He started the Mayday super PAC, raising millions for congressional candidates who vowed to fight the corrupting influence of money in politics. Larry Lessig teaches at Harvard Law School and made his reputation as an expert on Internet law. She’s also the author of this acclaimed book, “Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United.” She got more than a third of the vote in the Democratic primary. Zephyr Teachout teaches at Fordham Law School, and ran for Governor of New York, trying to rouse the public against corruption in our state government. That’s why we asked Larry Lessig and Zephyr Teachout to return to talk further about corruption – a subject both have studied as scholars and are fighting against as reformers. And that’s why the great problems facing everyday people in America are not being seriously addressed by a political class afraid to offend the people who write the checks – the corporations and the rich. And that’s just for starters.ĭemocrats, meanwhile, are so compromised by their own addiction to big money they have forgotten their history as champions of the working stiff, the little folks down there at the bottom. Once upon a time the GOP stood for Grand Old Party now it stands for Guardians of Privilege, and this is payback time for everything from fracking to getting the big banks off the hook from doing away with the minimum wage and coddling off-shore corporate tax avoiders to privatizing Medicare and Social Security to gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Environmental Protection Agency. Now, partisans of the system say this is just business as usual, which, of course, it is, and that’s the problem, as we’re about to see with the newly elected Congress. But the other side of the story is that members of Congress may implicitly threaten businesses that if they don't change their policy, or if they’re not heavily involved in the political process, that bad things might happen to them. The conventional wisdom out there is that businesses are going to Washington, writing checks and expecting big returns. NPR’s Peter Overby talked with political scientist David Primo: But it’s a road that runs in both directions. Now, that’s why K Street in Washington is the road to paradise for lobbyists. The watchdog Sunlight Foundation reports that from 2007 to 2012, two hundred corporations spent almost $6 billion for lobbying and campaign contributions, and received more than $4 trillion - that's $4 trillion - in government contracts and other forms of assistance. And the Supreme Court has ruled that powerful corporations and rich individuals can give just about anything they want to politicians who do their bidding, and it’s not considered corruption. Today, gifts to politicians that were once called graft or bribes are called contributions. They worried that the gift would corrupt his judgment and unduly bias Franklin in France’s favor.Įver since, we Americans have been debating the meaning of corruption.
His Majesty was a good friend of the American Revolution but when he gave Benjamin Franklin a gold snuff box with the monarch’s portrait surrounded with diamonds, some of our founding fathers objected. Like many of you, I’ve been watching Congress since the midterm elections, and what I’ve seen has me thinking of King Louis XVI of France.
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