NN08: Lawrence Lessig

12:51: Lessig has a good multimedia presentation with it, very, very entertaining. Hopefully you can see the whole thing online.

12:54: Lessig says a big part of the problem is: Socialized risk, privatized benefits.

12:59: Trust is built by keeping money off the table. Money poisons trust. Trust is the key we need to focus on.

1:04: He mentioned a movie called "Maxed Out," which talks about the issues related to credit card debt.

1:05: Under current law, Enron and similar companies are able to run up huge debts and get out of them, but people can't get out from under credit card debt.

1:08: Favorable views of Congress will soon be within the margin of error within 0% and money is a big part of the problem. They won't regain that trust until we do something about the money.

1:12: How much less money would be influencing decisions if there were public funding of public elections.

1:17: The government gets easy public policy questions wrong because of the distorting effect of money in Washington.

1:19: The subtle corruption of the private money system makes good people do bad things.

1:20: Bloggers and net activists are central to solving the problem.

1:22: Freedom of the press as envisioned by the founders was less CNN/Fox/New York Times and more the pamphlet-style work (think Thomas Paine) that is being done by bloggers.

1:25: There is extraordinary opportunity to do something now before they destroy what's being done. Change Congress was created to seize this opportunity and change Congress.

1:30: Today they'll be launching a blogger council, they're sending out a letter to each candidate/member of Congress requesting them to take a stance on their reform platform and then put the info on their website. They need people to contribute to the campaign. Just say 9. When you contribute, make sure the donations end with .09 (9 cents), so we can track what people are doing and so we can send a message.

1:35: Quoting Al Gore: "To solve the climate crisis, we have to solve our democracy crisis." This goes well beyond simply the climate crisis. This isn't the most important problem to deal with, it's the first one. We can't solve the other problems we face until we solve the money problem that causes the democracy crisis.