It is really wonderful to be back at Lund, this is my favorite university that didn't
give me a job, but you did give me a degree, which I am very proud of, hanging on my wall
and my five-year-old came here and he was very upset that he was allowed to come back
to this lecture, but I am hopeful that I can bring everybody back, again, because if you
need me to come back, I am totally okay with coming back, that's really fine.
Okay, what I want to do is introduce an idea, and I want you to imagine that you climbed
onto some drone and left Lund and flew to a place 8,700 kilometers away, El Paso, Texas.
And then you climbed into your time machine and you went back 90 years in El Paso, Texas.
And in old El Paso, Texas, you then moved yourself to the center of the city.
And if you did that, there's a chance you would meet an extraordinary man named Lawrence
Nixon.
Now, Nixon was a physician.
He was born in the late 19th century, and he moved to El Paso in 1910.
And every two years, between 1910 and 1922, Lawrence Nixon walked down to his polling
place, paid his poll tax, and voted.
But in 1924, he tried to do the same thing.
And when he arrived at the polling place and paid his poll tax, he was told by the Democratic
Party officials, Dr. Nixon, you know you're not permitted to vote.
And Nixon said, I know I can't, but I've got to try.
Now, he couldn't because in 1923, Texas had by law enacted something called the All White
Primary, a law which said that in the Democratic primary, only whites were allowed to vote.
So the system of democracy, quote unquote, in Texas, was that there was a general election
where any citizen had the right to vote.
But in the Democratic primary, which was the dominant party in Texas, only whites could
vote.
And you had to be able to run in the general election by clearing the white primary.
So a two-stage election with a filter in the middle, which excluded a significant portion
of Texas's population, about 15% at the time, from this critical first step of electing
representatives.
With the consequence, obviously, that Texas produced a democracy responsive to whites
only.
Okay, what Texas did wasn't particularly Texan.
Instead it's a trick, a pretty well-known trick, to defeat democracy.
The Tammany Hall leader, inspiration for much of what corruption in America is, boss Tweed
used to say, quote, I don't care who does the electing as long as I get to do the nominating.
Now this conception of democracy, we could call Tweedism.
And by Tweedism, I mean any two-stage process where a qualified group, the Tweeds, get to
do the nominating, the effective nominating, and the rest of the public gets to the electing
with a filter standing in the middle.
Once you see democracy like this, you can see Tweedism everywhere.
Think about the protests that broke out in Hong Kong last summer.
All across the city, there was an extraordinary outpouring of anger because of a law which
the Chinese government had proposed that Hong Kong adopt to regulate the selection of their
chief executive.
So the law said the ultimate aim is the selection of a chief executive by universal suffrage
upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee in accordance with democratic
procedures, a nominating process, which would have 1,200 Hong Kong citizens sitting on
that committee, which means out of a population of about 7 million is about 0.02 percent of
Hong Kong.
Now that's a tiny, tiny number.
It's like this number right there, really small.
If you imagine a single person, 0.02 percent looks something like this.
It's one out of every 5,000 citizens, a tiny, tiny proportion who had the right to nominate
the candidates who get to run in the general election.
That structure produced a strike because as people perceived the nominating committee,
it was they thought a biased filter as was protested, that 1,200 were dominated by a
pro-Beijing business and political elites, as Martin Lee, the chairman of the Hong Kong
Democratic Party put it, we want genuine universal suffrage, not democracy with Chinese characteristics.
And this structure, they thought, was not democracy because how could it be democracy
when 0.02 percent get to qualify the candidates who get to run in the election?
Okay, it's easy to say that talking about Hong Kong.
The uncomfortable fact is when we start thinking about the way democracy in America works.
In America, we take it for granted that campaigns will be privately funded.
But what you should recognize is that process of funding is its own contest.
It's its own primary.
Because members of Congress and candidates for Congress spend anywhere between 30 and
70 percent of their time raising money to get back to Congress, to get their party back
into power.
Dialing for dollars, calling people across the country to raise the money they need and
as they do that, through a process of osmosis, they learn what works.
They develop a sixth sense, a constant awareness about how what they do will affect their ability
to raise money.
They become, in the words of the X-Files, shape shifters as they constantly adjust their
views in light of what they know will help them to raise money.
Not in issues one to 10, but in issues 11 to 1,000.
Leslie Byrne, a Democrat from Virginia, describes that when she went to Congress, she was told
by a colleague, quote, always lean to the green, and then to clarify, she went on, you
know, he was not an environmentalist.
