A Grassroots Movement: Lessig's 'Change Congress'

Despite the huge list of ‘blogs’ pending the completion of my thesis, this one simply cannot wait. In an attempt to record a Virilo-esque history of the moment, I produced this transcript of the video:

Check out the video here

There’s been a lot of talk this political season about the idea of change. What exactly ‘change’ means is, of course, not clear, but what is clear is an agreement about where change comes from:

Barack Obama: “Change does not happen from the top down in America - or anywhere else - it happens from the bottom up.

Hillary Clinton: “It’s going to take a grassroots movement”

A grassroots movement: but as I look around in this political season I want to know where is this grassroots movement [in] the idea of simply electing a president. For a president cannot change Washington alone. He or she needs to be supported by others; others who believe in his or her values. They will make change happen. They are what’s necessary to make this change real.

So what are these values? In my view the most exciting part of the debate around change is the idea of changing how Washington works. Changing the influence of money in Washington. Not an influence that comes through bribes, but an influence that is produced by the economy of influence, that money now has in Washington, which skews public policy in extraordinarily important areas. For example, against the recommendation of the vast majority of nutritionists, the United States Government’s Food Nutrition Board now recommends that your kids get 25% of their calories from sugars, a change that occurred when the sugar industry happened to get just one more vote on that board. Or think of the story told in this fantastic film [http://www.maxedoutmovie.com/], about changes in bankruptcy laws that have occurred in the last eight years, making it easier for corporations to take advantage of bankruptcy, but almost impossible for lower, middle-class individuals to take advantage of bankruptcy, a change supported by major credit card companies pushing that idea through campaign contributions. Or think about the tragic delay of the United Sates taking responsibility for its contribution to global warming because of the millions spent in producing junk science, which complemented the political contributions by oil companies to support the idea that no change to stop global warming was necessary. The list here is endless, but there’s no need for me to repeat it because this is the one thing you know about how Washington works. You know about this corruption in Washington. A corruption that doesn’t come from evil people. Corruption comes from good people working in a bad system.

Now in my view ‘change’ – the change that progressives should be pushing for – is to change that system, to change that ethic, to change the power of money in Washington. Not because this is, in some sense, the most important problem, but because it is the first problem that has to be solved if we’re going to address these more fundamental problems later. Just as an alcoholic might be loosing his family, his job, and his liver, each alone, extraordinarily important, he won’t solve any of those problems until he solves his alcoholism first. We need to recognise that the power of money in Washington is our own alcoholism, that must be solved before these other – more important – problems ever get solved in the correct way.

So how could that ‘change’ happen? In my view this will take a coalition - a bipartisan coalition - of Members of Congress who pledge to three ideas.

1.That they will individually not take any money from lobbyists or PACs
2.That they will vote to ban earmarks in the congressional appropriations process
3.That they will support public financing of campaigns

People who take the pledge to these three ideas become part of the ‘Change Congress’ movement, and over a number of election cycles we can imagine the number of supporters to this ‘Change Congress’ movement growing dramatically. And as the numbers grow, it makes it possible to make real change in how congress works by making that change real in the political process.

So this is the first thing I want to announce in this video today: the launching of this ‘Change Congress’ movement, through the beginning of an exploratory committee that will be housed at this place on the Internet [http:change-congress.org] that will begin to gather together supporters and ideas for how this movement might be implemented.

Now I announced the basic idea for this ‘Change Congress’ movement in a speech I gave, billed as my last ‘Free Culture’ lecture at Stanford, and after that lecture someone came up to me and said “why don’t you do something about it? If it’s so important, why don’t you do something to bring it about?” Now that’s a totally fair question for a person who spends most of his life in the Ivory Tower. If indeed, this is important as I think it is, what can I do? Many others have said there is one thing I can do, they have been pushing me to consider taking the step to enter Congress myself. To run for an open seat that has just appeared in the district that I like in, the California 12th. There is a movement on the Internet to draft me to this position in Congress, a place on Facebook more than 2,000 people have joined to urge me to consider this step. So with lots of fear and uncertainty, the second announcement I making today is that indeed, I am considering this step, to launch a project to become a member of Congress, and by about March 1st I will make that decision, I will decide whether this is the best way to advance this movement to ‘Change Congress’.

But the one thing I want people who support this idea to recognise, is that this will be an extraordinarily difficult race, and not just because the message here is so insanely difficult to communicate to ordinary people in their ordinary lives, but also because the no.1 person running for this position right now – a woman named Jackie Speier – was an extraordinarily good State Senator. For thirty years she has lived in public service, indeed, so powerful has her service been, that a train has been named after her: the Jackie Speier Express. So nothing in this campaign would be a criticism of that extraordinary service, by that extraordinary public servant, but there is an important difference between Jackie Speier and me. This is a difference in the ethic, about how she runs her campaigns, for she takes money from the interests she regulates. As the chair of the Senate Insurance Committee she accepted over $250,000 in contributions from Insurance companies. It’s exactly that kind of behaviour that I think is wrong, and I would push for an ethic – an ethic that I think progressives everywhere should support, that would oppose that kind of influence. So maybe it is right that this campaign get launched by challenging precisely this kind of professional politician: not someone who is evil, not someone who is corrupt in the traditional sense of that word, but instead someone who is good, indeed someone who was great, within that old system of politics.

But change - the change we should be fighting for - is a change in that old system of politics. It is a commitment to this idea of a different ethic of politics. So if I decide to take this plunge – to run for Congress in this cycle - then I would commit:

1.to take this pledge – the ‘Change Congress’ pledge;
2.I would commit to use every effort I’ve got to build this national movement to change Congress, and;
3.I would offer something that not many politicians would offer – a guarantee: that if in two terms, the people in my district believe I have failed in this effort to change Congress then I would resign my position.

So if I run for Congress, those would be my 3 commitments. But I will only be able to run for Congress if you show your support right now. I need to see your support right now to understand that there is enough support for this idea, to make this campaign worth it: for it is very rare to have the chance to live in times, where there’s the opportunity for fundamental change. This is one of those times. We need to fix Washington now, before we can fix anything else that Washington’s involved with.