So Larry Lessig and Joe Trippi walk into the National Press Club. That's not a set up to a joke, but rather what happened at today's Change Congress launch. (You'll have to forgive me. I just got back from a bowling party and am all keyed up from wheat beer and curly fries.) Lessig laid out the three alliterative ideas driving his nascent movement -- truth, trust and Title VII.
Truth, said Lessig, is what gets slaughtered in Washington by the tremendous influence of the lobbying class. Copyright gets extended again and again thanks to the giant DC footprint of Disney et al. The federal government has perversely classified sugar as a valuable part of the American diet because of the power of the sugar lobby.
Trust is the coin of the realm in a functioning democracy, but there's little of it in DC today. Lessig mentioned "coin-operated experts" who have created a sense in Congress that any academic or other expert who heads to the Hill has to be marshaling his or her expertise in support of some benefactor's agenda. More often the actual problem, said Lessig, isn't that they're actual on someone's payroll, it's that the perception exists that that's the case.
Title VII -- I may have missed some of the nuances on this point, but the gist was this: the political establishment resisted Al Gore's effort to create add another section to the '96 Telecom Act that would have pulled together sections elsewhere in the code that governed the Internet. Why? Because any weakening of their regulatory power over industry would make it harder to raise money from them.
"Just because there is no personal corruption does not mean that this institution is independent," said Lessig (though that may be slightly paraphrased). The influence of industry determines how ideas flow through Congress -- creating a system in which electeds can be "personally honest and professionally corrupt."
Lessig made a play to sell the Change Congress idea to the right by suggesting that public financing of elections would shrink government. Let me break that down for you, because the connection wasn't so obvious to me at first. The idea is that what's driving big government is that electeds need to regulate interests so that they have the leverage over them to extract money come election time. Public financing = less need for special interest money = fewer people employed to do oversight = smaller government.
While Change Congress is still getting off the ground, Lessig offered some concrete ideas for how the movement gets started. The first is creating a mapping mashup that tracks how electeds embrace the the work of existing reform groups, displayed using some new techniques for tracking and display. Then there's a widget tool very similar to the one that powers Creative Commons, one that creates a badge and code that a candidate can add to their website to show the reforms they've committed to. Lastly, Change Congress aims to fund reformist candidates in the same way that EMILY's List funds the candidacies of pro-choice women.
UPDATE: Consider this your quick guide to the Change Congress launch, but check out TechPresident for Micah Sifry's really comprehensive notes on what went down.