This image, this practice is the way we should understand Congress.
B.F.
Skinner gave us this conception of the Skinner box where any stupid animal could learn which
buttons it had to push to get the sustenance it needs.
We need to recognize this is a picture of the life of Congress.
As members of Congress learn which buttons they need to push that gets the sustenance,
they need to get back into power or get their party back into the majority.
This is a primary two.
It's a money primary, not a white primary, but a green primary.
It is one stage in a multi-stage process in an election, the green primary, which qualifies
candidates to be able to run in the general election.
Now the filter in that green primary is biased, too.
And it's biased because of who the funders of those campaigns are, the funders.
In 2014, which was an off-year election, meaning we elected only members of Congress, there
were about 5.4 million Americans who gave even a dollar to any congressional campaign,
which means about 1.7% of Americans.
But the top 100 contributors gave as much as the bottom 4.75 million contributors.
So that 100 are the biggest funders.
But what we should think about is who are the relevant funders?
Who are the funders who give enough such that their views really matter to candidates for
Congress or members of Congress because they're very keen to make sure they haven't alienated
those people.
So what amount do you have to give to become a relevant funder, relevant to the candidate?
Well, in 2014, if you think about the people who gave the maximum amount they were allowed
to give to one candidate, that's $2,600.
The maximum amount you can give directly to a candidate.
In 2014, about 0.04% of America gave the maximum amount in one election cycle.
That's about 122,000 Americans, which is about the same number of people as are named Lester
in the United States, which is why I called the United States Lesterland in my TED Talk,
a tiny, tiny number.
Or think of the people who gave $10,000, meaning to more than one candidate, in aggregate
$10,000 to more.
That's about 0.008%, or 26,000 Americans, which is about the same number of people as
are named Sheldon in the United States.
Or think about the people who dominated in the super PAC contribution market.
Super PACs are independent political action committees that can take unlimited contributions,
of any size, in 2014, 100 Americans gave 70% of the money that was spent by super PACs.
100 Americans, about the same number of people as are named Adolf in the United States.
So whether it's Lesterland, or Sheldon City, or Adolfio, the point is a tiny, tiny fraction
of the 1% dominate this first stage.
Okay, now here's a particular statistic that was a surprise, but not too surprising to
notice in this election cycle.
Think about the number of people who gave the maximum amount you can give to any candidate
in the full cycle.
So we have primaries and elections, you're allowed to give any one candidate the maximum
of $5,200.
If you thought that was the line that made you a relevant funder, if you thought giving
that amount made it so you would be on the radar screen of the candidates, turns out
that there was 57,854 Americans who gave $5,200 or more.
That turns out to be 0.02%, you remember that number, right?
That's the number of people who nominated in the Hong Kong system, that's the number
of people.
If that number is what you think is the relevant line, who are the nominators in the American
system too, a tiny, tiny fraction, we could say a Chinese fraction, dominates this first
stage.
And the consequence of that is a democracy responsive to the funders only.
Last fall there was a study published at Princeton, and I'm not allowed to talk about
Princeton studies, so I'll put that off the stage very quickly, by Martin Gillins and
Ben Page.
The largest empirical study of actual policy decisions taken by our government over the
last 40 years, relating those policy decisions, the actual changes the government made to
the attitudes of the economic elites, organized business interests, and the average voter.
And so what that study found was, with respect to the economic elites, as the percentage
who support a policy goes up from 0% to 100%, the probability of that policy being enacted
went up as well.
Intuitively, that makes sense.
The more who support something, the more likely it is it gets enacted.
And there's a similar graph for organized interest groups.
The more the interest groups support something, the more likely that thing gets passed.
Okay, here's the graph for the average citizen.
It is a flat line, flat line.
What that means is that regardless of the percentage of average voters who support something,
it doesn't change the probability that that idea will get enacted, as they put it in English.
When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are
controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule,
near-zero, statistically non-significant impact on public policy.
And the consequence of that was described in a really dramatic way by Bard Professor
Pavlina Cherneva.
This is a graph that tries to represent the distribution of average income growth during
recoveries from the period of the late 1940s through the present.
So in the first period, the blue graph represents the percentage of income going to the bottom
90% of Americans.
And the red graph shows you the percentage of income going to the top 10%.
So in this first case, 80% of the income went to the bottom 90%, and 20% of the income went
to the top 10%.
So here's how this graph goes over time.
In the latest recovery, the top 10% got more than 100% of the value of the increase in
average income growth.
