Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [149]
They put those differences aside, and saved their nation from ruin. We must do the same. Not after the next election. Now.
Notes
Throughout these notes there are references to links (e.g., “link #23”) on the Web. As anyone who has used the Web knows, these links can be highly unstable. I have tried to address this instability by redirecting readers to the original source through the website associated with this book. For each link below, you can go to Republic.Lessig.org and locate the original source. If the original link remains alive, you will be redirected to that link. If the original link has disappeared, you will be redirected to a cached copy of the original source. I have used the wonderful resource WebCitation.org to store the cached version.
Introduction
1. “Congress Ranks Last in Confidence in Institutions,” July 22, 2010, available at link #1.
2. Ronald J. Pestritto and William J. Atto, American Progressivism: A Reader (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2008), 40–41, quoting “Who Is a Progressive,” April 1912 speech, reprinted in Outlook 100, April 1912.
3. Richard L. McCormick, “The Discovery That Business Corrupts Politics: A Reappraisal of the Origins of Progressivism,” American Historical Review 86 (1981): 247, 270. There is some contest among historians about how new this awareness was. Richard Hofstadter, for example, argues “there was nothing new.” But as McCormick powerfully describes, there was much about the mechanism to the emerging type of corruption that was not understood generally, or broadly. And when it was understood, it sparked a powerful political response. Ibid., 265. Beginning in 1906, “both major parties gushed in opposition to what the Republicans now called ‘the domination of corporate influences in public affairs.’ ” Ibid., 263.
4. Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, The Money Men: The Real Story of Fund-raising’s Influence on Political Power in America (New York: Crown Publishers, 2000), 29. See also the extremely compelling account by Jack Beatty in Age of Betrayal (New York: Vintage, 2007).
5. Pestritto and Atto, American Progressivism, 215, quoting Roosevelt’s “The New Nationalism,” Oct. 1910.
6. McCormick, “The Discovery that Business Corrupts Politics,” 247, 265.
7. Speech of Theodore Roosevelt, April 14, 1906, available at link #2.
8. John Joseph Wallis, “The Concept of Systematic Corruption in American History,” in Edward Glaeser and Claudia Goldin, eds., Corruption and Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 21 and 23, available at link #3.
Professor Michael Johnston is the dean of corruption studies. His Syndromes of Corruption (2005) captures better the dynamic of corruption that I am describing. While his work is comparative, and addresses the full range of corruption, including quid pro quo corruption, the mechanism he describes in a number of nations is close to the conception of “dependence corruption” described later.
Chapter 1. Good Souls, Corrupted
1. The first prominent reports of Yeltsin’s drunkenness came from a trip to the United States in 1989. Those reports were later discredited, including by the U.S. reporter who first reported them. Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 324, 344–48.
2. Taylor Branch, The Clinton Tapes (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), 56.
3. Ibid., 198.
4. See e.g., “The Scientific Basis of Influence and Reciprocity: A Symposium,” June 12, 2007, Washington, D.C. (Association of America’s Medical Colleges).
5. Dennis Thompson’s work goes the furthest in distinguishing institutional from individual corruption. His conception of institutional corruption, however, is more strongly tied to private interest than my own. See “Two Concepts of Corruption,” 12, n. 11 (Paper presented at an E. J. Safra Lab workshop, Nov. 2010). In my view, if an institution has an intended dependency,