We have an underdeveloped democracy and overdeveloped plutocracy.

We're trying to convey how much easier it is than most people think, especially young people, to turn the country around if they focus on the levers, if they focus on Congress, and state legislatures.

Let it not be said by a future, forlorn generation that we wasted and lost our great potential because our despair was so deep we didn't even try, or because each of us thought someone else was worrying about our problems.

Companies like Enron have learned that small investments in endowing chairs, sponsoring research programs or hiring moonlighting professors can return big payoffs in generating books, reports, articles, testimony and other materials to push for and rationalize public policy positions that damage the public interest but benefit corporate bottomlines.

Nothing short of a federal investigation can begin to disclose the abuses which have woven a fine web of mutually implicating relationships between businessmen and government officials.

Secrecy destroys accountability.

It is basically a strategy to destroy the essence of democracy, which is the competitiveness and choices of candidates on the ballot.