Third World America - Arianna Huffington [64]
But, far from biding his time, Kaufman soon emerged as one of the Senate’s fiercest critics of Wall Street and a champion of the need to push for a serious overhaul of our financial system to protect the middle class. What transformed this behind-the-scenes staffer into a fire-breathing accidental leader? A healthy sense of outrage.
In March 2010, on his seventy-first birthday, he took to the Senate floor to lambast the loss of the rule of law on Wall Street.10 He reminded his colleagues that the American taxpayer has laid out more than $2.5 trillion to “save the system,” and asked, “What exactly did we save?” His answer: “a system of overwhelming and concentrated financial power that has become dangerous … a system in which the rule of law has broken yet again.… At the end of the day, this is a test of whether we have one justice system in this country or two. If we don’t treat a Wall Street firm that defrauded investors of millions of dollars the same way we treat someone who stole five hundred dollars from a cash register, then how can we expect our citizens to have faith in the rule of law? … Our markets can only flourish when Americans again trust that they are fair, transparent, and accountable.”
Watching his determination to fix the financial system offers a window on how we can fix our political system. Aside from his personal character, which we cannot duplicate, there is a dynamic that helped turn Kaufman into a fearless crusader that we can duplicate: the absence of money as a factor in his political life.
Kaufman didn’t need to raise money to become a senator—he was appointed. And he doesn’t need to raise money for his reelection campaign—because he’s not running. So he is completely unencumbered by the need to curry favor with the moneyed interests. Kaufman is a great test case—a shining example of what it looks like when our representatives are not beholden to special interests and are only serving the public good.
Another important means of fighting the disillusionment, cynicism, and doubt that have infected the body politic in recent years is a top-to-bottom commitment to transparency. “Sunlight,” Justice Louis Brandeis famously said, “is said to be the best of disinfectants.”11 But real transparency means more than just putting up a website for every government agency. Creating a system in which the people feel confident that they know what their representatives are doing involves more than just throwing data at the problem. It requires context—and ways of helping the public yank back the curtain on the back rooms of power so it can see who is really pulling the levers.
A great early iteration of this was provided by the Sunlight Foundation during the health-care summit in February 2010.12 As part of its live streaming of the discussion, the group’s website offered a dose of transparency by showing, as each of our elected officials was speaking, a list of his or her major campaign contributors. It was simple, powerful, and spoke volumes about the extent to which many players in the summit were bought and paid for.
In the future, a souped-up version of this kind of technology will allow us to see who is funding whom, and who is carrying water for which special interest, in real time and across every imaginable platform. The Sunday political shows will be a whole different animal when we are able to effortlessly, instantly, and literally follow the money—and discover why a seemingly irrational policy becomes the law of the land.
American politics has become a rigged game. But, moving forward, innovative technology can give us the chance to level the playing field.
KILLER APPS FOR A TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY DEMOCRACY
Among those looking to use technology to improve the way our government is run is Tim O’Reilly, the tech guru CEO of O’Reilly Media. In 2004, O’Reilly popularized the term Web