Thurgood Marshall and other NAACP leaders holding an anti-racism poster. By New York World-Telegram and the Sun staff photographer: Al Ravenna [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.

Chief Justice Earl Warren

So people are casting about for the means to protect themselves against that insecurity. They are looking for a way to not only afford decent housing but to buy the house in the neighborhood that feeds into the good k-12 schools that will give their own kids a better chance at a life not marred by the insecurity that keeps them up nights. They are looking for a way to be respected at work, to be respected in their communities, to locate their position in the larger social structure and to find it congruent with their ideal selves. They are looking for dignity and rest. That we have constructed the only means for achieving those things as credential hoarding can be understood as “market demand” but I would call it mass insecurity. Again, language, tools, kings and masters.

If we accept my story of profit and higher education market we get to different kinds of questions that lead to different kinds of policies. Rather than disrupting higher education because it does not serve the needs of the market we can ask the market why it does not serve the interests of human beings. Why, as corporations increasingly use their moral authority and political will to limit their tax exposure and their contribution to social institutions like k-12 schools, why is public education being refashioned to provide them the “human capital” they require to continue their abdication of the greater social good?

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Profit, HigherEd and Lessons on the Prestige Cartel

Jerry Davis objects to my post, accusing me of misreading him because I didn’t read him (allegedly).  “I would not summarize my argument as ‘Blame the consumers,’ and tried to be careful not to phrase it this way.” I gather part of the complaint is that ‘blame the consumers’ implies it is solely their fault, whereas (at points) Davis is clear blame is shared. Fair enough.

Let’s start with the original post.

Blame quickly extended from the owners of the building and the factories it contained, to the government of Bangladesh, to the retailers who sold the clothing. But the culpability extends all the way down the supply chain — to us.

Our willingness to buy garments sewn under dangerous conditions, chocolate made from cocoa picked by captive children, or cellphones and laptops containing “conflict minerals” from Congo create the demand that underwrites these tragedies.

I’ll concede he doesn’t actual apply the word blame to consumers – he used culpability (seemingly  as a synonym for blame, which is used at the beginning of the sentence, but let’s leave that aside).  Where does our culpability come from?  “Our willingness” (a phrase I already quoted) to buy such goods.

So companies are culpable too, right. Well, maybe, maybe not.  There’s more on why companies can’t tell what happens further up the chain, but I like this bit:

After a generation of outsourcing and globalization, corporations in many industries are often merely the last step in a long chain of suppliers and assemblers. As a result, the companies whose brands are on the product often have little idea of what might have occurred two steps back.

Again, let’s leave aside that this is a feature, not a bug, of the system of “outsourcing and globalization.”  So if you are keeping score – the companies that sells you the product “often have little idea of what might have occurred two steps back” but you are culpable for buying it.

This issue gets addressed in his response to other commenters.

Should consumers feel any responsibility for how the goods they buy are produced? Ms. Goodman says no — that executives and officials higher up the chain are responsible, not us. But why should the buck stop with a retailer that buys from a wholesaler that buys from a brand licensee that sources from Bangladesh? The retailer is three steps removed from factory conditions; we are four.

We can choose to ignore distant tragedies, but our purchases keep the machinery in motion. In a Web-enabled world, ignorance is a feeble excuse: if you can use a search engine, you can quickly research which brands oversee safe practices and make the long-term commitment that Professor Posner describes, and which do not.

Ignorance is no excuse – for you.  It is an excuse for the corporations, who presumably are not Web-enabled. That seems like a weird and unjustifiable double standard to me.  Beyond that, my response is that I and Walmart are different in a number of ways, not just where we fall in how far removed we are from the factory.  Walmart has enormous sums of money, is an exceedingly large buyer, and has all sorts of resources I don’t. Walmart doesn’t suffer from collective action problems as my fellow consumers and I  do.

Can consumers do anything to promote changed business practices? Ms. Kenney mentions the grape boycott that ultimately changed the working conditions of farm laborers in California. Consumers today have the capacity to change the landscape for nearly every product they buy — particularly the affluent demographic that reads The Times. There are free apps on the Web that allow us to identify responsible products (such as GoodGuide), and some grocers post the provenance of their fresh foods.

I’ve already addressed the point about the apps, so I’ll just say the existence of a tool is not proof that the tool will deliver any level of results. Call me skeptical but I suspect those of us expressing outrage over this disaster typically have experience trying to buy ethically and are aware of the limits of such things.

