![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
peristaltor.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
talkpoliticsWhen I last mentioned Lewis Powell's now-infamous memorandum, I did so in a fairly limited scope, in explaining the silliness that might be behind the IRS investigation. I also found and quoted excerpts from a book, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Jacob S. Hacker & Paul Pierson. I've since read that book, and just in time for Money And Ethics In Politics month! If you want a good run-down on the real story of how money got into politics in such unprecedented amounts, start with Mr. Powell's Memo, then head over to Hacker and Pierson's book.
Here, I'll try to give a brief run-down and show some irony in the results Mr. Powell may have unleashed on our society.
First, the run-down. Late last year I noted that something big seems to have happened to the United States in 1980. Simply too many economic indicators—from the comparison between productivity and compensation, to the number of good jobs available to college graduates, to union membership as a percentage of the work force—took a nose dive after 1980. I suggested the Baby Boom cohort's entry into the workplace had a significant impact (which I still maintain). What I missed, according to Hacker and Pierson, was the sheer volume of money corrupting the democratic process from the early 1970s onward, a progression of warping influence that finally out-paced more progressive forces in 1978.
As an instructive example, the authors note a famous Hillary, this one Edmund, the first Westerner to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. We more seldom hear of his companion in that climb, Tenzing Norgay, a sherpa that accompanied Hillary all the way to the top of the world. And we certainly never hear about the thousands of other people below Hillary that made their ascent possible, including bearers that stocked the route upward with supplies in advance of the summit attempt and the hundreds that waited at the highest base camp for Hillary and Norgay to return. Without those thousands, it is highly unlikely that Sir Edmund would have made summit at all.
Likewise, though the conservative cheering squad cite President Reagan as the force that changed everything in 1980, the organizational power and money that put Mr. Reagan in office really did the changing to our fair country, and continues to do so today. And that organization started with men like Lewis Powell pointing the way. The evidence of this organization can be found in the numbers for all who care to look. Take once again, by way of reintroduction, Mr. Powell's call for the US Chamber of Commerce to "consider assuming a broader and more vigorous role in the political arena."
His call was headed, as the evidence suggests. Hacker and Pierson note that to win, conservative activists "needed to nurture a generation of conservative idea merchants. And to do that they needed to build idea factories, rapidly and on a massive scale." They did, working "with corporations and wealthy conservative families to build an industry of new foundations and think tanks":
How much money are we talking about? In his book Blinded by the Right, David Brock gives some rough numbers: "According to calculations made by the Washington Post, Scaife gave more than $200 million to conservative institutions between 1974 and 1992. . . ." (Brock, Blinded by the Right, Three Rivers Press, 2002, p. 87, emphasis mine.) Though Scaife was, according to Brock, "the most important single figure in building the modern conservative movement and spreading its ideas into the political realm," he was far from alone.
This massive organization building finally started to fruit just before 1980. Hacker and Pierson note the first major casualty year for the progressive movement in 1978. In that year, a Democratic House, Senate and President could not pass two widely-popular and widely-supported bills into law, one a tax increase on richer citizens and the other a codification of law affecting union organization. The built organization of the right had stymied passage of both, and energized givers and organizers to tackle even larger targets.
Here, I'd like to reiterate my portrayal of these forces as "corporatist" as opposed to intellectually "conservative." Nothing in the organizational forces Powell inspired cared much for small government per se. Note Reagan's massive military build-up as proof. No, when Scaife gave that money, he was making an investment in his future, the size and scope of government be damned. In 1974, the first year Brock notes Scaife giving money to institutes like Heritage, the top income tax bracket was 70%. By 1992, the last year Brock notes, it was down to 31%. When one includes other legislation that re-categorizes income and allows for enormous tax breaks (legislation all pushed by the same forces over time, again, funded by the very people what would benefit the most from them), that top tax bracket has fallen precipitously.
