One Way Forward: The Outsider's Guide to Fixing the Republic is the seventh book by Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor and activist concerned about the excessive influence of corporate money in politics.

He says the two groups have a lot in common, including a concern for the future of the US and a willingness to devote substantial amounts of time and possibly money to do what they think is likely to fix the worst of the problems.

Lessig hopes this book will help catalyze a needed rapprochement between different groups, encouraging them to listen to the others and find their common grounds.

To facilitate this, Lessig writes, "After a short period, and assuming the book takes hold, I will license it freely, and based on the feedback (at oneway.lessig.org), draft version two.

Insiders were also surprised by Obama's performance in 2008 and more recently by the Tea Party, the international Occupy movement, and the SOPA / PROTECT IP Act protests.

The Tea Party, Occupy, Move to Amend and similar groups have attracted many people who are very passionate in their concerns and willing to devote substantial amounts of time and money to try to fix what they see wrong.

Lessig insists that we can either (a) remain separate and ineffective or (b) squelch the inflammatory condemnations of the "others" and build a coalition to reduce crony capitalism and make the government "dependent on the people alone", as James Madison wrote in Federalist paper No.

This provides an essentially infinite supply of opportunities for calling lobbyists and major corporate contributors to "extort" (Lessig's term) money from them to extend their special provisions.

This diagram suggests a candidate for the gateway problem not discussed by Lessig: The reliance of the public on the major media conglomerates.

His proposed solution includes public funding of substantive investigative journalism, which could be implemented in a way consistent with Lessig's proposed "Grant and Franklin" project for public funding of political campaigns controlled by individual taxpayers; see The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again.

He suggests that citizens ask legislators to support publicly funded elections, to limit and make transparent independent political expenditures, and to reaffirm that "unalienable rights" belong to natural persons only.

He also suggests calling a constitutional convention for the limited purpose of drafting an amendment to dramatically reduce the corrupting influence of money in politics (see "CallAConvention.org".

Justice Stevens in his dissent from this decision wrote that, "While American democracy is imperfect, few outside ... this court thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics."

Apart from this book, Lessig supports the Rootstrikers organization, which tries to bring together people of differing political persuasions hoping to find common ground.

The League of Women Voters's web site provides a brief comparison of key features of different constitutional amendments proposed as of mid-2012.