But let’s talk about the grape boycott, which was not a product of aggregated consumers deciding they would not buy grapes. In fact, it was led by a union. In Bangladesh, workers need the approval of the factory owner to form a union (although that may be changing, thanks to a lot of voice.) Union members traveled around the country educating and mobilizing consumers, something that would be far more difficult for non-union workers across the globe.  Also, it’s a lot easier to avoid buying grapes (which are quite obvious) than say – clothing and electronics, whole classes of items.

The question here is about how regular people can bring about change. Is it better to use their consumption choices in order to express their views, or political action to express their views? That should be the question- rather than beginning with the idea that we should see ourselves as ‘consumers’ first, when thinking about this issue.  As Albert Hirschman said, “A person less well trained in economics might naively suggest that the direct way of expressing views is to express them!” Voice –that is, demanding change, causing a ruckus, which involves blaming those with the power to do something, is working quite well right now.

1. Bangladesh’s government agreed on Monday to allow the country’s garment workers to form unions without prior permission from factory owners.
2. Bangladesh’s government has announced that it plans to raise the minimum wage for garment workers.
3. H&M announced that it signed a fire and building safety agreement as did Zara.

Just so we’re clear, I’m not against people choosing to shop ethically, or am I against boycotts of particular companies who refuse to take these sorts of steps – like the Gap and Walmart. But the former is unlikely to change to change much, and the latter is more of a hybrid tactic using both voice and exit. (That the boycott goes beyond choosing what to buy and includes naming and shaming is key – it is a very different animal than buying decisions alone). I’m for a diversity of tactics. And these changes are essentially just press releases at the moment. The work of translating them into actions remain. Decisions to buy or no to buy, it should be noted, are very blunt, and therefore not very good for ensuring implementation.

But the whole idea that “consumer choices are the motive force, and we control what we buy” (a much stronger statement than ‘consumers bear some responsibility too’)  is problematic because – 1) it overlooks that we can only chose among the alternatives we are given, which leaves a great deal beyond our power and 2) it makes consumers feel guilty (or culpable or whatever) and defuses their anger making effective action less likely.

In his comment, Davis says:

If we want to change corporate behavior, we need to change consumer demand. “Naming and shaming,” boycotts, and public humiliation only work if consumers care and change their buying habits.

But that only holds if consumers prefer to buy things made under these conditions, and aren’t willing to pay the small amount is would likely take to change it.  Both of these claims are doubtful.  But my three bullets above suggest that change can come about through political, as opposed to economic, action. (So does the history of activism).

Regardless of intention, the overemphasis on the power of consumers and the suggestion that the only way (as a factual matter, or a matter of legitimacy) to change it is through consumption choices supports the status quo. And that status quo, including the sort of conditions that led to this horrific disaster, should not be supported.

A market, which exists, unlike “the market” which does not. (St Quinton Saturday Market by M Hobbs)

As far I am concerned, there is no moral or political difference between the two. Predistributive institutions and redistributive institutions are both just institutions. What matters is achieving greater economic equality, not so much the precise institutional regime that we use to get there. If anything, I tend to find so-called redistributive institutions more attractive because they are easier to fine tune and strike me as more liberating.

I certainly agree on the ‘no difference’ point.  Why is it more viable?

But, as Hacker correctly points out, my view is almost certainly an outlying one. For cultural or other reasons, Americans tend to be more supportive of equality-producing measures that get baked into paychecks than they are of equality-producing measures that go through more overt government channels. As a result, the US has a very stingy welfare state and delivers much of its government spending through opaque, submerged mechanisms like tax credits.

But as Susan Mettler argues in the Submerged State (at the link above), it isn’t so much that Americans are more supportive of predistribution as much as they don’t see it. We could say this just means that they would oppose equality producing measures if they noted them, but I’m not sure that’s exactly right either. Polls suggest they are largely supportive of equality producing measures, including those specifically for the poor, while at the same time opposing some such measures (like “welfare.”)  More important than public opinion here is likely elite opinion, which as we know is more powerful (Bartels, Gilens), or corporate interests. Why would they prefer submerged state policies?  As Mettler says:

 Most submerged policies, however, exacerbate inequality: they shower their most generous benefits on affluent people, and they generate detrimental side effects that adversely impact those who are less well off. Some of the largest winnings, moreover, are accrued not by individuals and households but rather by third-party organizations and businesses that benefit from the economic activities such policies promote.

Indeed, Mettler argues that because those policies are hidden, people don’t notice that they benefit from them, leading them to think  that only the poor are being helped by government while everyone else is just getting what the market delivers, making them less willing to support further government action.

