“With Selma and the voting rights bill one era of our struggle came to a close and a new era came into being. Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality.” — Martin Luther King, Jr., March 18, 1968

When we consider the events in Ferguson, MO and their aftermath, we need to take account of the trend shown to the left. Almost half of all manufacturing jobs in greater St. Louis, MO have been lost since 1990. Unfortunately, I cannot find a longer trend line, but the deepest job cuts probably came well before 1990. Some cite 1981 as the turning point, the year Corvette moved its plant from St. Louis to Kentucky.

People came to St. Louis for manufacturing jobs. They included African Americans, moving north as part of the Great Migration. Having an industrial job indicated market value. People can turn market value into civic and political power. As an example of that process, during World War II, 8,000 Black workers were hired in St. Louis defense contractors’ factories. Not coincidentally, the First African-American St. Louis Alderman was elected in 1943, and in 1944, the city passed its first integration ordinance.

The reverse is true as well. If you do not have market value, it is very hard to attain or retain political power–or even the ability to stand safely before authority in everyday interactions. Maybe “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”; but injustice can be borne for a long time by people who are viewed as economically dispensable before the rest of an affluent society pays a price for it.

Half the industrial jobs in the St. Louis MSA have disappeared since 1990. Put another way: about 90,000 industrial jobs have been removed in one metropolitan area in one generation. That is an unimaginable blow to the traditional industrial working class. Race definitely enters the picture–in numerous ways. But the graph above is economic; the problem it depicts is deindustrialization; and unless we address its consequences head on, I don’t think we can make real progress.

The post deindustrialization and Ferguson appeared first on Peter Levine.

In 1870, Linus Child of Boston, MA hired an attorney to lobby Congress for personal financial relief and promised to pay the attorney one quarter of the value of the award if it came to pass. The attorney was successful, but Child died and his son refused to pay. The Supreme Court ruled in the son’s favor on the ground that the original agreement–”for the sale of the influence and exertions of the lobby agent to bring about the passage of a law for the payment of a private claim, without reference to its merits”–was null and void. The Court cited Roman law: “a promise made to effect a base purpose, as to commit homicide or sacrilege, is not binding.” Likewise, to hire a lobbyist to pursue legislation for money would be “illegal and void because it is contrary to a … sound policy and good morals.”

The Court was eloquent about why lobbying was so immoral as to merit comparison to homicide or sacrilege in Roman law:

The foundation of a republic is the virtue of its citizens. They are at once sovereigns and subjects. As the foundation is undermined, the structure is weakened. When it is destroyed, the fabric must fall. Such is the voice of universal history. The theory of our government is that all public stations are trusts, and that those clothed with them are to be animated in the discharge of their duties solely by considerations of right, justice, and the public good. They are never to descend to a lower plane. But there is a correlative duty resting upon the citizen. In his intercourse with those in authority, whether executive or legislative, touching the performance of their functions, he is bound to exhibit truth, frankness, and integrity. Any departure from the line of rectitude in such cases is not only bad in morals, but involves a public wrong. No people can have any higher public interest, except the preservation of their liberties, than integrity in the administration of their government in all its departments.

The agreement in the present case was for the sale of the influence and exertions of the lobby agent to bring about the passage of a law for the payment of a private claim, without reference to its merits, by means which, if not corrupt, were illegitimate, and considered in connection with the pecuniary interest of the agent at stake, contrary to the plainest principles of public policy. No one has a right in such circumstances to put himself in a position of temptation to do what is regarded as so pernicious in its character. The law forbids the inchoate step, and puts the seal of its reprobation upon the undertaking.

If any of the great corporations of the country were to hire adventurers who make market of themselves in this way, to procure the passage of a general law with a view to the promotion of their private interests, the moral sense of every right-minded man would instinctively denounce the employer and employed as steeped in corruption and the employment as infamous.

If the instances were numerous, open, and tolerated, they would be regarded as measuring the decay of the public morals and the degeneracy of the times. No prophetic spirit would be needed to foretell the consequences near at hand.

In 2013, despite very weak disclosure laws, we know that $3.24 billion was spent to influence the federal government, and 12,353 people registered as federal lobbyists. The Court that decided Trist v Child would conclude that our public morals have decayed to the point that we no longer deserve the name “republic.”

