We're in the middle of a pretty important crisis in the United States.
It's a crisis around the basic corruption of our government.
The only way we're going to attack and to change that corruption
is to build these grassroots movements.
The thing that's fantastic about Occupy DC
is that Occupy DC from the very beginning
has focused on what I think is the real root problem
that has explained and made sensible the whole Occupy movement
and that is the relationship between money and politics.
Thinking about this conference and what may make a difference than others
is that we have, having some genuine left-right dialogue
about these really critical structural issues
that are all about our democracy.
We think that we really need to shift our campaign system
from large donors, special interests, to a citizen-driven, small donor system.
And that will accomplish a couple of things.
I think it will allow more people, different kinds of people,
a more diverse group of people to run and serve in public office, particularly Congress.
And I think it will create more of an atmosphere of decision-making
and policy-making that is based on the merits of whatever is being discussed,
not what money and what special interests are involving themselves in the discussion.
This is a, it should not be a partisan issue.
This really should be an American issue.
And I think that folks that find themselves on the political left, on the political right
and in the political middle can unite to talk about these issues
and to find common ground.
That's really what we need to do, because this common ground does exist.
I'm going to start by laying out how we have to think about this problem
and end by saying what I think we need to do.
So here's the problem. It is quite simple.
This institution is corrupt.
It is not corrupted around people's bad sense of corrupt.
It's not corrupted around the boy of it's sense of corrupt.
It's not corrupt in any criminal sense.
Indeed, I would speculate that there's practically no criminal activity
in what I'm talking about at all.
We're in another way of putting that.
If we eliminated every single criminal, we would not have changed this problem at all.
Here's the problem.
Congress has evolved to different dependents.
Not just dependents upon the people, but increasingly dependents upon the funders.
As members spend between 30 and 70% of their time raising money to get back to Congress
to get their party back to power they develop, as any of us would, a sixth sense,
a constant awareness about how what they do might affect their ability to raise money.
They become, in the words of the ex-files, shape shifters.
As they constantly adjust their views, not at issues 1 to 10,
but at issues 11 to 1,000 in light of what they know will raise money.
That belief arose trust in this institution of Congress.
Gallup found last year that 11% of Americans had confidence in Congress.
They then said it went up to 12%.
New York Times said it was actually 9% of Americans who had confidence in Congress.
9%.
There are certainly more percentage of people who believed in the British Crown
at the time of the revolution than who believed in this Congress today.
Since the United has made it, so the single thing in Congress we're most worried about
is that 30 days before the election some supercap will come in
and then drop a million dollars on the other side.
So what does the incumbent do in the face of that threat?
Well, we'll just reframe what he said a little bit to make it a little bit more clear,
but the incumbent does is the incumbent tries to buy super PAC insurance.
So what's super PAC insurance?
It's insurance so that when somebody comes in and drops a bottle on one side,
your insurer is committed to drop a bottle on the other side.
You're going to balance it out to make it so that the effect of the super PAC money is not decisive.
So how do you buy insurance?
Well, you all know this.
You pay your premium in advance.
You pay your premium long before you need the insurance company to come in
and make their payments in the face of the event they're trying to insure against.
And the event they're trying to insure against is somebody coming in and dropping a million dollars on the other side.
How do you pay your premium if you're a senator in advance?
Well, you talk to people who say things like,
I would like to help you, senator, but we can only support people who support us
if at least 80% of our support is required.
So long before the election, long before any money is spent,
long before any super PAC appears on the other side,
senators and representatives are deciding how to vote in light of what they need to do
in order to guarantee that the rich people on their side will step up if they're threatened.
The average salary increase for a representative leading to become a lobbyist?
1,452%.
0.26%.
One quarter of 1% of Americans give more than $200 in a congressional election.
0.05%.
Maxed out to any congressional candidate.
0.01%.
The 1% of the 1%
give more than $10,000 in any election cycle.
And 0.0000063%,
196 Americans have given 80% of the money spent by super PACs in this presidential election so far.
The question is, by whom will these campaigns be funded?
The first way to answer that question is to decide between citizens or non-citizens
who should be funded these campaigns.
Non-citizens like Chinese, French,
or whether or not corporations are persons no one has ever said they are citizens of the United States,
so should it be non-citizens who are funding elections or citizens?
And when framed like that, overwhelmingly, Americans say of course it should be citizens.
But if it's citizens, which citizens should be funded campaigns?
Some citizens or all citizens.
We have a system where the 1% per capita contribution is 10 times the per capita contribution of the 99%.
Now, you should step back from this.
It's kind of weird.
Could we run a government like this?
You know, if you think about elections in the United States,
every cycle there's at least two very different kinds of elections that happen.
One type of election is the voter election, where people go out and vote.
The second kind of election is the money election,
where people every single day decide whether they're going to send their money to candidates
so that the candidates can use that money to get people to vote.
Alright, now our constitution has been interpreted to say that in the voting election
we have to be almost precisely equal.
That if you have a district drawn so that the concentration of voting power in that district
is even 0.1% different from the concentration of voting power in the district next to it,
the constitution requires we redraw the lines to make sure that the effect of votes is exactly the same.
That's the value of equality when it comes to votes.
But when it comes to money, there is no principle of equality at all,
permitting radically different influence on the basis of your opportunity to use money to influence elections.
So these citizen-funded elections, by a small segment of our citizens,
have produced elections funded by the tiniest allies of the 1%,
which is exactly the picture that progressives gave us of elections 100 years ago.
And so when I talk about citizen-funded elections, obviously, I don't mean to talk about that.
But that leads people to the opposite extreme, where they say,
I think we all should fund elections.