Bruenig continues:

If we are going to live in a society that shies away from after-the-fact redistribution, the only way we can hope to achieve greater economic equality is through the predistributive channel. It is in that context that the recent Demos report Underwriting Bad Jobs is most salient. Authors Amy Traub and Robert Hiltonsmith find that the federal government is, in one form or another, involved in the employment of at least 2 million low-wage workers, a figure that is higher than the number of low-wage workers at Walmart and McDonalds combined. The authors arrive at this figure by adding up the number of low-wage jobs that are funded by federal contracts, federal health care spending, infrastructure spending, and a few other sources.

This is a good place to focus. It doesn’t directly help all workers, of course, but with the legislative route blocked by Republicans (even if you could line up all the Democrats in Congress to address this issues).  As the report notes, “President Obama has significant authority to improve the jobs of nearly two million poorly-paid workers whose work is paid for with our tax dollars through an executive order.”

Through federal contracts, grants, loans, concession agreements and property leases, our tax dollars are currently fueling millions of poorly-paid jobs and exacerbating inequality. While doing business with the federal government can be highly lucrative for executives at contracting firms, nearly 2 million private sector employees working on behalf of America earn wages too low to support a family.

Through the use of his executive power, President Obama has the authority to call for improvements in workplace standards among companies that do business with the federal government or get special benefits from federal agencies. An executive order requiring federal agencies to take all possible steps to raise workplace standards and ensure that companies comply with applicable labor and employment laws has the potential to dramatically improve the lives of the low-wage workers that federal agencies depend on to accomplish their goals.²⁴

The president should also act to improve oversight of companies doing business with federal agencies to ensure that this policy is enforced. Finally, in the case of federal contracts, the president can call on agencies to evaluate when work can be done more efficiently and effectively by government employees than private companies.25 As agencies like U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Internal Revenue Service have already found, bringing previously contracted services back into the public domain can save money, providing a better value for taxpayers.26

In the past, presidents have used their authority to improve job opportunities for Americans working or seeking to work for federal contractors. For example, starting in 1941, successive administrations issued executive orders to fight employment discrimination in the contracting workforce. This effort culminated with President Lyndon Johnson’s signing of Executive Order 11246, mandating equal employment opportunity and affirmative action for all individuals working for federal contractors. An executive order to raise and enforce workplace standards for contractors, grantees, and other private companies that do business with the federal government would follow this powerful and effective precedent.

A different type of precedent is offered by the more than a hundred living wage laws and labor agreements for economic development projects enacted by American cities, counties and states over the past fifteen years. These regulations take many forms, but at their core is a requirement that public contractors, subsidized businesses, concessionaires and/or other private companies that receive special public benefits must meet baseline job standards, such as paying living wages, offering affordable employee health benefits, or hiring in the local community. Less rigorous policies simply favor contractors or subsidize recipients who pay living wages and offer benefits. Still other states and cities require that contractors and other companies doing business with the public meet a basic standard of responsible business practices which excludes companies that have repeatedly violated workplace laws, failed to pay taxes, or flouted other public protections. These many approaches to reforming relationships with public contractors and other private companies that receive special public benefits can serve as models for potential federal action.

These do serve as a precedent for federal action, but they also serve as a precedent at the local and state level. I’ve written about this before. It’s obviously true that federal action is better than state action, but state or local action is better than no action. And if people mobilize over this issue at lower levels it would increase the ability to press for this at the federal level.

People are poor because our policies produce poverty. As the report says:

What most Americans don’t know is that many of the workers keeping our nation humming are paid low wages, earning barely enough to afford essentials like food, health care, utilities and rent. Through federal contracts and other funding, our tax dollars are fueling the low-wage economy and exacerbating inequality. Hundreds of billions of dollars in federal contracts, grants, loans, concession agreements and property leases go to private companies that pay low wages, provide few benefits, and offer employees little opportunity to work their way into the middle class. At the same time, many of these companies are providing their executives with exorbitant compensation.

Changing that should be a top priority.

[Update: On Orhtheory, Jerry Davis object to my comment (which was the first draft of this post) for claiming  that he is calling to blame the consumer.] 

[Update 2: Davis also makes his objections in this comments to this post. My response is here]

Speaking of the awful Bangladesh factory disaster that killed at least a thousand people, Brayden King at Orgtheory quotes Jerry Davis in the New York Times who blames consumers for working conditions in the Third World. In essence, consumer demand for cheap products are what forces wages down and makes working conditions so dangerous, so the blame lies with those consumers.

I see a few problems with this. First, if the all-powerful consumer was driving this, we wouldn’t see businesses making high profits, because that too raises costs. This is not the case. Second, even with expensive goods, where consumers are willing and even eager to pay high prices, we see similar working conditions (think Apple products).