Contrast the majority opinion in Citizens United v. FEC (2010), which views corporate donations to favored candidates as protected speech and doesn’t even hint at the threat to “public morals”:

Because speech is an essential mechanism of democracy—it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people—political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it by design or inadvertence. Laws burdening such speech are subject to strict scrutiny, which requires the Government to prove that the restriction “furthers a compelling interest and is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest.” … Premised on mistrust of governmental power, the First Amendment stands against attempts to disfavor certain subjects or viewpoints or to distinguish among different speakers, which may be a means to control content. … There is no basis for the proposition that, in the political speech context, the Government may impose restrictions on certain disfavored speakers. Both history and logic lead to this conclusion.

I came upon Trist v Child in David Cole’s review of Zephyr Teachout’s new book on corruption. I agree with Cole that lobbying and campaign finance raise First Amendment as well as anti-corruption concerns. It would be possible to over-regulate money in politics and thereby violate individual rights. I would not endorse the Court’s ruling in Trist that made lobbying illegal: individuals should be able to petition Congress. I was a registered federal lobbyist in 1991-3. I lobbied on behalf of Common Cause and believed that our goals were patriotic and idealistic, but Common Cause is a corporation, and it paid my salary. Thus I do not favor a ban on money in politics or a blanket law against political speech by corporations.

But we used to have a social norm that it was basically ignoble in a republic to hire someone to lobby or to influence the government for money, especially if cash were the primary motive for the petitioner or his agent. That social norm has decayed in popular opinion and vanished in jurisprudence. As I write in We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For (p. 115)

The Court [in Citizens United] meant that it was entirely appropriate for corporations to exercise power in their own interests by spending money to influence elections. This decision capped a century-long process in which special interests became “civil society,” Madison’s factions became “constituencies” or “stakeholders,” propaganda became “public relations” and “communications,” corporate pressure became “government relations,” and lobbying morphed from a disreputable matter of hanging around hotel lobbies and button-holing politicians into a white-collar profession.

However we reform the laws that govern money in politics, we must also recover the moral intuitions that the Court found self-evident in 1874. People who seek money to influence Congress, regardless of the merits of the case, are “adventurers” abhorrent to the “moral sense of every right-minded man,” “steeped in corruption,” whose proliferation would mark “the decay of the public morals and the degeneracy of the times.”

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(New York City): I am on a Washington-New York-Boston trip in which many of my meetings coincidentally touch on the same topic: what should we do about money in politics? Per my usual rant, the question is not what should be done. That is relatively easy. The question is: What should you and I do, granting that courts and legislatures are not going to do what should be done?

This is a question not only for you and for me, but also for the national organizations that work on this topic, such as my beloved first employer, Common Cause (now under the dynamic and visionary leadership of Miles Rapoport). Such organizations can communicate with the public and can enroll members, but ultimately they must ask citizens to do stuff. What should they ask?

They can’t just ask people to change their minds. Public opinion is at the heart of some problems. For example, climate change is worse because many voters do not believe it is happening, do not consider it a serious threat, or doubt that we can realistically do anything about it. Motivation is also a factor, because individuals, communities, and nations benefit by generating the problem (in this case, carbon emissions), and anyone who takes individual or collective action to limit pollution bears the price of that action. Climate change is thus the Mother of All Collective Action Problems, made worse by false opinions (which, in turn, result from targeted investments in misinformation). It is worth changing people’s minds to believe the facts and to vote and act differently.

Campaign finance is a different kind of problem. The public already thinks it’s terrible. Most people do not contribute to the problem, since only 0.18% of the population gives $200 or more. But it is against the interest of the majority of elected officials to do anything about money in politics, since they were elected under the current system. Democratic politicians tend to be more hypocritical than Republicans on this topic; neither party does anything about it, but some Republicans would defend the status quo on philosophical grounds.

Hobson, who offered one particular horse or none at all, and called that a choice.

Voters are typically offered a Hobson’s Choice: Vote for Candidate A–who shares your views on important issues like climate change but won’t do anything about campaign finance–or vote for Candidate B, who opposes your views of those other essential issues and won’t do anything about campaign finance.