Which leaves more money in the hands of the top fraction of the top 1% to invest in continuing to fund programs that funnels more money into the hands of the top fraction of the top 1%. Rinse, lather, repeat.
This creeping corporatism is a process. Money from the top undermines legislation and regulation, allowing more money to accumulate at the top later.
And what does the so-called "free market" have to say about all of this? Ah, see, the simple concept of a free market is part of the propaganda spewed by these funded mouthpiece outlets. 100 years ago, a more pragmatic theory was popular, that of "legal realism," which challenged more classical market theory today once again so prevalent. Teddy Roosevelt put it nicely: "Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public service corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs."
Echoing this seemingly lost observation, the Winner-Take-All authors note, "The libertarian vision of a night-watchman state gently policing an unfettered free market is a philosophical conceit, not a description of reality." Why?
Yes, the quote notes that the policies and regulations are the result of "politicians," and here I've been discussing some shadow organization. Isn't there a disconnect there? Of course not. How do you think the organizations exert their control? It's through the politicians, who finance the candidates they wish to succeed. And they chose mostly GOP pro-business candidates.
For a real-world example, take 1982. Yes, Reagan was President; what most people don't remember, though, was that people were sick to death of Reaganomics. A mid-term rout of the GOP was in the offing. What's troubling to Hacker & Pierson, though, was the fact that, although GOP lost members in that election, the public opinion polls, when correlated with past elections, dictated that they should have lost a lot more. The reason? Organization.
In fact, things were looking bleak for Democrats, and had for years:
In 1982, in fact, the DNC was still paying off old campaign debts they had incurred . . . for the election in 1968!
Over time, a few Democrats positioned themselves as "business Democrats" to better attract that sweet, sweet campaign cash. Thus money skewed the politicians' priorities (or perhaps "focused" them would be a better choice of words). One researcher, Larry Bartels at Princeton, looked into what politicians did and how their constituents felt should be done. It turns out the politicians did what the wealthy third they represented felt.
So we have money skewing policy toward those that have it and, most importantly, away from those who don't. Fine. I'm sure the number of people thinking this is a good idea is growing, yes?
No. Take union membership.
Okay, people want unions just as the likelihood that they can get a job with such representation is falling. What about the bugaboo of dreaded wealth redistribution? Aren't people fine with the wealthy keeping their booty? No again. Though "as measured by roll-call votes, the already dramatic rate of rightward movement in the GOP has actually accelerated in the past two election cycles (Hacker & Pierson, ibid., p. 264), today about "half of Americans advocate heavy taxation of the rich in order to redistribute wealth, a higher percentage than was the case in 1939." (How could I not underline?!?) Further, polling on the public mood finds that "in 2004, the public mood was more liberal than at any point since 1961." (Hacker & Pierson, ibid., footnote.)
So the non-moneyed are skewing left, just as the monied drive policy right. The media, bought by those monied few with every commercial interruption, fall into the same pattern and fail to even note these simple facts.
On that note, I'll let President Kennedy have the last prediction:
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
Here, I'll try to give a brief run-down and show some irony in the results Mr. Powell may have unleashed on our society.
First, the run-down. Late last year I noted that something big seems to have happened to the United States in 1980. Simply too many economic indicators—from the comparison between productivity and compensation, to the number of good jobs available to college graduates, to union membership as a percentage of the work force—took a nose dive after 1980. I suggested the Baby Boom cohort's entry into the workplace had a significant impact (which I still maintain). What I missed, according to Hacker and Pierson, was the sheer volume of money corrupting the democratic process from the early 1970s onward, a progression of warping influence that finally out-paced more progressive forces in 1978.
As an instructive example, the authors note a famous Hillary, this one Edmund, the first Westerner to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. We more seldom hear of his companion in that climb, Tenzing Norgay, a sherpa that accompanied Hillary all the way to the top of the world. And we certainly never hear about the thousands of other people below Hillary that made their ascent possible, including bearers that stocked the route upward with supplies in advance of the summit attempt and the hundreds that waited at the highest base camp for Hillary and Norgay to return. Without those thousands, it is highly unlikely that Sir Edmund would have made summit at all.
