welcome burlington welcome vermont welcome america has a special program here on channel seventeen town meeting television at burlington vermont i am pleased to be hosting my new friend rick hubbard here of burlington vermont and we have a special program for you all this evening on our live at five twenty five program we're talking about our democracy it's my democracy it's rick's democracy and it's actually your democracy too so hopefully we're really into take possession of it and willing to take control of it together so i'd like to introduce the world to recovered man should need no introduction he's been busy at work talking about democracy researching democracy and trying to get something done to restore democracy here in america rick welcome thank you pleasure what's no do we still have a democracy it's a fair question i gave a talk a week or so ago and i put out some indicators of whether we have a democracy or not and at the end of people thinking about the five indicators about two thirds of the room three quarters of the room voted to say we're in trouble or on our we've got a real problem we may be moving to diminish or lose our democracy for a lot of people in that room for a tuesday night as i recall do you feel like there's a popular consensus that democracy is in trouble in the united states and we need to do something about it collectively and sooner than later do you feel like that that's out there  in a way i might phrase it a little differently i think people feel that the way our political system is working is not looking out for the broad interests of most of us whether we're conservative lot liberal of all  ideologies it is making decisions that are distorted and they are distorted away from the broad public's you know benefit and interests and in aim towards people who have more influence who are participating giving more money in the political system and it's wrong that sounds incredibly discouraging what what signs do you see what specific signs do you see present today prevalent today that would point to the fact that we're in trouble and we need to steer away from this well of five criteria you could probably make it ten but let's pick five the first you might say is our citizens interest being properly represented this congress in the way it is making decisions on law regulation and policy over the past few to several decades are they are they doing a good job of properly representing our interests broadly the interests of the bulk of us are never going to please everybody all the time and there's resoundingly evidence no so we've already we've already passed that barrier and that's pretty clear do we have any specific a metrics i know you've done a ton of research in your travels what kind of specific data do we have to back this up oil what are we talking about the fair question and by the way might my research as you phrase it is more just of books that have been written about this you want to nobel laureate joseph stiglitz wrote about it in the price of inequality the price of inequality by joseph stiglitz ok but the one that jumps out at me is a book called affluence and preferences of all of us in america and he had data that broke it by income so basically by income decile from people who are earning the least two people in the top income death sile that were earning the most and he asked when you look at congress decisions by congress on law regulation policy over about thirty one years good run twenty one years and then he had another five or so back in the late sixty's early seventy's five years more data and then he had another couple of years in the mid two thousand so he had a run of thirty one years of data and he looked at surveys of public opinion over all this and so the question was when congress makes decisions how did the decisions congress makes line up with the preferences of the people in the bottom and all the way up through to the top decile and when you get all done it quickly dropped into two groups the ninety percent and the top ten percent and his conclusion was that on this range of all policies and decisions by congress over this and are not really all issues he don't mistake policy all the policies whenever the preferences of the ninety percent of us differed from the preferences of the ten percent and the top economically the correlation was zero statistically insignificant with the preferences of the ninety percent of it's incredibly damning you're telling me that according to the research into those thirty years congressional policy and legislation is for floating free of the influence of ninety percent of the americans that vote in this country that's his conclusion and the only time our preferences put myself and you in the ninety percent if that's ok are taken care of is when our preferences happen to line up with the preferences of that top ten percent if we agree maybe we get a little traction commonalities common obstacles that kind of thing you hope so well gee i think we need to step back for a moment and appreciate kind of the land the landscape of our history and the landscape of where we are today you recently hosted a talk where you talked about the state of our democracy and someone was somewhat snide in re correcting you that it's actually a republic so we're dealing with a in the united states of america it's somewhat new it was created by a bunch of colonialists who revolted against a monarchy crowd in england and basically they created a unified federal government of independent states which all basically operate under three branches of government executive legislative and judicial what's wrong with that good summary  when we declared our independence from great britain we listed a ton of grievances as to why king george and great britain were not properly serving and representing the interests of the people in the colonies our declaration of independence is shot through with examples of improper representation and when we formed our constitution  hundred eighty seven we with three separate branches of power were trying to keep any one entity from