Posted on 21 December 2012
The US Congress is marred by legal corruption, alienating voters and giving power to the wealthy few, Professor Lawrence Lessig said at the EUI on 19 December.
“Congress has developed dependence no longer on the people alone, but increasingly a dependence on the funders,” he said. The Harvard Law School professor turned to the recent US presidential election, which cost around $6 billion, to demonstrate how the wealthy are able to influence politics. “0.3 per cent of Americans gave $200 or more to any federal candidate in the election that happened in 2012…0.000042 per cent – 132 Americans – gave 60 per cent of the super PAC [political action committee] money spent in the election in 2012,” he said.
“The people have the ultimate influence over elected officials, but they have that ultimate influence in their general election only after the funders have had their way with the candidates,” he said, adding: “This conflicting dependence between the funders and the people is a kind of corruption…Everything I’m talking about is perfectly legal.”
This not only impacts who wins a presidential election, Lessig said, but wields constant influence as financial backers push politicians to block legislation: “Inside of a constitutional system of democracy like the United States, the easiest thing to sell is the capacity to veto reform or changes. That’s the one resource you can be certain of. This is the non-trustworthy, not-trusted, policymaker at the core of what the American government does.”
Such a structure has stalled progress across a broad number of policy areas: “In a world where the relevant funders are 0.05 per cent of the population, it is simple to gather together the numbers you need to comprise the interests sufficient to block the reform you want to stop.” Lessig included the pharmaceutical and insurance industries among those which succeed in legally corrupting Congress.
Politicians play into this game by creating temporary measures, supported by big financial backers who will then continue funding Congress to ensure the measures are passed again, he said. The professor cited a 2010 report by The Wall Street Journal on temporary tax codes to demonstrate how a cycle of ‘extender mania’ plays out, whereby interested parties push Congress to pass bills.
Citizens may well be losing their faith in the democratic process, as voter turnout for November’s presidential election was estimated to be 14 million lower than in 2008. Lessig compiled various polls from 2006 to 2011, featured in his book ‘Republic, Lost’, to determine that 75 per cent of Americans believe ‘money buys results in Congress’.
Restoring citizens’ confidence in Congress entails an overhaul of the electoral system, said Lessig, with people given more equal influence no matter their income level. “Systems like vouchers given to people to help fund campaigns would be one way to do this. Everybody has a voucher which they hand to candidates who agree to fund with vouchers only,” he suggested, meaning politicians are equally dependent on all citizens, not just those with great wealth.
While this appears simple, Lessig said “change may well be impossible” given the fact that the ‘dependency corruption’ he described is legal. “We go from old-style illegal corruption to legal corruption. The problem is it’s not clear that the capacity to remedy these corruptions progresses equally.”
“If I had to pick between the two, I’m not sure that I would pick legal corruption,” he said. “Because the thing about illegal corruption is that it has some shame, there’s some limit…But legal corruption produces things like the incapacity of the American government to address global warming, or the financial crisis, or healthcare.”
(Text by Rosie Scammell)