My latest read was Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress–and a Plan to Stop It, by Lawrence Lessig. The book poses the question of why the big issues facing the United States are forever kicked down the road by Congress, and as a corollary, why the issues that Congress does spend its time on are not the issues that matter to the great majority of the American people.

The answer posed by the author in a very convincing manner is that the single greatest concern of most senators and Congressional representatives is to get re-elected, and re-election takes money, and money comes from – well, you know the answer. Money comes from corporations and well-funded organizations seeking to advance their bottom line.

The fascinating argument of this book is the author’s explanation of how this funding system works, and it’s not by outright (illegal) bribery. He describes a complex system involving personal relationships, gift culture, well-connected and well-paid lobbyists, and “donations” of a few thousand dollars that can be leveraged into millions if only the right piece of legislation is passed. And it’s all legal.

There is much more – enough to derail the most optimistic among us, I suspect. At the end of the book, Lessig offers several strategies that might solve the problem and return our representatives to what should be their true work: representing the voters who put them in office, not the contributors who made their campaign possible. None of the solutions struck me as likely to make any difference. The most promising one was to work on getting the required plurality of states to call for a constitutional convention to address campaign finance reform – and of course we’re a long, long way from that ever happening.

Strangely enough, this book affirmed the cynical worldview that’s a background element of some of my upcoming work, particularly the story due in an issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction and, sadly, it’s affirmation that I did not go too far in my extrapolations.

Posted on: Saturday, December 15th, 2012 at 8:00 am
Categories: Reading, Recommended Reading.
Tags: non-fiction