having too much power and what was driving that was they wanted to get better representation for the broad concerns of all of us that we just their clear their independence and fought a war and so that was their best attempt and things over time changed there isn't a mention in our constitution about the idea of a republican and democratic party at parties where an even mention the concept was we would elect representatives who in madison swerd in the federalist papers would be dependent on the people and the people alone in order to keep their jobs and that therefore by being dependent they would not stray too far from what is good for all the people but we have stra our discussion just before the program you actually mentioned that there may have been a bit of progress there may have been a bit of about face that went on between the publication of the declaration of independence in seven hundred seventy six and the the constitution is there something in the constitution which does something to clean up some of the lack of specificity in the declaration of independence or do we take these two documents to be somewhat equal in terms of their indorsement of democracy in the american context well the declaration of independence clearly set forth improper representation as the reason we were going to break from great britain when we set up the constitution they had that in mind and they were trying to do a better job but there's nothing in the constitution that says that the job of government is to represent the broad interests of all the people and if the government isn't doing that the people have a right and obligation to fix it now it may not be in the u s constitution but it is in vermont's constitution one of it is in new hampshire's constitution although vermont is a little more we worded the new hampshire's they're more direct about the need to fix it or rebel and now is this in the seven hundred ninety one from on republic constitution a political order under which we no longer live here in the state of vermont or is that the actual state of vermont constitution as it exists under the united states constitution or a puppet are present in force state constitution then that's article seven wonderful well you know we've always been ahead of the pack and it's a proud tradition to carry with us so here we can learn from vermont so here we are it's twenty seventeen that last ten or fifteen years money in politics has been really the the biggest culprit for how the system must be broken how can you have these tens of millions hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases going into democratic and republican party coffers and expect that there's any room left for the representation of people who frankly are a lot of money you know that's true although i would for a minute slightly differently i think it goes back a lot further than ten or twenty years we've had problems  laws been tipped in the eighty's in the seventy's way back in the end of the seventy's the early eighty's i was on the national board of common cause for half a dozen years the national board of common cause yes you might refreshing us a little bit on the history of national  formed by john gardner who was secretary of health education and welfare way back then and after he finished that he formed this organization basically as a good government organization to focus on improving the workings of government and a plea independent that's right nonprofit so would so must've been an eye opener so we we used to explain how money was tipping the process then we common cause and lots of other organizations were lobbying the government to improve and reform itself and that's gone on pretty much continuously from then till now there are hundreds of organizations that have goals whether you're the n publications are free and available to all over the internet and the problem is that in the broad scope of things most of these organizations are not accomplishing their stated objectives they are getting blocked congress congress is not paying attention to them and they are not seeing and being able to enact the kinds of changes that they have a whole membership behind them trying to enact they're getting really blocked and the problem with that goes to the problem with congress today and the reason congress is not properly serving the broad interests of the american people you can have polls that show that big percentages of all americans want something but it doesn't necessarily correlate with what congress does yeah i think we've we've got plenty of evidence to this effect right in front of us i think that one of the big stories in terms of popular opinion in the united states in the year twenty seventeen is this emergence of a consensus moving toward consensus that some kind of medicare for all or some kind of subsidized health care some kind of universal health care system is actually justified it's sustainable and it is the natural future for this country and the democratic party didn't really see this one coming and you actually have democrats in the house the house minority leader was even putting up obstacles to this and say oh i don't think we're ready quite yet and no not quite yet so we see popular opinion at odds with the left leaning major party in congress right now alex we can't in our political system even put the question squarely on the table and as an example i have a masters in business administration and one of the things you do is learn how to analyze and solve problems and based on your values what is the objective and then once you've set your objective in healthcare for example let's say that a good government policy directive would be and one of private provide good health care not insurance actual care for all americans we're going to measure against all we want to do it in for the least total overall system wide cost regardless of who's pocket it's coming out of and we want it to be sustainable into the future and other countries have used approaches that use a fraction of g d p in relation to what we do we spend seventeen or eighteen