Our government is corrupt.
Not corrupt in any criminal sense, but corrupt in a perfectly legal sense: special interests bend the levers of power to benefit them at the expense of the rest of us
Only the people can force lasting
change on this broken system.
And that change begins with understanding: The people must recognize that corruption is not just one among many important problems. Corruption is the root problem that makes solving the others so difficult.





As Henry David Thoreau wrote—

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."
—so will we practice until this evil has left.

Why you should listen to him:.Lawyer and activist Lawrence Lessig spent a decade arguing for sensible intellectual property law, updated for the digital age. He was a founding board member of Creative Commons, an organization that builds better copyright practices through principles established first by the open-source software community.
In 2007, just after his last TED Talk, Lessig announced he was leaving the field of IP and Internet policy, and moving on to a more fundamental problem that blocks all types of sensible policy -- the corrupting influence of money in American politics.
In 2011, Lessig founded Rootstrikers, an organization dedicated to changing the influence of money in Congress. In his latest book, Republic, Lost, he shows just how far the U.S. has spun off course -- and how citizens can regain control. As The New York Times wrote about him, “Mr. Lessig’s vision is at once profoundly pessimistic -- the integrity of the nation is collapsing under the best of intentions --and deeply optimistic. Simple legislative surgery, he says, can put the nation back on the path to greatness.”