Wealthy campaign donors and lobbyists continue to exercise a disproportionate amount of influence on lawmakers, Harvard U. Law School professor Lawrence Lessig said Thursday evening in the lecture “Rebooting Democracy.” Lessig said the influence is part of a set of “completely predictable, understandable results” of a democracy centered on a flawed system of electoral campaign finance.

The United States has experienced a “radical change in the industry of lobbying” in recent decades, Lessig said, explaining that members of Congress have become “increasingly dependent on campaign cash” as the costs of campaigning increase. Politicians are spending a significant portion of their time in office ensuring that they or other members of their party are re-elected, he added.

The recent financial crisis exemplified this problem, according to Lessig. The “explosion in campaign cash” given to the Democratic and Republican parties by large firms who lobbied for financial deregulation changed the nature of Wall Street operations, Lessig said. This exchange fostered a relationship between the government and corporations that gave lobbyists more power in Washington, he added.

Financial regulations have also protected Wall Street interests through bailouts, which “socialize risk and privatize benefit,” Lessig said.

The return on investment for lobbying efforts is enormous, which explains the amount of money poured into the occupation, Lessig said. According to one report, the return of investment for lobbying efforts can reach up to 22,000 percent, he said.

The flourishing lobbying industry has caused a “wealth boom” in Washington, D.C.

“The business of selling policy is an extraordinary profitable business,” Lessig said.

The nature of campaign finance in the United States has created a democracy that favors policies supporting the interests of the largest campaign donors, despite the insistence of politicians that campaign money “might be affecting access to lawmakers, but is definitely not affecting results,” according to Lessig.

Lessig said the “learned obliviousness” of legislators is the underlying cause of this problem.

The debate over global warming is another example of how private industries are attempting to shape public policies, Lessig said. He cited a survey of approximately 1,000 peer-reviewed science articles, all of which support the global warming findings articulated by former Vice President Al Gore. At the same time, over 50 percent of articles produced by “popular media” explicitly questioned the validity of the global warming issue, he said.

“The difference between science and the popular media is the extraordinary amount of junk science that has been spread into this debate by campaign funders who have particular and self-interested views in the matter,” Lessig said.

These donors hope to give Congress reason to delay implementing environmental-related policies that might hurt businesses, he added.

“Policies get bent to those who pay … to the effect that it weakens public trust of American democracy,” Lessig said.

A poll suggested that roughly 88 percent of the American population currently believes that “money buys results in Congress,” he said.

The solution, Lessig said, is to “reboot our democracy.”

Lessig proposed a cross-partisan citizen movement to restore the integrity of American democracy, and the link between what the people want and the policies lawmakers implement.

“We need to take control of this alternate path to delete the corruption that is our government in this sense,” he said.

Lessig currently serves as the director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard U.