And as this incredible book by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pearson describe, the reason for
that change, the reason this shift in value of income changes so dramatically, is tied
directly to changes in government policy, changes in how income gets taxed or how benefits
are distributed.
And those changes in government policy we need to understand are because of the way
we fund campaigns.
This is the consequence of Tweedism in America, such that we should recognize we have a very
clear picture of America today, goes something like this.
This is kind of what the average American looks like, unfortunately.
We the citizens, there's this bus driver.
Now notice the dynamic of this bus driver's life, discovering that the steering wheel
has been removed from the bus, this is the dynamic that these data are describing.
The most basic function of a democracy, of a representative democracy, of what our framers
would have called a republic, have been lost.
Now it's popular and well-funded for governments, especially western governments, to talk about
corruption as a significant problem that nations around the world struggle with.
And by corruption, what they typically mean is crime, bribery or extortion, or quid pro
quos in exchange for influence or favors.
Bad stuff, really bad stuff, the sort of stuff that happens in the third world, which is
why Transparency International, when you see their graph of where the corrupt nations
are, most of the world looks red or some very dark red, but the yellow nations, the happy
nations, the nations where the perception of corruption is low, are essentially the
United States and Canada and Australia and much of Europe.
Okay, this way of thinking about corruption is very convenient, very convenient for us
western nations.
Because of course, I don't mean to deny that quid pro quo corruption is bad, and I don't
mean to suggest that western nations have radical amounts of unreported quid pro quo
corruption.
But quid pro quo corruption is not the only corruption.
And indeed, in the developed world, it's not even the worst form of corruption.
Because corruption, properly understood, can be predicated of different objects, meaning
we can use it to describe different kinds of objects, predicated of different things.
So we can say corruption is predicated of an individual, and it's different to say that
from corruption is predicated of an entity or an institution, and it's institution that
I mean in my title, I corruption, institutional corruption.
Those are different conceptions of corruption.
So if I say Richard Nixon was corrupt, what I mean by that is the individual Richard Nixon
traded political influence for money.
And that statement is fundamentally different from the 18th century British parliament was
corrupt.
Because when theorists of the British parliament said the parliament was corrupt, they were
not saying that the parliament was filled with people taking bribes.
Maybe they were, maybe they weren't.
What they were saying is because the king had a special influence over the British parliament,
it was a corrupted institution from the conception of a parliament that should be representing
the people.
So the corruption of an entity is not just the sum of the corruption of individuals within
that entity.
You can have a corrupt entity, even if there are no corrupt individuals within that entity,
and you can have a non-corrupt entity, even if there are lots of corrupt individuals inside
that entity.
And this is because corruption, entity corruption, is talking about the system, is talking about
deviation within the system, deviation from its design or its plan.
So let's take a very pedestrian example.
In a house with two apartments, each apartment has a thermostat, and the thermostat is connected
to an air conditioning unit.
And the people living in the top have a very different desire for air conditioning for
people living in the bottom.
But then imagine because of some electrical problem, the wires get crossed.
So that signals from the top floor about when to air condition or not get affected by what's
going on on the bottom floor, so that it's not just the temperature of the top floor.
So in this system, we can say the cooling system is corrupted in the sense that there
is a wrong dependency, the dependency on the wrong thermostat, instead of an exclusive
dependency, it's exclusive dependency on what's going on in the top floor, there's conflicting
dependence.
It's sometimes going on, sometimes going on, depending on two floors rather than one.
And that change in the way we can speak of it and the way classical people used the term
corruption, that change is a corruption.
Now that change, that conception of corruption, is how we can understand the corruption of
the United States Congress.
The framers of our constitution gave us what they called a republic.
But by a republic, they meant a representative democracy.
But they didn't, therefore, mean to create a pure democracy.
Our republic was a very complicated, think of it as kind of a Swiss watch version of
a constitutional democracy, different checks and balances to limit the democratic power
of the people, but to balance it, to make it respect the other interests that the framers
thought democracy needed to respect.
So within that system, there were different departments.
And each of those departments had an intended dependence.
So the judiciary was meant to be dependent on the law.
Decisions of the independent judiciary were to track what the law required.
The Senate originally didn't elect senators, they were picked by the states.
And that was because the framers thought the Senate needed to be dependent on the states
so that it would represent the interests of the states in our political system.
But Congress, the House of Representatives, as the Federalist Papers described, was to
be a department which would be dependent on the people alone.
So their plan was this department would have an exclusive dependence, a dependence on the
people.
