Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [116]
Astonishingly, O’Reilly agreed:
They spend so much time raising money and kissing butt, they don’t even think about problem solving. But it cuts both ways. The liberal pinheads are just as bad as the right-wing pinheads.
Rarely—okay, almost never—do these two figures agree about something. But here was agreement: upon “the corruption at the heart of all these problems.” Corruption. Heart. All these problems.
As you’ve already seen, I couldn’t say it better myself.
CHAPTER 15
Reforms That Won’t Reform
Our democracy does not have just one problem that one single reform would fix. There is a long list of reforms that we need. I would happily join with others to push for this long list. But there is a beginning to that list, and we need to be clear about what that beginning is. In this chapter, I address two reforms many believe to be sufficient. To be reform enough.
They are not.
The Incompleteness of Transparency
In 1973, regulators at the EPA were struggling with ways to get Americans to care more about fuel efficiency. In August of that year the agency published a voluntary protocol for calculating fuel economy values, and a label format for manufacturers choosing to display the calculated values. Those protocols have undergone a number of changes. The most recent version requires a label like the one in Figure 15.1
The insight here was brilliant. Give consumers an understandable chunk of data and let them use it to regulate their own behavior. Some won’t care about the cost of gasoline. They’ll ignore the label. But others will care. And on the margin, their care will push more car manufacturers to do the thing the EPA wanted: improve the fuel efficiency of the nation’s fleet.
About the same time the EPA was innovating with transparency, good-government sorts were struggling with ways to get Americans to care more about good (as in clean) government. What could regulators do to protect democracy from the embarrassment of corruption? How could they mobilize a public to demand cleaner government?
FIGURE 15
Their answer (amending the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971) was massive, if largely invalidated (by Buckley v. Valeo [1976]). But the one part that survived Buckley looked, in principle at least, a lot like the EPA fuel economy standards: disclosure. Federal law now required that all political contributions greater than $200 be recorded and disclosed. More significantly, the information disclosed would include whom someone worked for, making it possible to aggregate contributions on the basis not just of zip codes, but of industry codes and corporations.
So here’s the product of that bit of sunlight, for contributions to Democratic congressman Mike Capuano, a local hero representing Cambridge, Massachusetts. To spare a forest, I’ve simply aggregated the contributions by the firm the contributors worked for.2
ORGANIZATION PAC ($) CITIZENS ($) TOTAL ($)
Triumvirate Environmental
0 44,650 44,650
Telecommunications Insight Group
0 40,780 40,780
Machinists/Aerospace Workers’ Union
30,000 0 30,000
Genzyme Corp.
7,500 15,100 22,600
Feeley & Driscoll
0 20,700 20,700
Eli Lilly & Co.
16,000 2,000 18,000
FMR Corp.
10,000 8,750 18,750
Liberty Mutual Insurance
10,000 5,250 15,250
Raytheon Co.
10,000 4,950 14,950
Citigroup Inc.
0 14,500 14,500
Science Research Laboratory Inc.
0 14,450 14,450
Mintz, Levin et al.
0 13,600 13,600
Wilmerhale LLP
0 12,800 12,800
Intl Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
12,500 0 12,500
UNITE HERE
12,000 0 12,000
Government Insight Group
0 12,000 12,000
Goulston & Storrs
0 11,650 11,650
New York Life Insurance
11,000 0 11,000
Somerville
0 10,950 10,950
Suffolk Construction
0 10,350 10,350
United Food & Commercial Workers’ Union
10,000 0 10,000
National Education Assn.
9,000 1,450 10,450
American Assn. for Justice
10,000 0 10,000
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