[startupfounder]

30%-70% of our government representative's time is spent calling the 0.05% (150k people) of US citizens to raise money to get re-elected.

Our Republic is a Representative Democracy (not a true democracy) where there are 2 election cycles, the "Funders" and the voters. As a representative you can't get your name on the ballot in the voting cycle unless you pass the "Funders" cycle.

This is a closed source program where one has to "lean to the green", towards the 0.05% of people who have the money, to play.

NH is the KEY! Isolate 50,000 people in New Hampshire who say, "What will you do to end the system of corruption in Washington?" 50,000 people will swing the vote.

How can technology help isolate those 50k people? What apps can we build? What networks can we build?

[dublinben]

How are 50,000 people in New Hampshire going to change anything? That state has two representatives in the House of Representatives. What are two people in a corrupt legislature supposed to do?

[startupfounder]

What is the first stop in the presidential primary?

New Hampshire. Specifically Dixville Notch, NH[0]

It has massive media coverage because it is the first stop for both parties[1]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixville_Notch,_New_Hampshire [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Hampshire_primary

[mayneack]

One of the reasons that politicians can "get away" with the current campaign finance model is that on a national stage it almost never gets talked about and is never part of "the conversation". If something is important in New Hampshire, then it has to be part of "the conversation" at least once every 4 years.

[snowwrestler]

Even if we accept that this characterization is true, you would still need to show that it results in worse policy outcomes than whatever alternative system you my care to propose.

That is very difficult to do because policy outcomes are subjective. What you think is a worse policy outcome might be desired, or at least acceptable, to a majority of people.

It all comes down to policy, even for Larry Lessig. His turn toward reforming the entire system only happened after the system produced an outcome (on copyright extension) that he strongly disagreed with.

[cbsmith]

I disagree that worse policy outcomes are strictly necessary to propose a need to fix the system.

There are already demonstrable and massive distortions between what Congress debates and invests effort in vs. what the populace is preoccupied with vs. what these interests are preoccupied with. That means we've derailed the original intent of democracy/the Constitution.

Either you ratify a change to the constitution to make that okay, or you make whatever changes are needed to prevent this from continuing. You don't leave something this central to law & order in this country to be bypassed just for the fun of it.

> It all comes down to policy, even for Larry Lessig. His turn toward reforming the entire system only happened after the system produced an outcome (on copyright extension) that he strongly disagreed with.

You should watch the video. You are implying post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning here, and that's not really how it went down. He was working on what he thought was his part of the problem until his definition of "his part of the problem" was changed, and it wasn't changed by his failure to get the outcome he wanted.