And to be clear, Madison in Federalist 57 defined the people.
And he said, the people are, quote, not the rich more than the poor.
Not the rich more than the poor.
Now against that background, we can re-describe what Tweedism is.
Tweedism is an added and extra dependence built into the system, the dependence on the Tweeds.
And it's conceptually possible that the additional dependence conflicts with the intended dependence
of the system.
And my view is the additional dependence that the Tweeds have provided in the United States
certainly conflicts with the conception that Madison had of a government dependent on the
people alone, where the people means not the rich more than the poor.
The system we have right now is not not the rich more than the poor.
The system we have right now is the rich having more power than the poor.
This is a corruption of the design of the original American Republic.
And if corruption is properly understood, then we should take a map like this from Transparency
International and we should re-describe the United States.
Because in the important sense of corruption, the United States is corrupt.
And the consequences of that corruption are in my view much more significant than the
corruptions of trivial quid pro quo corruption inside of a mature democracy.
It is a different corruption often just as bad and sometimes worse than the corruption
of quid pro quo.
But if you go to the United States, the conventional wisdom is kind of a cute graph.
So this is like a convention sticker.
It says wisdom.
So conventional wisdom, this is a girl blogger put this up, but okay.
The conventional wisdom in the United States is that people don't care about the corruption.
Politico wrote an article quoting a Republican consultant to say, quote, it's a zero issue.
No one cares.
They shrug.
They already believe that all politicians are corrupt assholes.
It's baked in the cake.
They get it.
But I think there's a deep confusion in that view.
We did a poll at the end of 2013.
We asked how important is it to you that the influence of money and politics be reduced?
96% of Americans said it was important to reduce the influence of money and politics.
But then we asked how likely is it that the influence of money and politics will be reduced?
And we found 91% said it was not likely.
So you put these numbers together, you begin to understand the dynamic of American politics.
You know, look, at least 96% of us wish we could fly like Superman.
But because 91% of us know we can't, we don't leap off tall buildings regularly.
We accept our mortal state and we just get on with life.
And so our apathy is not a reflection of our desire.
Our apathy is resignation, just like people in Egypt under Mubarak.
It's not that they loved Mubarak, but just what were they going to do about it?
And in the United States, we have modified what Ben Franklin used to say, Franklin used
to say, nothing is certain but death and taxes, and we have added and a corrupt government.
But what follows from this, if this is true, is that if you can show people it's in fact
possible to change this corruption, then you will motivate them to care.
And the truth is, as hard as this is to believe, it is possible, as my students like to say,
it is totally possible, totally possible.
We can solve 90% of this problem with a single statute, a statute that would change how campaigns
are funded.
So for example, you can think of a statute establishing traditional public funding.
We have that in theory for presidential candidates.
Every president between Nixon and Obama was elected to the office on the public's dime
using public money, and nobody benefited more from that system than Ronald Reagan, who ran
three national campaigns using public money to fund his election.
And most strikingly, when Ronald Reagan ran for reelection, he attended eight fundraisers.
But when Barack Obama ran for reelection, of course, after he had given up public funding
and said he would not take money from the government, only raised his money privately,
Ronald Reagan attended eight, Barack Obama attended 220 fundraisers before his 2012 reelection.
Now you might ask, how does the most powerful man in the world do his job while attending
220 fundraisers, without even thinking about the kinds of people he is meeting again and
again and again at those 220 fundraisers?
So public funding could take care of this problem overnight.
But Americans don't like the kind of top-down public funding, so there are alternatives.
Think about vouchers.
Imagine every American got a rebate of their taxes in the form of vouchers.
We give it like a Starbucks card for democracy, right?
And candidates can take those vouchers if they agree to fund their campaigns with vouchers
only and maybe limited contributions in addition, maybe up to $100.
So $50 a voter would be $7 billion.
The total amount raised and spent by congressional candidates in 2014 was about $1.5 billion.
So this is many times more than the amount we're spending right now.
It's real money, but the critical point is it's money from the many, many, not money
from the.02.
Or finally, think about a democratic idea.
Vouchers are pushed by Republicans.
Democrats push the idea of matching funds.
So John Sarbanes, a congressman from Maryland, has a proposal where small contributions,
like $100, could be matched up to $9 to 1, so $100 would be worth $1,000 to a campaign,
making it possible again for candidates to raise money from the many, many, not from
the.02.
The point is all three of these statutes would change what matters to the candidates.
What would matter would be the votes and not the unequal contributions of money.
