Friday, April 04, 2008

The Wire v Change Congress

I was torn today. At 5pm Harvard was having two different free public lectures I wanted to go to. One was "a panel discussion of crime, gang activity, and urban policy." This wouldn't ordinarily interest me but the panel included David Simon, creator of "The Wire" and Sudhir A. Venkatesh who amongst other things blogged the series What Do Real Thugs Think of The Wire?. It also included Nora Baston, Dep. Superintendent of the Boston Police so it was probably going to be interesting. The other was a talk by law professor Lawrence Lessig who created Created Commons and most recently Change Congress. All of these topics should be familiar to readers of this blog.

I decided since I watched Lessig's recent speech at UPenn on Monday, this talk would be similar, so I went to The Wire panel. However I got there a half hour early to find that they were beginning with a half hour of clips from the series and the hall was already over capacity. So I walked over to the Ames Courtroom in the very impressive Austin Hall to see Prof. Lessig.

I'm sure video of the talk will be posted soon. In spite of my recent doubts, he does give very effective talks and as compelling as they are in person I think they are equally so on video. He uses a mac (and I'd say 80% of the computers in audience were macs) it looked like the talk was done in Keynote. And yes, he clicks to advance each slide.

I did know most of the presentation and was reminded of this line of the David Sedaris post in Stuff White People Like (which is turning into a book for $300,000 from Random House), "Let me say that again, they will pay money to see someone read from a book they have already read. They know the jokes are coming, they know the punch lines, but they feel the need to hear the author actually say it."

Change Congress is trying to change the role of money in government. There are pledges for candidates and citizens to (1) not accept contributions from lobbyists or PACs, (2) abolish earmarks, (3) increase transparency and (4) publicly finance elections. Of course the usual problems with getting people in Congress to change things is that they mastered this system and its been good them. He brought up a really ironic point. Gerrymandering might make it easier to get support from congressmen for publicly financed elections. Those in "safe" districts really don't have much to lose from giving up the monetary advantage.

If there is a video, you might stay to the end as I asked the last question. He said that Change Congress will allow citizens to donate to a pool of their desired pledge level and will give to candidates with the same pledge level. While this made some sense to me as it gives incentive to candidates to take the pledge, it also seemed to violate the first pledge level. What's the difference between accepting money from a PAC (which pools money from individuals) and accepting pooled money from Change-Congress.org?

He answered that this had come up in his potential congressional campaign with him potentially taking money from ActBlue which had collected donations. He said in this capacity ActBlue and Change Congress were acting as PayPal. The difference between this and a PAC is transparency and of course it's up to the individuals to monitor the results on their own. He said you can be ambiguous on PACs (IIRC the implication was if they were bad). I said that the issue is that the first pledge is not ambiguous.

I'm not sure what the answer is. Change Congress pooling money is an interesting bootstrapping attempt and uses the system (monetary donations) to help change the system (remove money). But you have to do something to avoid recursion and make sure the money actually comes out. A question before mine was how was he going to prevent corruption in this new organization and he didn't really have an answer yet. It is early in the organization and they are still forming their board.

I think it's better to actually separate money from political decisions. As he said, if you remove the need for politicians to be telemarketers for themselves, they have an amazing job. Tackle hard problems, figure out the right answers by talking with the experts in the field. If they could see it that way, who wouldn't want the job. If you're trying to make people see that, maybe it's best not to confusing things by involving money in the first step. Then again, there is a matter of being practical. How, in the current system, do you get people to pay attention?

Update: Doc Searls was there and posted notes.

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