I think that to some extent, politicians also face a Hobson’s Choice because of the recalcitrance of all the other politicians, a classic collective action problem. They can A) burn their capital trying to pass campaign finance reform, or B) actually pass health insurance reform, Wall Street reform, and environmental laws. Basically, my reading of President Obama is that he chose option B.

We would like everyone (voters and politicians) to change their priorities and put campaign finance reform higher–but in order to do what?

Well, there are things you can do. Join Common Cause, because it’s a robust membership organization that fights indefatigably for reform. Give money to Mayday PAC, which will intervene in “five districts during this election cycle, in a way that makes it clear that the most important issue was the role that money plays in politics.” Donate to Fund for the Republic, too. Tell your elected officials, even if they stand with you on other issues, that they risk losing your support unless they sign onto something like H.R. 20, the Government by the People Act.

I think these are worthy steps, but I am not overly optimistic they will work even if quite a few people do them. That is why I am obsessed with the problem of leverage, or how to turn ethical civic action into large-scale change in a given system of incentives and constraints, against dedicated opponents. After all, Margaret Mead was wrong: we should doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. They usually fail–or grow into a large group, maybe achieve something, and cease to be thoughtful and committed along the way. We must turn from a bunch of citizens who are angry about the status quo (and who perhaps take some modest actions) into an effective mass movement. That is a problem of organization and structure that I do not think we have cracked.

The Mayday PAC widget:

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In the earlier times of the colony, when lands were to be obtained for little or nothing, some provident individuals procured large grants; and, desirous of founding great families for themselves, settled them on their descendants in fee tail. The transmission of this property from generation to generation, in the same name, raised up a distinct set of families, who, being privileged by law in the perpetuation of their wealth, were thus formed into a Patrician order, distinguished by the splendor and luxury of their establishments. From this order, too, the king habitually selected his counsellors of State; the hope of which distinction devoted the whole corps to the interests and will of the crown. To annul this privilege, and instead of an aristocracy of wealth, of more harm and danger, than benefit, to society, to make an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent, which nature has wisely provided for the direction of the interests of society, and scattered with equal hand through all its conditions, was deemed essential to a well-ordered republic.

–Thomas Jefferson, recalling his own Bill for the Abolition of Entails, August 11, 1776

Thomas Picketty has become the world’s best-selling economist with a simple argument. Normally, he says, the people who own capital not only become richer (which would helpfully encourage investment), but their wealth grows consistently faster than the economy. Thus, even if they lounge around–even if they fall into comas–their share of GDP will grow, giving them disproportionate political as well as economic influence. That pattern was suspended for most of the 20th century but is now returning.

Picketty has been called Marxist and anti-American, but Thomas Jefferson shared his concerns. In colonial Virginia, capital took the form of land and slaves. Some of the earlier settlers had put their families on course to dominate the colony by writing wills that passed their estates to their first-born sons and prevented their land from being sold or divided. Since the British were blocking westward expansion, holding together a large estate meant gaining a growing share of the colony’s wealth as the population expanded. Jefferson thought this was a recipe for an “aristocracy of wealth” that was incompatible with republican government. He passed bills to abolish the “entails” that kept family estates from splitting.

Scholars seem to disagree about the economic and social consequences of his legislation. But he saw his own bills as radical efforts and as components of a multi-pronged strategy:

I considered 4 of these bills, passed or reported, as forming a system by which every fibre would be eradicated of antient or future aristocracy; and a foundation laid for a government truly republican. The repeal of the laws of entail would prevent the accumulation and perpetuation of wealth in select families, and preserve the soil of the country from being daily more & more absorbed in Mortmain. The abolition of primogeniture, and equal partition of inheritances removed the feudal and unnatural distinctions which made one member of every family rich, and all the rest poor, substituting equal partition, the best of all Agrarian laws. The restoration of the rights of conscience relieved the people from taxation for the support of a religion not theirs; for the establishment was truly of the religion of the rich, the dissenting sects being entirely composed of the less wealthy people; and these, by the bill for a general education, would be qualified to understand their rights, to maintain them, and to exercise with intelligence their parts in self-government: and all this would be effected without the violation of a single natural right of any one individual citizen. To these too might be added, as a further security, the introduction of the trial by jury, into the Chancery courts, which have already ingulfed and continue to ingulf, so great a proportion of the jurisdiction over our property.