In addition, “our willingness” to buy products produced under these conditions is an odd way to talk about it. Businesses spend a lot of energy obscuring these working conditions, to tell those who are concerned about it that they have improved them, will work to improve them, or that they aren’t that bad or that they are inevitable.  Beyond that, it’s not clear what consumers are supposed to do. If all products were clearly labeled to give us a full sense of the conditions in which they were made, it’s not as if it would be possible to simply avoid such products. Anyone who’s ever spent time trying to do this knows while you can occasionally find something made in fair conditions, it’s next to impossible to do it consistently.  Despite the myth that markets always provide broad choice, this is simply not the case.

There’s also the question of where consumer demand comes from. Does it spring immaculate from the unorganized consumers, or do corporations shape it? John Kenneth Galbraith argued long ago that it was the latter, and this makes more sense to me. Did consumers rise up and demand cheaper, lower quality goods? Or did corporations decide this was a better way for them to make money, especially given the wage stagnation of the neoliberal era?

What would this new price increase look like?  Here’s Bryce Covert at Think Progress:

So how much would clothing prices rise for the average consumer if all of the costs of upgrading Bangladesh factories were passed on to them?

According to an estimate provided by the Worker Rights Consortium, it could be as little as 10 cents per article of clothing. The group comes to this figure by estimating that building renovation, safety equipment installation, and other related costs would come to about $3 billion, which is says is a high estimate that assumes virtually all factory buildings need major renovations, as some may not. Spreading that cost over five years, it comes to $600 million each year, and tacking 10 cents on to each of the roughly 7 billion garments exported from the country each year would easily cover that cost. After the initial investment in renovations, the group says the costs of maintenance will drop significantly.

Is it really plausible that consumers are so attuned to price that such a small sort of increase would make a difference?  And note, this assume the entire cost of the increase would be passed along directly to consumers, while there’s little doubt that the corporations are in a far better position to absorb some of the losses.

While Davis tells consumers it’s up to them to fix this, King only agrees with this “in principle.”

[C]onsumers are actually very inertial creatures. If we put all our hopes in changing the global marketplace in the wallets of people like Joe Schmoe from Brownsburg, Indiana, we’re not likely to see much change. Most changes in supply chain management begin with a few committed activists who are willing to go out and pressure the company through “naming and shaming” tactics.  Public humiliation still seems to work.

In terms of the remedy, I think King is right. But it’s not just inertia, but the ability to act – the mass of consumers aren’t organized, and even if they were, it’s almost impossible to buy products that are made in better conditions. That makes voice, as opposed to exit, the more fruitful strategy.

But when people believe that consumers are what drives this, I think they are less likely to engaging in these naming and shaming tactics, because consumer choice is seen as default legitimate.

Blaming consumers, like blaming voters, is a cop out.

In my investigation of how scholars of judicial politics adopted the decision as the core concept of the thing to be explained, part of my argument has been that this wasn’t unique to the behavioralists, but was true of ‘traditionalists’ as well.  Joseph Tanenhaus, a participant in this conflict, agrees, in his Journal of Politics article “Supreme Court Attitudes Toward Federal Administrative Agencies” (1960). It’s easy to get distracted by the dispute between quantitative and qualitative approaches, but there is more here than that.

In the current controversy over the suitability of quantitative methods for the study of appellate-court behavior, there is a tendency to overlook a rather important similarity among the majority of contenders on both sides. Most contemporary analysts of appellate-court decisions, whether they be lower-court judges, practicing lawyers, journalists, professors of law, or political scientists, tend to comb discrete decisions in a search for uniformities and inconsistencies [my emphasis]. However much their motives may vary, analysts of both schools strive to generalize about phenomena which are, in some ways, unique. Utilizing the techniques it considers most apposite, each group collects and classifies data which it hopes to cast into formularies characterizing the behavior of a court and its individual members.

Fundamental though their common objective may be, the differences between the generalizers who quantify (the quantifiers) and those who do not (the qualifiers) can hardly be put aside. Two of those differences seem presently relevant. In the first place, the quantifier tends to place greater emphasis on systematic and objective classification. He seeks to devise procedures which will permit trained analysts to come up with highly comparable results. On the other hand, the qualifier tends to feel that such striving for reliability sacrifices too much that is vital. In his view the richest ore is mined by those who devote their energies to nuances too elusive for systematic objectivity.

In the second place, the quantifier is more disposed than the qualifier to study the voting behavior of judges as distinguished from the opinions they father. To the qualifier,a judge’s vote grossly  oversimplified the hard choice he is frequently obliged to make among competing principles, values and interests. And what is more, each of a judge’s votes is counted equally by the quantifiers, although some decisions are obviously more important than others. How, the qualifier asks, can one equate Korematsu v. United States (sustaining the wartime Japanese evacuation) and Martin v. Struthers (invalidating a city ordinance against doorbell-ringing by peddlers of literature)? Though each case may have involved a fundamental freedom, Korematsu dealt with the physical internment of many thousands of persons, while the Struthers case involved only a minor inconvenience to a small group of proselytizers. A vote against the national government in the evacuation case was of such vastly greater moment than a vote against the city in the doorbell-ringing case that they cannot seriously be treated as equal.