And the simplest way to fund elections for all of us would be something like
federal election commissions, public funding and presidential election system,
where we just get a bunch of money from the federal government and give it out to fund elections.
Now this system, interestingly, is generally heated by Americans.
Some think it's arbitrary, the numbers are arbitrary.
Some, on the right in particular, say,
there's something wrong with my money being used to subsidize your speech.
And most people look at it and think it's kind of a loaded, bureaucratic mess
that doesn't really reflect anything fundamental or important about what democracy is or elections should be about.
So I want to say, when I'm talking about citizen-funded elections, I'm also not talking about that.
I'm not talking about the federal election commission's public funding elections.
What I'm talking about is a system where all people fund elections,
but the decisions about how to fund elections are driven from the bottom up, not the top down.
And these are the systems that Nick Nyhart was talking about in the panel before.
These are voluntary, small-dollar funding campaigns.
Systems that allow candidates to opt into a system where they take small-dollar contributions only,
and the system amplifies those small-dollar contributions.
Go talk to the NRA about this.
And we can recognize every single membership organization would look at something like a voucher program
as an extremely effective way to make it so that their members would have a more effective way to participate in the politics of their system.
Because, of course, even in a system where you can give $100, the vast majority of Americans don't have $100 to give in political campaigns.
They have $100 to pay their rent, they hope, but not necessarily to give in their political campaigns.
So the politics of a voucher program is to extend all the way across the spectrum of Americans.
The opportunity to participate in the political system in a way that politicians would care to respond to.
So where do you think they focus their attention?
But in a voucher system, they would focus their attention all the way across,
because all the way across there is a potential resource to get into their political campaign.
That's what I think we have to meet by citizen-funded elections.
A system where everyone is participating from the bottom up, only citizens are participating, but all citizens are participating.
And that's the way to get that, this idea of a democracy dependent upon the people above.
Now, is it enough?
Given the non-citizen-funded super PACs, our citizen-funded campaigns,
but obviously, we see this, not enough, super PACs have redefined the character of campaigns.
We've entered the age of the super PAC, not just happy super PACs, like they'll bear super PACs,
but super PACs that evoke more on 20 super PACs.
The corruption here is a corruption relative to what the framers of our Constitution thought they were giving us.
As Nick Nagar described it, the framers of our Constitution gave us what they call a republic.
And by a republic, they meant a representative democracy. And by a representative democracy, as Federalist 52 puts it,
they meant a democracy that would have a branch of government that would be dependent upon the people alone.
This is why I think it's so important, not the thing, that the fight we are having is a fight about citizens of the United States.
Because on January 20th, 2009, the day before Citizens United was decided.
Our democracy was already dead.
Citizens United shocked the body, but the body was already cold.
So any movement that aims to just reverse Citizens United and no more is not a movement that's going to solve the problems we face.
So while I agree we have to overturn Citizens United.
I think we should recognize that it's a much bigger fight we have.
And I would overturn Citizens United quite directly.
Not in these magic bullet words of whether money is speech or corporations or persons quite directly.
I would say Congress has the power that Citizens United says they don't have.
To limit, I don't think they should have the power to ban speech by any means.
So I would say limit independent political expenditures within 90 days of elections.
But the point is there's a period of time where we should be able to silence the noise, non-citizen noise,
and allow citizens to hear campaigns talk to citizens.
Number one, we have to guarantee, and I would do it constitutionally as we suggested in the last question before,
we have to guarantee in a constitution that elections are publicly funded and the way I do it is the way I've described.
And number two, I would guarantee that we have the power to limit independent expenditures.
And in this respect, I'm extremely proud to come and speak to the Occupy DC Group,
which passed a resolution misreported by everybody that is the only resolution I think that has been passed in the Occupy movement
that made these two elements central to what reform has to be.
I can't let this issue go dark in this presidential election.
If we go through this presidential election without this becoming the focal point of the debates,
then we will have had two election cycles where the tiniest slice of the 1% have bought the elections.
And when those two cycles have passed, most Americans will just accept this is the way democracy is.
They will accept and cap down of American democracy as guarantees that the rich combined their results is just what we have,
and there's nothing that can be done about it.
Okay, here's the final point.
I go around and speak way too much about this issue.
Way too much.
And the overwhelming response I get is a response similar to a response I got when I gave a speech at Dartmouth
and this finished woman stood up and she said,
Professor, you convinced me absolutely that it's impossible to fix this problem.
Completely impossible.
And I read about this in my book.
At that moment I had this image in my head about his brother, his eight-year-old brother.
And I thought, so my actual doctor came to me and said,
your son has two little brain cancer and there's nothing he could do that's impossible for us to deal with.
And I thought, would I do nothing?
Just accept it.
And that thought led me to a recognition about what love means and what is love.
Love is the willingness, the commitment to act in the face of impossibility because of that love.
It's the willingness to do whatever it takes regardless of the probability.
And when I had that recognition about my son, I had that recognition about this democracy.
Because we on the left love this country too.
We on the left believe in the ideals that have been spoken by our founders from throughout our time, Martin Luther King, as much as James Madison.
We love this country too.
And so when the reasonable rational person stands up and says, it's impossible,
the response of those who love is, it's irrelevant whether it's impossible.
It's irrelevant whether it's impossible.
We love this country half but one choice.
And that is to fight like hell to change the system.
And as you think about it like this, I think on this issue we need to raise a different slogan.
The slogan is, we are the hundred percent.
We are the hundred percent.
Because when you look at these numbers, you know, all the lawyer, 99.99%, that's a hundred percent.
We on this issue are the hundred percent.
We who love this country and these ideals look at the system of corruption and all of us say, it must change.
You have the capacity to make that change start.
I'm honored by our employer to take the steps to do that.
Thank you.