Reasserting a fundamental principle, equal votes for equal citizens.
This is a simple statute that is perfectly constitutional, even under the Supreme Court's
radical doctrines about the First Amendment.
So why don't we have it in America right now?
Well, one of my favorite teachers in this subject is a congressman named Jim Cooper,
who went to Congress first in about 1982.
He's a Democrat from Tennessee.
And when he was explaining to me the problem of Congress, he said, you need to understand,
Congress has become a kind of farm league for K Street, where the lobbyists live.
And what he means by that is, members and staffers and bureaucrats have an increasingly
common business model, a business model focused on their life after government, their life
as lobbyists.
50% of the Senate, according to a study by a public citizen, between 1998 and 2004 left
to become lobbyists, 42% of the House.
And according to United Republic, who tracked the salary increase for people who left Congress
to go to the House, the average salary increase in the last cycle was 1,452%.
So you have a system where everyone depends on the system surviving for their future,
for their income, for their kids to go to college, a system that makes lobbying so incredibly
profitable.
Because the lobbyists are serving a dependence that the congressmen have, and the congressmen
are serving a dependence the lobbyists have.
The lobbyists need a congress responsive to them, therefore they can sell their services
very, very profitably.
And Congress needs people to help them raise money, so lobbyists channel money to the congressmen.
Lobbying becomes more than information, it feeds the dependence.
And so you could rightly look at the system and say, how could we ever expect that they
would change this?
Well, the truth is they won't change that.
On their own, they would have no motive to change that.
But I think that we, meaning we who are not politicians or politician wannabes, can.
And the strategy to changing it depends on an analytic and an emotion.
The analytic is what I've just given you, a way of understanding how this is corruption.
This improper dependence on the funders corrupts the idea of a government dependent on the
people alone.
That's the analytic.
But the most important part is the emotion.
What would motivate people to step up and do something about it?
And that emotion requires that we identify an ideal and the victim.
And the ideal, I think, is to get people to recognize the importance, the central importance
of equality in a democracy and to get them to see that this is inequality.
It's completely obvious to every American today, even though for 100 years after the
amendment granting African Americans the right to vote, it was not obvious.
But it's completely obvious to every American today that what Texas did in 1923 was unequal.
It created a system of inequality.
And what we need to do is to get Americans to recognize that a system where.02% are
the relevant funders in the first critical stage of an election is also a violation
of equality.
But this is a fight for equality first.
And in America today, it is an appropriate time to see this as a fight, because it's
the 50th anniversary of the most important battle that we had in the 20th century for
a struggle for equality.
It was 50 years ago and 15 days when a man named Jimmy Lee Jackson was murdered in Marion,
Alabama.
Jackson was walking the streets of Marion, trying to register people to vote.
Because at the time, Alabama had a voter participation among African Americans of just 1%.
One percent of blacks in Alabama were registered to vote.
And the reason 1% was registered was that if you were black and you tried to register,
you had to answer questions given to you by the registrar, quizzes that only blacks had
to answer because whites were grandfathered into the system.
So the blacks had to answer questions like, name all 67 county judges in Alabama?
Or when was Oklahoma admitted to the union?
Or my favorite, and I swear to you, this was a question on some of these surveys.
How many bubbles are there on a bar of soap?
And if you got any of these questions wrong, the registrar had the right not to admit you
as a voter.
So therefore, 1% of blacks were registered to vote, the 1% would counter the bubbles
on a bar of soap.
So what Jimmy Lee Jackson was doing was participating with others, fighting for an equal right to
vote, a right that was denied to him and other African Americans when he was murdered.
And after he was murdered, the civil rights movement in America was terrified that the
ugliness of that death would drive people away from the movement.
And so they decided they would launch a new effort to change the character, an optimistic,
hopeful effort, which James Bevel, who was the director of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, conceived of.
And the idea was to launch a march from Selma to Montgomery, a long march, 50 mile march.
It would be a moment of celebration as whites and blacks would march together to the capital
where they would demand equality for all Americans.
But it was 50 years ago and one week when the world saw the consequences of that march.
And then called Bloody Sunday, where the blood spilled on that march was spilled across television
sets around the world, and most powerfully in the north, where the north finally came
to recognize the meaning of that inequality.
But that blood had an effect.
Because one week later, 50 years ago yesterday, Lyndon Baines Johnson stood before Congress
and declared, I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy.
This man who was understood by most until he became president as himself a racist, this
man made civil rights the central movement of his initial administration, and he succeeded
in getting equal rights for African Americans through the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
They didn't have the vote, an equal vote, so they walked and they protest and they fought
and they died for equality, for the dignity of equal citizens.