Despite these troublesome objections, the quantifier persists in his use of voting data-in part because of the relative ease in recording them in a systematic and ostensibly value-free way. But only in part. Other reasons are, I think, more important.

For one thing, since an appellate judge normally votes far more frequently than he writes opinions, his voting behavior may often be the only data available. For another thing, what a judge says in one case is not always an accurate guide to what he will do in others. Appellate courts are collegial bodies. Though they employ a division of labor in writing opinions, a majority statement is always in a sense a group product. It reflects the style and sentiments of its author, but only as tempered by necessary deference to the wishes of other members of the majority. [More recent work acknowledges this is potentially true of votes as well] Moreover, and this applies to concurring and dissenting opinions as well as to majority opinions, a judge may be unwilling or unable to articulate the premises on which his decision is based. [my emphasis] Opinions, in fine, like voting records, have their limitations as data.

But fine for what? As the preceding italicized sentence shows, fine for inferring what factors drive the decision.  Both focus on the formal ruling on the merits, the disagreement goes only to how best to do that.  And that means, despite what the behavioralists claimed, they remained formalists. Their ‘realism’ extended only to questioning whether judges made decisions based on law, but assumed (implicitly) that once those decisions were made, that other actors treated them as authoritative. This assumes away the bulk of the politics. And while most knew that not to be the case, the study of what caused decisions and what happened to decisions once made were kept separate, with the former placed at the center of the field, and the latter more of an afterthought.  (And at least some behavoiralists saw any deviation of attention from formal rules as a move towards traditionalism, even when done by  other behavioralists).  But that only makes sense if you fail to notice it.

Progressives have forgotten how to think about the constitutional dimensions of economic life. Work, livelihood, and opportunity; material security and  insecurity; poverty and dependency; union organizing, collective bargaining, and workplace democracy: for generations of American reformers, the  constitutional importance of these subjects was self-evident. Laissez-faire, unchecked corporate power, and the deprivations and inequalities they bred were  not just bad public policy—they were constitutional infirmities.  Today, with the exception of employment discrimination, such concerns have vanished from progressives’ constitutional landscape.

That has to change.

Today, Matt Dimick called attention Williams Forbath’s piece in Dissent, “Workers’ Rights and the Distributive Constitution” which opens with the above quote. It makes a good follow up to my last post on the role of money in putting deeply unpopular Social Security cuts on the agenda, or more simply, the power of the donor class. Forbath notes that conservatives use constitutional language to advance their agenda, while progressives often respond defensively.  But Forbath calls for progressives to recapture a constitutional tradition that would insist that government has not only the power but the duty to push back against the conservative assault on the New Deal and Great Society.

The gist of the distributive tradition is simple: gross economic inequality produces gross political inequality. You cannot have a constitutional republic, or what the Framers called a “republican form of government,” and certainly not a democracy, in the context of gross material inequality. Gross economic inequality produces an oligarchy in which the wealthy rule; and insofar as it produces deprivation and a lack of basic social goods among those at the bottom, gross inequality destroys the material independence and security that democratic citizens must have in order to think and act on their own behalf and participate on a roughly equal footing in political and social life. Finally, access to basic goods [my emphasis] such as education and livelihood is essential to standing and respect in one’s own  eyes and in the eyes of the community.

Another way of putting this is “the contest between ‘Wealth’ and ‘Commonwealth’”, or a the claim of “the artificiality of the opposition of ‘economic’ versus ‘political’ or labor versus civil rights protest.”  Forbath notes that one of the organizing principles of the New Deal, and the social movements that gave birth to it, was the idea that democracy couldn’t be something that existed only outside the workplace. The older term is ‘industrial democracy’ but workplace democracy would make more sense today.  This vision is one that would require a social movement, not just the normal politics we are used to. (Forbath also notes that for most of our history, this tradition has been partial, leaving out people on the basis of race, gender, etc.  He notes the 14th Amendment partially addressed this issue, but I would go further.  Section One protects ‘persons.’  That gives us all the authority we need to extend this tradition to everyone).

Read the whole thing.

