politics altogether. Instead, he wants a system where money is given to voters, like a tax rebate - $50, $100 say, right. He gave a talk at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. And he pronounced a plea to members of Congress that "wasn’t exactly diplomatic:" “End the humiliation that is your life, the embarrassment that is our representative democracy.” Lessig is a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark, and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications. In 2001, he founded Creative Commons, a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon and to share legally. Prior to his most recent appointment at Harvard, he was a professor of law at Stanford Law School, where he founded the Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago. He is a former board member of the Free Software Foundation and Software Freedom Law Center; the Washington, D.C. lobbying groups Public Knowledge and Free Press; and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. As a political activist, Lessig has called for state-based activism to promote substantive reform of government with a Second Constitutional Convention. In May 2014, he launched a crowd-funded political action committee which he termed Mayday PAC with the purpose of electing candidates to Congress who would pass campaign finance reform. Lessig is also the co-founder of Rootstrikers, and is on the boards of MapLight and Represent.Us. He serves on the advisory boards of the Democracy Café and the Sunlight Foundation. |
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