Chris Hedges and Lawrence Lessig: Getting Money Out of Politics

Chris Hedges and Lawrence Lessig: Getting Money Out of Politics

Please watch this excellent video interview that in very short order identifies the major problems in America, and then proposes a solution.

Among their points:

- a fraction of 1% of the voters contribute all of the money today. This buys that small group considerable power over the election process.

- it's not only the political system that's been seized by the corporate state, it's the labor unions, public education, etc.

- think insiders and outsiders, not left and right

- underlying cause, deep corruption inside government, because of the way we've embedded power


Their analysis matches mine very closely and we've come to the same conclusion, and believe in the same solution: election campaign refresh to take the money out of politics.

There is absolutely no doubt that a highly effective election process can be placed onto the Internet. Heck, I've got one such design at the ready and could actually build it myself. And I would love to, but I'd love it even more if a competitor has a better system! The objective is to get it done, and I don't really care who does it.

I've worked with large computer systems for many years and see an election/voting system as just another application, there really is nothing special about it from a computer point of view. The special part comes by what it can be designed to do: which is to help the voter become better informed of the issues and the candidates positions on the issues, as well as to register the voters own positions, which the computer can organize as a personal decision chart. Organized as such, it's a simple matter for a program to help the voter narrow down the candidates to those most in line with the voter's positions.

And it's an ongoing process. It doesn't begin and end on election day, but instead is developed throughout the election cycle. While votes are actually cast on election day, the information collection and development process is ongoing and continuously being improved, both by the information suppliers and the voter's input as well. The voter now has the time and when the inclination strikes to spend some time with the system, the results are that much better, and when election day does come around, the voter's submission will be hugely better cast.

The cost is nominal, existing and available government and Internet computer systems can easily carry the load. Security people have a variety of ways to secure the system from anyone's hacking.

Where is Google on this issue?


Bill