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Lawrence Lessig Answers Your Questions About His Mayday PAC (Video)
We've mentioned this interesting PAC more than once, including when Steve Wozniak endorsed it. The original Mayday PAC goal was to raise $1 million. Now Larry is working on a second -- and more ambitious -- goal: To raise $5 million by July 4. We called for your questions on June 23, and got a bunch of them. This time, instead of asking via email, we used Google Hangout to ask via video.
Here's a quote from the Mayday website:'We are a crowdfunded Super PAC to end all Super PACs. Ironic? Yes. Embrace the irony. We’re kickstarting a Super PAC big enough to make it possible to win a Congress committed to fundamental reform by 2016. We set fundraising goals and then crowdfund those goals." Check the Mayday About page and you'll see that a whole bunch of Internet and coding luminaries are on board. You may also notice that they span the political spectrum; this is totally not a partisan effort. | Another quote from the website: "Wealthy funders are holding our democracy hostage. We want to pay the ransom and get it back." Is this an achievable goal? We'll never know if we don't try. | This is Part 1 of a 2-part video. (Alternate Video Link) Update: 07/02 23:42 GMT by T : Here's a link to part 2 of the video, too.
What difference does any of these efforts make if the 9-robe court thinks corporate donations and an individual's right to free speech are essentially exactly the same?
What process defeats an over-arching fail condition like that?
Would be to put it all in youtube videos, right?
WRONG.
Sure, videos have their purpose but just give me a damned transcript. I can read a transcript in much less time than it takes to watch some old guy babble, and I can search the text of it as well.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Come on, guys. Post the damn transcript instead of a stupid video.
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
The transcript for this video was a little late, but it's up now.
who said anything about revoking the First Amendment? This is not an issue of freedom of religion, speech, assembly or petition.
We are talking of corruption, of money controlling our lawmakers and executive branch. We are talking of cutting out control by large corporations who have circumvented the democratic process.
Why is it ironic? The whole point here is that money has undue influence in politics, so in order to effect political change (including the reduction of that influence!) you need money. It's trying to beat the system with the tools that are empowered by that system.
this issue has nothing to do with who is president, nor can any president solve the problem. remember Douglas Adam's words, the purpose of a president is not to wield power but merely to distract attention from those who do.
That is not particularly useful, though. The Hide/Show transcript button displays the transcript in real-time, with the video
No it doesn't. It displays this:
Tim: Larry, one of our readers has asked: What do you think if you reach all the goals that you have right now for the Mayday PAC, what will prevent lawmakers from finding other loopholes in laws that do something that’s similar but not quite the same as campaign contributions. We’ve seen it with FISA and DMCA that people can’t necessarily get some sort of legislative advantage—they’ll try it again and try it again the next year. So if you get rid of all corporate money in government, do you think that’s the only avenue for undue influence? What is the answer to someone who says that this isn’t enough to really remove that sort of influence in government?
Larry: So there is an idea good enough for government work that I think we need to embrace and understand. It is a standard way below the standard of typical technologists. It is a standard that’s hard for, I think, technologists to accept—but here’s the idea: If we change the way elections are funded, we will give Congress a chance to actually think of something other than what the big funders care about, when they make a decision. Now they could still make the wrong decision—they could still make a stupid decision. They can still make a completely biased or ill-informed decision. There is no guarantee that this creates good government. But what it does do is give them the freedom, ‘the freedom to lead’, as Buddy Roemer used to say. Because they are no longer focused on what this tiny tiny fraction of the 1% care about. So nothing we are offering is about perfection. We are offering the first necessary step. To get us out of the pathology that we are in right now.
Tim: Okay. So another critical and this one is a slightly different type of critical questions that a lot of our readers have, and I think this is also widespread, is they object to the idea of regulating the money that can be given to a political campaign, and they say that that is equivalent to speech; one reader asks, and I am going to say that this is somewhat facetiously, that aren’t you in that way, also calling for a prohibition of documentaries of the political bench, or books written by politicians who are in favor of a particular candidate? Distinguish the way money per se as a campaign contribution in that form is different from other forms of material support, and why it is that it is okay to limit contributions to a certain dollar amount for a person or group as opposed to other ways that people influence political campaigns themselves.
Larry: Great question. So the Mayday PAC is aiming at changing the way elections are funded. And the proposals that we pointed to don’t necessarily do anything directly about limiting people’s capacity to spend their money to speak.
Tim: But then we already have such restrictions anyhow with campaign contribution limits.
Larry: Right. But we are not focused on restrictions—we are focused on increasing the range of people who participate in the funding of elections. So there are two basic models that we’ve got: One is the voucher program—you can see it at reform.to—a voucher proposal, where every voter is given a voucher that they use to fund small dollar elections. The other is matching grant where you give a small contribution—it’s matched up to 9:1—that’s John Sarbanes’ proposal. Those two proposals don’t restrict anybody’s ability to contribute anything. Or don’t restrict people’s ability to spend their money speaking at all. All this is doing is making it, so candidates don’t spend all of their time literally 30% to 70% of their time, focused on the tiniest fraction of the 1%. So there are lots of people out there who are talking about much more r
I don't see how their $5 million is even a drop in the bucket compared to the couple billion the big money donors will bring to field in the election. We can't fight them with money.
People make me pro-nuclear.
It would be like turkeys voting for Thanksgiving.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
nonsense, you invent a straw man "Changing the situatio requires rewriting the first amendment"
no, it doesn't.
a corporation can be stripped of any and all rights, even to exist as legal entity, just for example, and individual liberty remains.
The only way to stop Koch brothers and various BribeLaunderingPacs from throwng hundreds of millions of dollars at elections is for it to cease to be cost-effective to do so. The first time money doesn't make a difference, it will no longer be an issue. Free flow of information is a significant step.
300 million "average" people each donating as much as they possibly can afford, cannot even hope to match the BribePac power of a single Walton or Koch.
It is 100% fruitless to attempt to fight them on this arena, the only thing we can hope to do is defeat them with unlimited free press (via the internet)... which is a huge longshot, but at least it isn't mathematically impossible,
Not really. If you want to force someone to lay down their weapon, you'll have to use weapon yourself. If the one that they use happens to be the most efficient in the circumstances, then you'd do well to pick the same. It's not really ironic, it's just the way the world works.
It was during the Articles of Confederation period...
Really? You mean there were no slaves and women could vote?
From what I've heard, the best times were during the revolutionary war, when the races were freely intersexing and the saloons, I mean pubs, served anyone with the cash any day, any hour, and working hours were rather... relaxed.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Exactly, and ChrisMaple's logic is flawed. Just because he thinks the 16th and 17th amendemnts are 'horrible' is logically unrelated to the possible character of a convention. Congress has a very limited power to propose individual amendments. A convention would be much more far-ranging since it would be much more capable of proposing sweeping changes.
Honestly, I don't think such a convention would NECESSARILY be problematic, but there's no reason to assume it would be any more beholden to the will of the people than the existing ludicrous clown-filled House of Representatives. Presumably its finite lifetime and the ad-hoc nature of its constitution would make it quite amenable to corruption.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson