Trapped in a K-hole: The truth lies hidden in plain sight. Simply parsing political rhetoric reveals that lobbyists wield much more influence on our political process than most realize. Some members of Congress spend up to 70% of their time rounding up funds for reelection. Last year, the average Senate seat cost campaigners a cool $8.5 million. With the number of former lobbyists now working as congressional aids having more than doubled since the most recent elections, it’s clear that K Street has a vested interest in Congress. But who owns K Street?
If you can’t beat ‘em, join 'em: Here at Pleasestealthisidea, we support technological solutions to increase efficiency and transparency for everything from voting to taxes. When it comes to lobbyists, there is no love lost for those who pedal influence obedient only to dollars but rarely sense. Unfortunately, entrenched systems (particularly those in politics) are notoriously difficult to disrupt. Until we subvert the whole system, our best option is to co-opt it for good. That is, we should aggregate the public interest - like we do on sites like donorschoose.org - to vote with our collective wallet and hire lobbyists to pedal the influence of groups of individuals rather than simply those with private interests.
Implementation: Our site, which replicates the function of KickStarter for congressional lobbying must unfortunately begin by with those currently in control. Hopefully the infusion of interest and investment would attract a whole new rank and file to the industry of influence in our nation’s capital and bring about at least a little lasting transparency. Rather than let the powers that be continue to propagate their influence, let’s all get together and show each other what to change and how to change it. All we have to do is start by swapping the corruption of Jack Abramoff for the openness of the Internet.
Atrribution: Andrew Magliozzi
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.