Lawrence Lessig calls the problem of campaign finance–or more clearly, dependence corruption–as the root of the problem. Not the main cause, the one that must be dealt with first before others can be successfully addressed. There is something to this. But at the moment, progressives largely lack a substantive, positive, vision of what they seek. Forbath says “constitutionalism is the language Americans most often use to talk about the rights of citizens and the duties and purposes of government.” To fail to address these questions about economic rights,  instead treating them as mere ‘politics’ is “wrong as a matter of constitutional history and wrong in principle. And it is bad politics.” I agree. It’s hard to mobilize people only to play defense, or to go the mat over small or mixed improvements over the status quo.

Social Security was enacted in response to mass mobilization. It can only be saved through mass mobilization.

The president’s new budget proposal includes both Chained CPI, a cut in Social Security benefits, and cuts in Medicare benefits.  As Shawn Fremstad  notes, the White House’s assurances that the ‘most vulnerable’ will be protected are not to be taken seriously.

It’s troubling for any number of reasons, including that the defenses offered are nonsense.  Chained CPI is arguably a more accurate measure for working people, but the existing measure clearly underestimates inflation for seniors, who spend far more of their income on health care, where costs are rising faster. Social Security doesn’t contribute to the deficit, which doesn’t matter (at least at the moment), and no one actually cares about it, and Medicare costs could be dealt with through costs controls rather than benefit cuts.

These programs are so wildly popular across all age groups and political affiliations that seeking to cut them is electoral suicide–or rather it would be if one party were willing to call it what it is.  Democrats had their chance to do that, when Paul Ryan’s budget proposed privatizing Medicare.  They briefly used this to stir up their base (mostly for donations, it would appear) and then Republicans insisted it was no fair to use their proposals against them. Many Democrats, including Bill Clinton, agreed, and pretty soon the phrase “Ending Medicare” was modified with the nonsense qualifier “as we know it” as if turning a social insurance programs into a voucher program and calling it the same thing made it so.  This wasn’t just politicians, but the media and the online chattering class too.  Republicans are movable, but Democrats have shown they prefer not to move them.  The exact reasons why are unimportant, but none of them are acceptable.

For some time, the possibility of cuts to either Social Security or Medicare have been periodically floated, in stories citing anonymous sources close to the White House. This is how politics works in DC–anonymously float proposals to see how people react without having to take a stand on them, to see what the reaction is to gauge the existence and strength of support or opposition.  Sometimes it was White House allies, or members of Congress, or staffers themselves, on the record, suggestion that these things might be necessary, or should be considered, or what have you.  Some used this opportunity to try to demonstrate opposition.

The process seemed to work like this: first Social Security cuts were floated, these were attacked, and then they were “taken off the table,” which only means some staffer said those words to reporters.  There was much rejoicing, and little follow-up, and soon Medicare cuts were floated .These too were attacked, taken off the table, at which point the Social Security cuts returned–a shell game.

But there were plenty of people there to tell us we weren’t serious.  These things would never happen. Obama himself hadn’t said it, or if he did, he didn’t mean it. The Republicans were forcing him to say it, somehow. Even now, we hear that it’s all a ruse to–when the Republicans (inevitably) reject the proposal, it will (finally) demonstrate to everyone that Obama is reasonable and the Republicans are not. Obviously, lacking any evidence for that proposition before, and because people care more about this then whether their grandparents slip into poverty and whether they themselves will have retirement security, they will flock to the president’s side.  That’s right, the White House is proposing a cut that harms current and future retirees.  At least the Republicans had the good, if evil, political sense to only harm one of those groups at a time.

Since the opposition appeared small, divided and weak, the White House has placed both cuts into the budget. And the GOP, all of whom have been screaming about “entitlements” and demanding cuts and some of whom have been calling for Chained CPI are now attacking the Democrats (all of them, regardless of their position on this issue) for attacking seniors from the left, which while cynical is entirely true.

This is obviously bad politics, if by politics you mean democratic politics.  But sadly, that’s not the only meaning, nor even the dominant one, in our discourse. When you hear Jonathan Alter or Chris Matthews talk about what’s politically possible, they aren’t talking about public opinion or votes. That’s why they can insist that raising the cap on for collecting payroll taxes for Social Security so that it is less regressive is considered impossible but the massively unpopular policy of cutting benefits for current and future retirees is seen as reasonable. They are talking about elite politics, the elites who, most of the time, hold all the power in our system.  Saying that outright is inconsistent with what we tell ourselves about our system of government–that it is democratic, that the people have all the power, that public opinion in reflected automatically in policy.