Jefferson certainly should have favored (instead of opposed) the abolition of slavery. But note his explicit class theory; his concern with “future” as well as “antient” aristocracy; and his willingness to use a combination of economic, cultural, legal/governmental, and educational strategies to produce the “foundation … for a government truly republican.” I think the nation’s third president would view today’s proposals for combatting oligarchy as but weak and tentative.

See also: why is oligarchy everywhere? and why is oligarchy everywhere? (part 2).

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By 1937, John D. Rockefeller had accumulated $1.4 billion from his monopolistic oil business. That was 1.5% of the whole nation’s GDP, concentrated in one person. It conferred vast political power on him and his family. His descendents were to include New York Governor and US Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, Arkansas Governor Winthrop Rockefeller, West Virginia Senator and Governor John D. Rockefeller IV, and other prominent leaders of government and philanthropy. In Aristotle’s terms, the Rockefeller family and their peers added an element of oligarchy to the mixed regime of the United States.

However, per Thomas Picketty’s argument, economic growth was larger than the returns to capital from 1913-2000. Meanwhile, the Rockefeller clan grew in number. They earned money from their capital (and from other business activities), but the country grew at a faster pace. As a result, according to Forbes, there are now 200 descendents of John D. Rockefeller, and they have $8.5 billion in combined assets. Their total wealth is 0.05% of the nation’s GDP. It is shared 200 ways, leaving each Rockefeller with an average share of .0002% of GDP.

In short, John D. had a slice of the national pie 7,500 times bigger than that of his descendents. To the extent that today’s Rockefellers have an advantage in politics, it is mainly because the generations after John D. genuinely served the public and built up some honor. His son John D. Jr. quit active management of the family business and devoted himself to philanthropy with a strongly progressive tilt. Many of his children and in-laws then became public servants.

Arguably this happened because, in Aristotle’s terms, the Rockefellers lived in a constitutional polity, or at least a society that aspired to be one. In any proper constitutional polity, “The end of the state is the good life … by which we mean a happy and honorable life” (Politics 3.9). Congress forced John D. Jr., to testify about the Ludlow Massacre, and then Mother Jones herself persuaded him that his testimony had been false. “Mackenzie King was later to say that this testimony was the turning point in Junior’s life, restoring the reputation of the family name; it also heralded a new era of industrial relations in the country.”

In a constitutional order, the rich can grow richer than they were, but their ability to convert their wealth into power must shrink over time; they must be required to explain and justify their behavior; and they must be disciplined by the need to demonstrate public service.

But Aristotle observed a cycle of decline before his own day: “The ruling class soon deteriorated and enriched themselves out of the public treasury; riches became the path to honor, and so oligarchies naturally grew up.” Signs that the same decline is happening today:

• The owners of capital and their heirs accumulate growing shares of GDP.
• Capital can be converted into political power. Restraints are removed.
• Wealth (inherited or otherwise) confers respect or honor, independent of genuine public service.
• The very wealthy are insulated from their critics and do not have to explain themselves.

[This is a follow-up from yesterday's post. See also Ezra Klein's "Doom Loop of Oligarchy" posted today.]

The post why is oligarchy everywhere? (part 2) appeared first on Peter Levine.

The first governments were kingships. … . But when many persons equal in merit arose, no longer enduring the pre-eminence of one, they desired to have a commonwealth, and set up a constitution. The ruling class soon deteriorated and enriched themselves out of the public treasury; riches became the path to honor, and so oligarchies naturally grew up. These passed into tyrannies and tyrannies into democracies; for love of gain in the ruling classes was always tending to diminish their number, and so to strengthen the masses, who in the end set upon their masters and established democracies. – Aristotle, Politics III

Recent headlines suggest that the Aristotelian cycle is happening globally–with the very important difference that Aristotle believed oligarchies turned into democracies, but the reverse seems to be happening now. For instance:

• “US Details Charges Against Ukrainian Oligarch“ (ABC News-Apr 2, 2014)
• “French court blocks Kazakh oligarch’s extradition“ (RFI-Apr 9, 2014)
• “Sheldon: Iran’s Best Friend,” by Thomas Friedman (April 5), with the sentence: “[Sheldon] Adelson personifies everything that is poisoning our democracy and Israel’s today — swaggering oligarchs, using huge sums of money to try to bend each system to their will.”
• “Oligarchs and Money,” by Paul Krugman (

  April 6, 2014)

Why would this be happening? Mainly, it’s because we aren’t fighting back effectively; and I am optimistic that sooner or later we will. But in doing so, we’ll have to address the underlying currents that seem to cause democracies to drift into oligarchies unless we act.

