Lawrence Lessig compares pre-selection in America’s “green primary” to Beijing’s 1200-strong “nominating committee” proposed for Hong Kong elections:
To run in any election, primary or general, candidates must raise extraordinary sums, privately. Yet they raise that money not from all of us. They raise it from a tiny, tiny few. In the last non-presidential election, only about .05 percent of America gave the maximum contribution to even one congressional candidate in either the primary or general election; .01 percent gave $10,000 or more; and in 2012, 132 Americans gave 60 percent of the superPAC money spent. This is the biased filter in the first stage of our American democracy….
America’s government is demonstrably responsive to the “economic elite and organized business interests,” Gilens and Page found, while “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”…..
There is no doubt that because of the way we fund campaigns, the “economic elite” — what conservatives call “the cronies” and progressives “corporate power” — have hijacked American democracy…..
Read more at We Should Be Protesting, Too | BillMoyers.com.