percent of our g d p that other countries spend eight percent ten percent twelve percent and they have better health outcomes than we do so you would think rationally that congress would at least put that on the table is one of the alternatives that we then analyze it's the hell out of to see which one has a better shot in theory of actually reaching the goal and then we go out and build support you know  collaboration to try and act but it's our political system and we haven't spoken about it yet but that's the way we finance our political system that blocks us from even putting that on the table ok well let's say i'm a candidate here for the state representative not the senator from vermont but the representative from vermont our very own peter welch i'd like to give him a run for his money and i'm going to do so as an independent is he better financed than i am are there are there are some unfair fair financing mechanisms at play in both parties that would actually curtail independent and insurgent candidates ability to get their viable ideas onto the radar and basically volley a platform that mean something to people into the mainstream in the first thing you've got to come to grips with is that out of all americans ninety eight percent of us are not going to donated to any federal candidate or political party think about that directly to any political party or candidate ninety eight percent and that's that's even in the context of the recent insurgent campaign of bernie sanders which had all kinds of people to two percent of america or three hundred twenty million of us he would need you know six or seven million people behind him and even bernie didn't get six or seven million separate contributors america two percent of us give something i give something but they don't call me i don't give enough two tenths of one percent of america is giving stu thirds of all the money that's going in to run the federal political process point zero two of the american population is who tenths of one percent of america and america is finance oh so you third so that's that's point two of the entire nation is controlling the finances of all of the major party candidates as that's of two thirds of it oh two thirds of the major putting it is putting in two thirds of the money that's a pretty sobering statistic and the bulk of that by groups is coming from the financial industry banking finance and insurance the only real issue industry now why is it so lopsided don't we have lots of money we can contribute are they are they better financed in the financial industry to be able to spread this money around or bernie and others talk about the inequality in america that is developed and happened on my watch it's much worse now than when i grew up and  you're in vermont and you're for viewers who might be skeptical about this because there's an ongoing skepticism about whether access to credit amounts to wealth kind of how poor are we i mean she is i've got all my vaccinations and i drive an automobile and none of my teeth are falling out i must be middle class to what extent can we actually show how much we've lost in the last thirty years and do we have any really helpful and sort of texts that we could direct people i could mention the former secretary of education under clinton he has a movie called inequality for all that or raise the numbers pretty concretely and it's pretty unmissable what's going on in that movie  that they will find the numbers to bear that out that's right and the bottom line is that in recent decades our g d p the gross domestic economic output of the whole country has been going up and of that incremental increase each year all virtually all of it has been going to the very top it's within the top ten percent but it's much higher than that and said what i need for one one hundredth of a percent and one one thousandth of the population for the vast majority of all americans if you allow for inflation our actual real wages are going negative we are going backwards until the last year and a half when finally there's a little bit of an uptick the median wage for families household families finally began to go up the last two years but that wouldn't offset this trend i mean it just is a slight counter wow and so it looks like there's a really strong correlation between inequality of wealth and intractability of the political system an ability to finance those who want to run for office so if you're going to run as a candidate against peter and you need money oh i need money now we have to talk about who is going to vote in the primary because nationally only ten fifteen percent of all registered voters in the primaries vote and pick the candidates that then the rest of us get to pick up among in the general election so you have to shape your views to the ten or fifteen percent that are actually going to vote in the primary if you want to get elected and get through you're not going to run as an independent in the primary but let's just make the example shore and so the people in that are voting in the primary often are following issues a little more closely they probably are a little more set in their values and they probably are a little further they're a little further apart than the rest of many in america and so it's as they may have vested intense those people that small percentage will then pick who the rest of us get to choose now it doesn't have to be that way are improvements that could fix that congress california has moved to have an improvement in that correct they decided that on this and some other issues it was becoming too divisive and too many people weren't able to participate and so they basically said we're doing away with that system are we flashing back to the gray davis recall and things like that that showed kind of how dysfunctional the california electoral system was well i can't speak to what led to this but what they did it was say everyone is going on one ballot and democrats republicans independents you'd be on there you wouldn't even get to speak as an independent till after the primaries were