First, consider the argument of Thomas Picketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, which–to be clear–I have not yet read. His point is that almost always, the return to capital has been greater than the economic growth rate. That means that the people who possess capital get progressively richer than everyone else, and their children get even richer than them. The period 1913-ca. 2010 was anomalous because growth exceeded the return to capital, meaning that people with wealth got richer, but their societies got richer still. That is also a period when democracy and socialism (between them) covered most of the global north. One might assume that market democracies boosted growth and lowered the returns to capital, and that would imply that they can do so again. But it’s also possible that the returns to capital were lower than growth for external reasons (technological change; war), which is why democracies survived. If the latter explanation is true, we are in trouble, because returns to capital again exceed growth and are expected to do so for decades to come.

Second, there’s the disturbing thesis of Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined its Citizens and Privatized the Public. In my version of their argument: starting in the 1600s, certain nation-states allowed the mass public to have power. As a result, these states were able to mobilize their people to fight wars and to lend money to finance wars. In turn, the states that had the biggest armies either dominated everyone else or forced the others to imitate them. The exceptions were terrifying tyrannies that conscripted their men and seized their wealth, but they turned out to be fragile. By a kind of Darwinian process, the nation-states that were democracies prevailed; they were “fittest.” But then technologies of death became more sophisticated. Wealthy nations no longer needed lots of soldiers. They could win wars with a few well-equipped professionals. They only needed a small proportion of their people to finance these 21st century militaries. As a result, the Darwinian pressure to expand democracy is now gone.

Again, I am not proposing an inevitable drift to oligarchy. These are simply tendencies that we must confront.

The post why is oligarchy everywhere? appeared first on Peter Levine.

Lawrence Lessig makes the following argument in his TED Talk, his excellent stump speech (which he gave last week at Tufts), and his book The USA is Lesterland:

Members of Congress and candidates for Congress spend anywhere between 30% and 70% of their time raising money to get themselves elected or their party back in power. But they raise that money not from all of us. Instead, they raise that money from the tiniest fraction of the 1%. Less than 1/20th of 1% of America are the “relevant funders” of congressional campaigns. That means about 150,000 Americans, or about the same number who are named “Lester,” wield enormous power over this government. These “Lesters” determine this critical first election in every election cycle—the money election.

I could not agree more. I spent 1991-3 lobbying for campaign finance reform on behalf of Common Cause and have watched things deteriorate ever since. I admire Lessig’s extraordinary leadership and commitment, exemplified by his walking across New Hampshire recently to raise awareness. He has moved easily 1,000 times as many people as I have with my book The New Progressive Era and other writings about campaign finance.

Yet I am not that optimistic about the strategies he proposes. He is clear-eyed about the limitations of each strategy but leaves the audience wondering if anything can work. Here is where I would offer an alternative.

The “Lesters” are exceptionally powerful because their money buys communication. They do not literally purchase votes; they buy the ability to advertise and persuade. One reason that they raise so much money ($7 billion in 2012) is that mass communication has a low return on investment. Influencing elections is an expensive and uncertain proposition.

Meanwhile, in We are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, I estimate that at least one million Americans are currently involved in demanding forms of civic work–projects and programs that involve strong elements of open-ended public deliberation. Collectively, they engage many millions of their fellow citizens. Their impact per dollar is much higher, because they have strong relationships with peers.

But they are so deeply invested in specific civic projects that they do not have the time to step back and ask why civic work is so frustrating and marginal in our society. A major reason is the corruption of our political institutions, and the Lesters are deeply implicated in that. The strategy I recommend is to organize the “Civic One Million” for political reform. They have vastly less money than the Lesters, but they may actually have more of what the Lesters try to buy: persuasiveness.

In practical terms, this means convening people who do civic work to ask why their efforts are so hard, to diagnose the barriers, and to develop collective strategies for political reform.

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