So that's ideal.
And it's that ideal, I think, we need to see standing behind the emotion that this movement
needs.
But who is the victim?
Because in a strange way, African Americans had an advantage here.
They knew they were treated as unequals.
They got it.
Not just in voting, but in every sphere of their life, especially in the South, they
understood that in the system of equals versus unequals, they were the unequals.
There was no ambiguity about that.
It was these subtle shades of color that helped them to see that inequality.
But we live in the digital age.
Things are black and white in our age.
Things are binary, either or.
And the striking fact about most Americans is that they make the equivalence, because
we can vote, because nothing blocks all of us to vote, we must all be equal.
But we are not equal.
We, the 99.98%, are the unequals in this story, but we don't even notice it.
We certainly don't tell this to ourselves.
We certainly would be embarrassed to admit it to democracies around the world.
So who is the victim?
Well, it's hard to call 99.98% the victim.
And the truth is, I think, the critical group to be understood as victims here are those
whom Banksy was art making this art for when he painted this on the wall of a Boston building.
Those whose dreams have been canceled, and who are they?
I think a clue is to remember who started the protests in Hong Kong, because I hope
you remember, the first people to show up were kids, literally even elementary school
kids who went to sit on the streets with the students in high school and students in college
to protest.
And it was only after the adults began to feel guilty that the kids were doing all the
protests that everybody else showed up.
It was the kids who looked at what China was saying and said, this is not a democracy.
This is not the democracy that we want, because they realized that democracy didn't care
about them.
And it's the same that's true about the victims of the consequence of the American corruption.
The victims here are our youth, because if you think about every important problem that
we can't solve, these are problems that don't affect people my age or older, really.
And when we all talk about the incredible importance of dealing with climate change,
but people who are 50 and over will be long gone before the most dramatic consequences
from climate change happen.
It's the kids who will bear the burden of that.
The United States is going through an extraordinary period of debt, literally borrowing money
from our children to pay for the life we want today.
It is the kids who will pay the consequence of that.
We have the most expensive and least effective healthcare system in the world in the United
States for comparable democracies.
We can't change that system without giving extraordinary gifts to pharmaceutical companies
or insurance companies.
But I'm going to have healthcare until I die.
There's no concern that I have.
It is my children.
These are not all my children, but okay.
My children who bear the burden of that, and an economy which is stagnating in the United
States because of a system of crony capitalism favoring incumbents over challengers, it is
not us who bear the consequence of that.
It is our kids.
The victim here is the youth, the people who don't vote, who can't vote, who are so incredibly
cynical about the system that they just tune out.
They are the victim of this inequality.
Okay, so there's an emotion here.
The emotion is the injustice of this inequality, the inequality of its victims.
The victims first, the peoples whose future is denied by the structure of corruption,
them first and then the rest of us, all of us except for the 0.02%.
Okay, one more thought before I stop.
We should recognize that there is a global anti-corruption movement happening around
the world, from Brazil to Israel to India to Russia to the United States.
There is a movement of people who recognize the way their government fails because of
what they call corruption.
Even though the kind of corruption they complain of is different in these different countries.
What unites this movement is the recognition that the government's so corrupted creates
extraordinary inequality within their society.
That is what corruption is.
The common failure that we are seeing in democracies around the world is the failure to resist
that corruption, even if it has different causes in these different democracies.
We should understand these movements as part of the same movement, a movement that demands
the respect of equality that equal citizens are entitled to have.
The rare exception among this experiment that we call democracy, this experiment that's
being practiced in democracies around the world.
The rare exception are places that work, places where the democracy works.
You, of course, live in an area of the world we think of as an exception to the way democracy
has been corrupted.
Our exception isn't explained by culture, there are states in the United States where
state governments function perfectly well, perfectly responsive in the way we think of
an ideal democracy to be.
The exception is explained by something.
I think that means that you, too, have a role in this movement against this corruption,
this movement for equality.
Because you have an incredible opportunity to help us, you help us, us, your friends.
You help us by being critical, by calling us on the failure of us to live up to our ideals,
to help us see how what we have done is a failure, a failure of democracy.
Because we are the most powerful nation in the world, acting like a drunk grizzly bear,
acting like children while ignoring our children.
And it's time we act like adults, and it will take adults, adults from mature democracies,
democracies that work, to bring us around to the ideals which we think we gave birth
to.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