It’s also inconsistent with the dominant critique of that view among Democrats, which is that the only thing that stands in the way of this is Republican intransigence and the filibuster (never mind that Democrats in the Senate refused to take this abused tool away from the Republicans in a deal that would supposedly stop them from abusing it. This deal fell apart within seconds, and Harry Reid and Dick Durbin sheepishly shrugged their shoulders and scolded Republicans for doing what they were obviously going to do. For what it’s worth, they weren’t the suckers. Anyone who believed them was a sucker.) Besides, here we are with Democrats proposing to cut Social Security and Medicare, and pretending its a good thing. It takes some serious delusion to convince yourself that the filibuster made them do that.

People keep asking the question: why is Obama doing this? Usually, the question is phrased this way, directed toward the president himself, as if these policies don’t enjoy widespread support among party elites, as if the last Democratic president doesn’t support them (see above) and try to do it himself (thank you Lewinsky scandal).  Still, Obama has been talking about this for a very long time.  Regardless, I think the reason for this confusion is twofold. First, there is the idea that a politician’s personal views dictate the positions they take, and that these views spring immaculate from their soul uninfluenced by the system in which they operate and rose.  I find that odd, even more odd to describe what an institution does. The presidency is an institution, much larger than one person.  And second is the idea that the public typically gets what it wants, and that anyone who fails to deliver that will necessarily be punished.

The latter is not true. The evidence for it is clear and convincing, and has been for a long time.   Who supports cutting Social Security? It’s pretty simple, as this chart from Demos shows, based on research by Page, Bartels, and Seawright.

The donor class versus the people.

That’s right. That’s what our ‘democracy’ looks like.

In fact, this instance may be particularly egregious, but it is in no way usual. The concerns of the donor class, generally speaking, determine the boundaries of what is politically possible. (Lawrence Lessig lays out the case in his wonderful, infuriating book, Republic, Lost.  Thomas Ferguson’s Golden Rule is also essential reading here.) In policy area after policy area, policy and the agenda are a reflection of elite concerns not the population.  If you can’t get funding to challenge a candidate for opposing the public, and you can’t find a way to run that doesn’t rely on big money, then no one will face the music. And aside from that, the reason the concerns of regular Americans are largely ignored is because the concerns of elites, and protecting the profits of large corporations (not to mention raising money from them) take up so much of their time.

The reality is that our donor class, and the media and political elites that operate on their behalf (whether they do so because they believe it or not is irrelevant) has it exactly backwards.  The basic system of retirement security in the US had three parts–pensions, personal savings (mostly the value of a home) and Social Security. But pensions have been largely replaced with 401Ks, which even at their best provide less for most retirees than pensions do also have the problem of relying on the stock market, so they are not secure.  Remember the tech bubble crash and then the financial crisis?  And speaking of the financial crisis, that was ultimately caused by the popping of the housing bubble.

For most Americans, Social Security is all that’s left, not because they are lazy or unwilling to do what they were told to do but because what they were told to do was inadequate and insecure. (But on the bright side, the rich got much richer). Only one leg of the retirement security school is left standing, and the elites have decided even that small level of security is too little desperation.  Instead, we should be expanding it–I’d fund it with a financial transactions tax. I’d also suggest expanding Medicare–for example, temporarily lowering the retirement age to 55 until we get back to a reasonable level of employment, and covering chronic, costly illnesses that are made worse by lack of primary care. (In fact, it wold be better to expand it to everyone–but we’ll leave that for another time).

There was a time when Social Security was considered the “third rail of American politics.”  That time has passed. Sure, people still say it, but it’s not longer true.  What that meant was that no one in politics was willing to even suggest touching it.  The only legitimate options were expanding it or standing pat. To suggest cutting it in any way would bring about massive push back. No one wanted to be the lonely soul to step out of that consensus. At one time, the AARP would at such a suggestion mobilize its massive constituency.  Now it demands straight talk.

While we receive endless emails to sign a petition to let the Democrats know we don’t want them to cut Social Security and Medicare (something they most certainly already know), after these same groups spent months announcing their opposition to such cuts, it’s not clear that any of them have the capacity or the inclination to do anything about it. This has been a long time coming, yet full-scale mobilization never occurred. Only 31 Democrats in the House to date have opposed these cuts. (Check out the link–calls do matter.  Here’s information on Democrats in the Senate.) The White House has chosen not to listen. Why would they care how many people signed a petition?

And once the precedent is set, cuts will be used to justify more cuts.  The donor class is overwhelmingly hostile to these programs, in part because they are licking their chops thinking about all the money they can make when it is redirected into non-public hands.

But that doesn’t mean it can’t be saved, and it doesn’t mean we can’t recapture that consensus.

Social Security was enacted in response to mass mobilization. It can only be saved through mass mobilization. Let’s take the third rail metaphor seriously.  Touching the third rail on train tracks means you get shocked. That’s what we need. Something shocking.  Something isn’t standard. Something that challenges the donors–the funders, and the politicians they fund.  They have made it clear they aren’t listening. But they would if they feared us.