over they don't pay any attention to you in the debates you won't get on v p our and in other primaries as an independent so it sounds like the states call of california  consolidated their primaries and rather having people vote along party lines saying i'm a democrat i'm going to vote for my democratic primary i'm a republican i'm vote for my republican primary i'm a progressive same thing we had all of the candidates cardless a party on the same ticket and everybody gets to vote one hundred percent of the registered voters not just the people that are in the republican or the democratic primary and registered party members and so no as a candidate you have to pitch your position on issues not to this ten percent or fifteen percent but you've got to pitch in to what everybody in california or wherever thinks is important it changes the way you run your candidacy if you want to be effect heartening is there any evidence that this model that california has initiated will take off and like wildfire and you know cover the entire continent or i think if we sit back and wait for that to happen we will be sitting and waiting a long time if we want these things to happen we have to take some action ourselves to make it happen that's great to hear because as we run into the final third of our programming is very important to me at least as somebody is producing programming with you here today that we be able to give our viewers something to take away that something actionable specifically so you're the author of a recent book called the democracy amendments these are amendments that have not been passed yet they don't exist what amendments are we going to need in order to bring our democracy into some kind of state of equitability for the citizens and residents of this nation if we want to fix it we and we interestingly has to be we whether we are liberal or conservative or anywhere along the ideological spectrum we have to agree on what will fix the system so that it will work better for all of us and to do that i think we have to leave the other arguments like abortion that we're never likely to agree on aside and just focus on the systemic things one thing we could do is to change the way we finance the political process so that one hundred percent of us are financing the political process if if each of us had and this is a proposal by harvard professor lawrence lessig let's say each of us got a voucher as a registered voter for something like fifty dollars it's in that  range and we could allocate in small amounts this voucher or a prepaid credit card call it what you will to in the primary and then again in the general election those candidates whose positions on issues we live now those candidates to get the money have to have positions that appeal to all hundred percent of us and that you could use that approach to take a big chunk of the three point three billion dollars a year which is about forty five dollars in american households that it takes today to finance our entire federal political process for president senators reps and if you pass them on a good chunk of the money out that way then all you give all of us a reason to get more involved a reason to find out more about the candidates because we got to allocate the money that's one approach and that could make a big change if you change the way we use the public airways ok i did like england or france and basically said we're going to require that the p broadcasters dedicate a certain percentage of free primetime airtime to helping all citizens learn more about the political process so we hear roughly equally about the arius candidates that have enough support to get over the hurdle to get on the stage and we do it equally what are their professional and personal backgrounds what are their positions on issues how do they mix it up in debate if you could learn that more efficiently in a shorter amount of time we could shorten the electorate the election time and we could all still learn about our candidates including the independents and then we could make an intelligent choice that's another approach  so it's sounds like both of those things are talking about putting commonsense boundaries in place putting boundaries around a bare minimum that i would have to contribute a maximum of time that these candidates would have to bore us with their ridiculous platforms and things like that and a certain amount of a certain amount of moderation to this excess that's true and there are many many other potential reforms like the california reform on the way they did their primaries you could you could focus on gerrymandering california put citizens in the middle of the legislator jam gerrymandering process they didn't want one political party that was dominant rigging the rules to benefit their party so they put independent citizens in the middle of the process you still have republicans and democrats on the committee that sets the district boundaries in california but they put citizens who have to have no direct ties to a political party in the middle of it and  it's more complex than that i've spelled it out in my book it's out there but you can basically try and mandate constitutionally that the process work to benefit all citizens not the interest of one party over another it's another kind of approach you can argue in their part of the checks and balances we talked about earlier tonight that's right well we can certainly go on with it forever you will be hosting a series of lectures and participatory interactive dialogues around the state not lectures not please poly logs we'll call them and recovered is that all of his research and all of his work is available through rick hubbard dot au argy you catch him around town tuesdays and thursdays you could probably catch him up on mountain mansfield most weeks and we want to really thank you for your research at this incredibly porton juncture in our nation's history and we want to thank all of you out there for joining us taking democracy seriously taking free speech seriously and keep the faith that there will see you next time