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Please support #Lessig2016 and the Citizen Equality Act of 2017

• Politics • 654 words • 4 minutes to read

If you've known me for more than 5 minutes, you’ll know that I’m interested in politics, thoughtful discussion of the issues, and educating the kinds of people who only get their political information from Facebook. You’ll also know that I support moving beyond the petty, drive-by politics of today by changing the way that I — and hopefully others — think about the issues that affect us.

ask not what your country can do for you, [unless you can afford a lobbyist.]

The core of the problem…

Source: Lawrence Lessig: The unstoppable walk to political reform

In America today, your vote doesn’t matter.

Your vote has a 0% impact on whether or not a piece of legislation passes in Congress. I’m not being hyperbolic — statistically, your vote is utterly worthless. Is this what a democratic republic is supposed to be? Is this what the founding fathers meant by “We the People…”

Currently in America, the top 0.02% of Funders determine who gets elected to both Congress and the Presidency. Not the Voters — the Funders. The Funders determine who gets nominated, and the Voters get to pick from whoever is left. Both Democrats and Republicans serve Big Money™ more than their constituents, and elected officials spend between 30–70% of their time in office fundraising for the next election.

Donald Trump flat-out admitted (during the recent 2015 Republican candidate debate) that this sort of cronyism is commonplace in Washington D.C. — where he/she who has the most dollars, wins. Whether you like Rand, Donald, Hillary or Bernie, there are currently zero major candidates who are dedicated to reforming this fundamental corruption in the American political system.

Source: Represent.us: Corruption is Legal in America

The system is rigged.

A USA Today/Gallup poll conducted on July 19–22, 2012 showed that 96% of American voters support reducing the corruption stemming from the influence of money in politics, but 91% of voters don’t believe that we can do anything about it. They feel hopeless — like there’s nothing that can be done to fix the corruption in American politics. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said in an interview that “the system is rigged” when discussing this topic.

For years I’ve felt that Congress doesn’t represent me, and now I’ve seen the statistics that tell me that I’m not the only one.

This is why I would encourage you to look at Lawrence Lessig’s campaign, and the Citizen Equality Act of 2017. Without fundamental change in the core of how our elections are funded, and ensuring that all citizens have equal access to vote, the system will remain rigged against the average voter. The system will continue to be rigged in favor of the Funders, instead of in favor of the Voters as our founding fathers had designed.

Source: MayDay.us: The Plan To Take Our Democracy Back

Please support Lessig in 2016.

If the President is, metaphorically, Superman (capital “S”; I’m not excluding females here), then Washington D.C. is kryptonite. No president will ever be effective in favor of the American voters until we pass true, fundamental reform that brings democratic voting back to the citizenry.

Please support #Lessig2016 and the Citizen Equality Act of 2017.

Source: Lessig on Equal Citizens

Further reading

Ryan Parman

is an engineering manager with over 20 years of experience across software development, site reliability engineering, and security. He is the creator of SimplePie and AWS SDK for PHP, patented multifactor-authentication-as-a-service at WePay, defined much of the CI/CD and SRE disciplines at McGraw-Hill Education, and came up with the idea of “serverless, event-driven, responsive functions in the cloud” while at Amazon Web Services in 2010. Ryan's aptly-named blog, , is where he writes about ideas longer than . Ambivert. Curious. Not a coffee drinker.