Ernesto Cortes, Jr., organizer of the Industrial Areas Foundation network in Texas and the San Antonio-based Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS), has plainly described activists’ necessary relationship to public officials. “It’s unfortunate that fear is the only way to get some politicians to respect your power. They refuse to give you respect. They don’t recognize your dignity. So we have to act in ways to get their attention. In some areas, what we have going is the amount of fear we can generate. We got where we are because people fear and loathe us.”

So, how we can we make them–Republicans and Democrats, office holders and funders– fear and loathe us?

The definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power; the antagonist can rarely agree on what the issues are because power is involved in the definition. He who determines what politics is runs the country, because the definition of alternatives is the choice of conflicts, and the choice of conflicts allocates power.

E.E.  Schattschnieider, The Semisovereign People: A Realist View of Democracy (emphasis in the original).

By Scrumshus (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Erika Eichelberger has a great and depressing story on how some Democrats (and more Republicans), are trying to weaken the major financial regulation legislation Dodd-Frank, passed in response to the financial crisis, before it takes full effect.  This massive legislation requires a great deal of administrative rule making to implement it

A group of 21 House lawmakers—including eight Democrats—is pushing seven separate bills that would dramatically scale back financial reform. The proposed laws, which are scheduled to come before the House financial-services committee for consideration in mid-April, come straight on the heels of a major Senate investigation that revealed that JP Morgan Chase had lost $6 billion dollars by cooking its books and defying regulators—who themselves fell asleep on the job. Why the move to gut Wall Street reform so soon? Financial-reform advocates say Democrats might be supporting deregulation because of a well-intentioned misunderstanding of the laws, which lobbyists promise are consumer-friendly. But, reformers add, it could also have something to do with Wall Street money.

“The default position of many members of Congress is to do what Wall Street wants. They are a main source of funding,” says Bartlett Naylor, a financial-policy expert at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. “These are relatively complicated [bills]. It’s easy to come to the misunderstanding that they are benign.”

This challenges two narratives about the problems in Congress among the left leaning.  First, is the idea that Republicans are solely responsible for what’s wrong, and Democrats are well-meaning but sometimes forced to doing bad things by Republicans.  But that’s not the case here. This isn’t about deal making, it’s not about the filibuster.  The other narrative is that the problem with the Democrats is the so-called corporate Democrats, those who often represented marginal or red districts / states.

Reps. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) and Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), both of whom are members of the lefty House progressive caucus, [my emphasis] cosponsored the Inter-Affiliate Swap Clarification Act along with two Republicans. Moore and Fudge’s bill would allow certain derivatives that are traded among a corporation’s various affiliates to be exempt from almost all new Dodd-Frank regulations. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), a major Wall Street regulator, just issued its final rule on these products on Monday, and although the rule includes many exemptions, reform advocates say it is still stronger than what Fudge and Moore’s legislation proposes.

Fudge advocated for the bill “because it came at request of corporations and businesses in our district,” says Belinda Prinz, a spokeswoman for the congresswoman.

These are not your typical villains.

This is all bad policy and bad politics.  But it strikes me that this episode gives us a window into the larger problem.  To run a typical campaign, members need money. In certain moments, people are mobilized, watching them, and members will be more likely to do the right thing. But we tend to focus too much on formal decision-making, especially on legislation, and we miss that decisions are just a moment within a larger political process.  But the powerful make no such mistake. And they are the ones those member must rely on the fund their campaigns.  No doubt it’s easy to convince themselves that what they are doing does not undermine reform.

This process is the same even if activists hand-pick a candidate and put them in office. (See Kuster, Ann). Small donations can’t challenge this process.  The problem is the reliance on big money to run a standard campaign and the vast inequalities that ensure that a small number of people make the biggest difference.  We need to provide an alternative way of campaigning.  That would involve the creation of permanent, grassroots organizations, that could knock on doors, make calls, and provide the powerful person-to-person contact for which advertisements are a weak substitute. They would allow those people to monitor members, to make sure they were living up to the principles they campaigned on, so that it wasn’t just the lobbyists watching once the cameras are turned off. These organizations would make sure the members worked for them, not the other way around, that members “fear and loathe” them.  Interest groups and unions could also transform themselves from operating like arms of the Democratic Party into truly member driven organizations, that would hold members into account, and only work on behalf of those members who have earned it.

But watching the vultures of the Predator State circling the by no means sufficient, compromised Dodd Frank law, it’s clear something has to change.

[Update: For more on the battles in Congress as well as in the courts and the agency, check out Mike Konczol.]