Tomorrow, Lawrence Lessig will bring his message on the need to get big money out of politics to Austin, Texas.
In a talk called “MAYDAY: The Next Phase in the Fight to Save American Democracy,” the lawyer and activist will address a crowd gathered at SXSW Interactive.
Not among the badge holders? Not to worry. Join the conversation using the hashtags #sxsw and #maydaypac.
Whether you tune in virtually or in person, don’t miss these videos from our NationSwell Council event with Lawrence Lessig.
Here, he describes why the Citizens United ruling was, in fact, a gift to campaign finance reform.
And in less than a minute, he captures the reason for his political action committee.
Lessig has drawn a lot of attention with his mission to raise money for candidates who commit to saving our system. He’s not alone at SXSW Interactive in tackling the issue of making government work, as the conference deals with the intersection of technology and just about everything.
Interested in improving government? You can also tune in online or in person for sessions including “Move Fast, Government, Or Get Out of the Way” and “How Government Fails and How You Can Fix It,” featuring another featured NationSwell Council speaker, Code for America founder Jennifer Pahlka.
Tag: Lawrence Lessig
Lawrence Lessig Reacts to the Citizens United Decision
Harvard Law School professor and campaign finance reform activist Lawrence Lessig tells NationSwell why he views the Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United as, “the greatest gift to the reform movement since Richard Nixon.”
The decision allows for unlimited funds in support of political candidates, with the stipulation that this money — over a predetermined dollar amount — can’t go directly to the official campaigns. Perhaps surprisingly, Lessig believes the verdict has done more to engage citizens with the issue of money in politics than anything else.
“What it did was to terrify literally millions of people to join the call for reform,” says Lessig, “But the critical fact of Citizens United is that it didn’t on its own create the problem of American democracy. On the day before Citizens United was decided, our democracy was already dead.”
Lawrence Lessig Breaks Down Mayday PAC
Harvard Law School professor and campaign finance reform activist Lawrence Lessig recently spoke to NationSwell about his crowdfunded non-partisan Mayday PAC.
Simply put, the political action committee’s goal is to raise money to support candidates who want to drive campaign finance reform. The irony of raising funds to influence elections to end the omnipresent impact of money in politics isn’t lost on Lessig; indeed, he addresses the apparent contradiction directly.
“Just like every single moment of the transformation of American democracy has used the existing rules to change the rules,” says Lessig, “that’s what we have to do here.”
Join the NationSwell Council Conversation with Lawrence Lessig
When it comes to making government work, Lawrence Lessig sees a straightforward solution. The country, he says, needs to overhaul the way elections are funded. The challenge, of course, is making that happen.
Lessig will discuss this challenge at a February 2 lunch from 12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. with NationSwell Council members in New York City. We hope you will join the conversation by tweeting your questions before then by using the #NSCouncil hashtag or joining the live conversation on Twitter.
Lessig, the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard University, launched the Mayday PAC as a “counterintuitive experiment” to tackle the problem of money in politics. In phase two of this experiment, which was first tested in the 2014 midterm elections, Mayday PAC is looking to its supporters to recruit members of Congress who will support reform. As The New Yorker put it in a recent profile, “Lawrence Lessig wants to reform campaign finance. All he needs is fifty billionaires.”
In his TED talk, Lessig says that only by spreading funder influence beyond the “tiniest slice of America” can we restore the idea of a government dependent on the people alone.
“We have lost that republic,” he says. “All of us have to act to get it back.”
These 10 Documentaries Will Change How You See America
Documentary films are known for sparking social change. (Case in point: Who wants to eat at McDonalds after seeing Super Size Me or Food, Inc.? What parent suggests visiting SeaWorld after seeing Blackfish?) Though 2014’s nonfiction films weren’t massive box office hits, they pointed out injustice and lifted our eyes to the doers making a difference. Here are the 10 must-see documentaries that inspired us to action.
10. The Great Invisible
BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 still darkens the coastline along the Gulf of Mexico in the form of altered ecosystems and ruined lives. Named best documentary at the SXSW Film Festival, Margaret Brown’s documentary dives deep beyond the news coverage you may remember into a tale of corporate greed and lasting environmental damage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDw1budbZpQ
9. If You Build It
Two designers travel to the poorest county in rural North Carolina to teach a year-long class, culminating in building a structure for the community. In this heartwarming story, 10 students learn much more than construction skills.
http://vimeo.com/79902240
8. The Kill Team
An infantry soldier struggles with his wartime experience after alerting the military his Army platoon had killed civilians in Afghanistan. On the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ long list for best documentary, Dan Krauss’s challenging film shows how morality dissolves in the fog of war and terror of battle.
