“If not us, then who?”
Lawrence Lessig, founder of the Creative Commons, Stanford law professor, and copyright scholar, has turned his attention to corruption resulting from the influence of money and its impact on the decisions made by government, etc.
He presents a strong and compelling first lecture on the subject here.
Perhaps the most important thing we can take from this is the issue of responsibility. As he states, “The most outrageous part of this story of corruption is that this is corruption primed by the most privileged within our society. And the second most outrageous part is that this is corruption permitted by the passivity of another class of privileged, namely us.”
While those of us who are “wealthy, secure, and articulate” have not committed the wrongs leading to corruption of our government, we are complicit in these wrongs if we sit back and fail to take action.