Likewise, though the conservative cheering squad cite President Reagan as the force that changed everything in 1980, the organizational power and money that put Mr. Reagan in office really did the changing to our fair country, and continues to do so today. And that organization started with men like Lewis Powell pointing the way. The evidence of this organization can be found in the numbers for all who care to look. Take once again, by way of reintroduction, Mr. Powell's call for the US Chamber of Commerce to "consider assuming a broader and more vigorous role in the political arena."
Business must learn the lesson, long ago learned by labor and other self-interest groups. This is the lesson that political power is necessary; that such power must be assidously (sic) cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination — without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.
His call was headed, as the evidence suggests. Hacker and Pierson note that to win, conservative activists "needed to nurture a generation of conservative idea merchants. And to do that they needed to build idea factories, rapidly and on a massive scale." They did, working "with corporations and wealthy conservative families to build an industry of new foundations and think tanks":
Some, like the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), sought to create a mirror image of traditional policy shops like the mildly liberal Brookings Institution. . . .
Over the course of the 1970s, this project was enormously successful. The AEI, which had one-tenth the budget of Brookings in 1970, was roughly the same size by 1980. The Heritage Foundation was born in 1973. Backed by money from beer magnate Joseph Coors and the Sarah Mellon Scaife Foundation, it had equaled the size of AEI and Brookings by the early 1980s. Arguably, the reach of an outfit like Heritage was far greater, for it devoted far more energy than its traditional counterparts to proselytizing. Brookings spent less than one-twentieth of its budget on public relations and outreach; Heritage, around a fifth.
And that spending was unabashedly directed at pushing conservative ideas into the mainstream and, specifically, into the hands of the GOP.
(Jacob S. Hacker & Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, Simon & Schuster, 2010, pp. 123-124.)
How much money are we talking about? In his book Blinded by the Right, David Brock gives some rough numbers: "According to calculations made by the Washington Post, Scaife gave more than $200 million to conservative institutions between 1974 and 1992. . . ." (Brock, Blinded by the Right, Three Rivers Press, 2002, p. 87, emphasis mine.) Though Scaife was, according to Brock, "the most important single figure in building the modern conservative movement and spreading its ideas into the political realm," he was far from alone.
This massive organization building finally started to fruit just before 1980. Hacker and Pierson note the first major casualty year for the progressive movement in 1978. In that year, a Democratic House, Senate and President could not pass two widely-popular and widely-supported bills into law, one a tax increase on richer citizens and the other a codification of law affecting union organization. The built organization of the right had stymied passage of both, and energized givers and organizers to tackle even larger targets.
Here, I'd like to reiterate my portrayal of these forces as "corporatist" as opposed to intellectually "conservative." Nothing in the organizational forces Powell inspired cared much for small government per se. Note Reagan's massive military build-up as proof. No, when Scaife gave that money, he was making an investment in his future, the size and scope of government be damned. In 1974, the first year Brock notes Scaife giving money to institutes like Heritage, the top income tax bracket was 70%. By 1992, the last year Brock notes, it was down to 31%. When one includes other legislation that re-categorizes income and allows for enormous tax breaks (legislation all pushed by the same forces over time, again, funded by the very people what would benefit the most from them), that top tax bracket has fallen precipitously.
Which leaves more money in the hands of the top fraction of the top 1% to invest in continuing to fund programs that funnels more money into the hands of the top fraction of the top 1%. Rinse, lather, repeat.
This creeping corporatism is a process. Money from the top undermines legislation and regulation, allowing more money to accumulate at the top later.