7. Starfish Throwers
Three people — a renowned cook, a preteen girl and a retired teacher — inspire an international movement to end hunger. Jesse Roesler’s film includes the story of Allan Law, the man who handed out 520,000 sandwiches during the course of a year in Minneapolis, which we featured on NationSwell.
6. Lady Valor: The Kristin Beck Story
A former Navy SEAL (formerly named Christopher, now Kristin) says that changing genders, not military service, was the biggest battle of her life. In retrospect, her SEAL experience takes on new importance as she comes to understand the true value of the words “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
5. The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
An online pioneer who developed Creative Commons with the academic and political activist Lawrence Lessig at age 15 and co-founded Reddit at 19, Swartz crusaded for a free and open internet. Another potential Oscar candidate, the film poignantly recounts how Swartz ended his own life at age 26 after aggressive prosecutors initiated a federal case against him.
4. True Son
A 22-year-old black man recently graduated from Stanford returns to his bankrupt hometown of Stockton, Calif., to run for city council. Michael Tubbs convinces his neighbors (and the movie’s audiences) you can have “a father in jail and a mother who had you as a teenager, and still have a seat at the table.”
3. The Hand That Feeds
After years of abuse from their bosses, a group of undocumented immigrants working for a New York City bakery unionize for fair wages and better working conditions. Led by a demure sandwich maker, the employees partner with young activists to fight their case against management and the food chain’s well-connected investors.
2. Rich Hill
Three boys confront impoverishment, learning disabilities and dysfunctional families in this human portrait of growing up in small-town America. The backdrop to the teenagers’ lives is their Missouri hometown of 1,396 residents, where one in five lives in poverty and where the fireworks still glow every Fourth of July.
1. The Overnighters
Our top film and a favorite for an Academy Award nomination details how an oil boom draws a city-sized influx of workers to a small town in North Dakota, where they scrape by on day labor and live in their cars. With the heft, detail and narrative twists of a Steinbeck novel, Jesse Moss profiles the Lutheran pastor Jay Reinke, who welcomes these desperate men into a shelter called “The Overnighters,” to his congregation’s dismay.
Are there any documentaries that should have made the cut? Let us know in the comments below.
This Plug-in Makes it Easy to Track Campaign Donations
Campaign finance laws have made it easier for politicians to shadow donors, but despite a national push toward more transparency, most Americans remain unaware of who’s handing out cash to elect their local, state and federal lawmakers.
Which is why the new plug-in Greenhouse is an exciting development in helping citizens make connections between their elected officials and special interest groups or industries.
Created by 16-year-old Nick Rubin, Greenhouse collects data from the nonprofit Center of Responsive Politics project Opensecrets.org and lets a user track a politician’s funding portfolio simply by hovering over his or her name. Users can immediately see a scorecard for any member of Congress who pops up in an article or online site, breaking down not only which industries are supporting the candidate, but also how much money they give in total, as well as percentages of donations from individuals contributing less than $200.
“Even though I am only 16 years old, not quite old enough to vote, I am old enough to know that our political system desperately needs fixing,” the Seattle native said on the Greenhouse website.
Self-taught in computer coding, Rubin was in seventh grade when he first took interest in how money shapes politics. He pursued his idea after participating in a project on corporate personhood and hearing Harvard professor and campaign-finance activist Lawrence Lessig speak. According to Fast Company, Lessig consulted with Rubin on the launch of the beta version.
Since the plug-in went live in June, it’s amassed more than 41,000 users.
The project has garnered interest on both the left and right and helped illuminate an issue that’s important for American politics in general, regardless of ideology. As Greenhouse’s tagline states, “Some are red. Some are blue. All are green.”
“What it signifies is that the influence of money on our government isn’t a partisan issue. Whether Democrat or Republican, we should all want a political system that is independent of the influence of big money and not dependent on endless cycles of fundraising from special interests,” Rubin said.
Indeed, it’s refreshing to see the next generation — especially one that is not even of voting age — taking interest in reforming the political process into one that all Americans can be proud of.
MORE: Washington Needs to Be Fixed. These Innovators Aren’t Waiting for Congress to Do It.
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