Recognizing you have a problem is the first step towards recovery. Professor Lessig succinctly put the problem with our country's federal policies in an excellent and concise essay in the San Francisco Chronicle today:
There was a way Obama might have governed differently. It would have been risky, but in his first speech to the nation, he could have built on the rhetoric at the core of his campaign. On Jan. 20, 2009, Obama could have said: America has spoken. It has demanded fundamental change. I commit to work with Congress to produce it. But if we fail, or more precisely, if Congress allows the special interests that control it to block change, it will be time to remake Congress. Not by throwing out the Democrats or the Republicans, but by throwing out both. If this Congress fails to deliver change, then we will change Congress.
Had he framed his administration in these terms, the failure to implement his agenda would not be the failure of Obama to woo Republicans. It would have been what America was already primed to believe: a failure of this corrupted institution.
We can hope that Obama recognizes these missteps. But as we've seen, hope will only get us so far. What's needed now is a citizens' movement to stop the Fundraising Congress. We need to demand change, including publicly funded elections, a seven-year ban on lobbying for any former member of Congress and amendments to the Constitution to assure that reform can survive the Roberts Supreme Court.
As Democracy School leader Richard Grossman often points out, this is just more of the legalized corruption that is regularly accepted in our culture.
