Obama’s hawkish sabre-rattling against Iran (including his hope for sanctions, see his commentary to the Chicago Tribune on September 26, 2004), Obama and Clinton’s agreement that single-payer universal health care is impossible (despite http://www.counterpunch.org/cohen12212007.html Jeff Cohen & Normon Solomon pointing out that a majority of Americans saying they’d pay higher taxes to make universal health care happen), and Obama’s continued funding of the Iraq occupation (even when Democrats control Congress) make me think nothing substantive will change under an Obama administration.

Before Prof. Lessig can be sent to Congress he too will have to deal with these issues, not just debates about copyright. If Lessig does run for Congress let’s hope his platform includes clear stances on properly restricting corporate power replete with specific examples of what he’d do to address corporate crime, fraud, waste, and abuse.

This is really a great example of why Frank is right- corporations will always seek to benefit themselves in the system, no matter what rules you put in place. So we have to go further than Lessig’s proposal, and enable and empower individuals rather than just hobbling ‘special interests’, however you want to define them.

“The Obama campaign, as of late March 2007, has accepted $159,800 from executives and employees of Exelon, the nation’s largest nuclear power plant operator.

The Illinois-based company also helped Obama’s 2004 senatorial campaign. As Ken Silverstein reported in the November 2006 issue of Harper’s, “[Exelon] is Obama’s fourth largest patron, having donated a total of $74,350 to his campaigns. During debate on the 2005 energy bill, Obama helped to vote down an amendment that would have killed vast loan guarantees for power-plant operators to develop new energy projects the public will not only pay millions of dollars in loan costs but will risk losing billions of dollars if the companies default.”

“Senator Obama has all the necessary leadership skills required to be president,” says Frank M. Clark, chairman of Exelon’s Commonwealth Edison utility.”

Unfortunately, that doesn’t help the messaging, which I think was Ethan’s question, and one where I have less constructive feedback for Lessig.

First, as I implied above I think that corporate lobbying is here to stay for reasons of economics if nothing else, and that attempts to restrict it in major ways through Congress or the courts will probably be as unsuccessful as previous attempts to reform copyright in major ways (e.g. Eldred). The alternative approach (by analogy to copyright) is the creation of mechanisms to promote an alternative world of effective lobbying by citizens, just as the GPL and other FOSS licenses created an alternative domain to the proprietary software industry.

Second, as noted above we need to reduce the barriers to entry for citizen lobbyists by providing them inexpensive and effective tools that they themselves can control and enhance — the lobbying equivalent to the GNU tools and other technologies that spurred FOSS development (e.g., online source code repositories, bug systems, Internet-based distribution mechanisms, etc.) Such a citizen lobbyist toolset would enable individuals to know where to lobby, about what, and to whom; it would also enable them to collaborate effectively with each other and form larger “lobbying projects” (analogous to FOSS projects) to combine their efforts to be more effective. Ideally as with the FOSS world more fundamental tools could be combined to create higher-level “lobbying applications” that would both provide more extensive capabilities and also be accessible to and hackable by more people.

Third, as in the FOSS world (and unlike the proprietary software world) the returns to most individual participants in citizen lobbying will be primarily non-economic (at least in the sense that they won’t involve immediate economic rewards). The most effective approaches to citizen lobbying will be those that are designed to leverage that fact, e.g.., by building positive emotional connections between individuals doing the lobbying (who might have little or no economic stake in the issue) and the individuals (not necessarily the same ones) affected by the issue at question. (The Kiva microfinance system is an example of this in a somewhat related area.)

Fourth, just as FOSS developers and activists have built sometimes problematic but generally productive relationships with corporations such as IBM, Sun, Red Hat, etc., individual lobbyists will need to find ways to productively cooperate with corporate lobbying efforts when and where it makes sense, as opposed to just painting all such efforts as negative. (This works in reverse too: If citizen lobbying efforts become more effective then corporate lobbyists will have to become more sophisticated in their efforts to work with them, as opposed to following traditional “Astroturf lobbying” approaches.)

By analogy with the FOSS world, the end vision would be of a robust “citizen lobbying ecosystem” that includes effective activities by multiple actors at multiple levels: spontaneous lobbying campaigns by individuals and small groups, larger more formalized campaigns institutionalized either in separate NGOs (analogous to FOSS nonprofits) or under umbrella NGOs (analogous to the Software Freedom Conservancy and similar efforts), cooperative efforts with corporate players whose interests are aligned, and possibly hybrid organizations that combine aspects of citizen lobbying organizations and political parties. (I consider the latter more unlikely at the national level, given the way the US electoral system is structured, but they might emerge at a local level.)

Anyway, those are my thoughts. I apologize for the length of these ramblings (and I really should make a separate blog post about this) but I thought you and possibly others might have at least some interest in them.

That’s federal election funding rules, not Lessig, I’m pretty certain.

Other than that, great news, can’t wait for him to really run, and I hope his influence will be as good as it was in the CC movement.