And what does the so-called "free market" have to say about all of this? Ah, see, the simple concept of a free market is part of the propaganda spewed by these funded mouthpiece outlets. 100 years ago, a more pragmatic theory was popular, that of "legal realism," which challenged more classical market theory today once again so prevalent. Teddy Roosevelt put it nicely: "Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public service corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs."
Echoing this seemingly lost observation, the Winner-Take-All authors note, "The libertarian vision of a night-watchman state gently policing an unfettered free market is a philosophical conceit, not a description of reality." Why?
Governments do redistribute what people earn. But government policies also shape what people earn in the first place, as well as many other fundamental economic decisions that consumers, businesses, and workers make. Practically every aspect of labor and financial markets is shaped by government policy, for good or ill. . . .
[Thus] the treatment of the market as some pre-political state of nature is a fiction. Politicians are there at the creation, shaping that "natural" order and what the market rewards. Beginning in the late 1970s, they helped shape it so more and more of the rewards would go to the top.
(Hacker & Pierson, ibid., pp. 55-56.)
Yes, the quote notes that the policies and regulations are the result of "politicians," and here I've been discussing some shadow organization. Isn't there a disconnect there? Of course not. How do you think the organizations exert their control? It's through the politicians, who finance the candidates they wish to succeed. And they chose mostly GOP pro-business candidates.
Beginning in the 1970s, first unions and then (on a much larger scale) business groups formed PACs and began to channel unprecedented amounts of money into campaigns. In 1976, there were 224 labor PACs, a number the would increase modestly to 261 a decade later. Over the same period, corporate and trade PACs increased from 922 to 2,182. Both sides ramped up spending over the period, but throughout the decade, trade and corporate PACs were able to outspend labor two or three to one.
(Hacker & Pierson, ibid., p. 171, me again going boldly.)
For a real-world example, take 1982. Yes, Reagan was President; what most people don't remember, though, was that people were sick to death of Reaganomics. A mid-term rout of the GOP was in the offing. What's troubling to Hacker & Pierson, though, was the fact that, although GOP lost members in that election, the public opinion polls, when correlated with past elections, dictated that they should have lost a lot more. The reason? Organization.
What saved the GOP [during the 1982 mid-term rout] was its pronounced organizational edge. The decisive races involved those where credible Democratic challengers confronted vulnerable Republicans. It was here that the organizational resources of the parties came into play. The Republican national committees—the RNC and the House and Senate campaign committees—were able to raise over six times as much as their Democratic counterparts, and they contributed almost six times as much to individual House and Senate candidates.
(Hacker & Pierson, ibid., p. 166.)
In fact, things were looking bleak for Democrats, and had for years:
Democrats effectively had no organization. In July 1982, just months before the Democrats' best shot to derail Republican momentum, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was so broke it was forced to lay off fifteen people from its ninety-member staff. Candidates had to rely on the money they raised themselves. Much of it ended up being wasted by powerful incumbents who didn't need the help.
(Hacker & Pierson, ibid., p. 166.)
In 1982, in fact, the DNC was still paying off old campaign debts they had incurred . . . for the election in 1968!
Over time, a few Democrats positioned themselves as "business Democrats" to better attract that sweet, sweet campaign cash. Thus money skewed the politicians' priorities (or perhaps "focused" them would be a better choice of words). One researcher, Larry Bartels at Princeton, looked into what politicians did and how their constituents felt should be done. It turns out the politicians did what the wealthy third they represented felt.
Bartels looked at how closely aligned with voters U.S. senators were on key votes in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It turns out there is a pretty high degree of congruence between senators' positions and the opinions of their constituents—at least when those constituents are in the top third of the income distribution. For constituents in the middle third of the income distribution, the correspondence is much weaker, and for those in the bottom third, it is actually negative. (Yes, when the poorest people in a state support a policy, their senators are less likely to vote for it.)
(Hacker & Pierson, ibid., p. 111, I emboldened what should be obvious.)
So we have money skewing policy toward those that have it and, most importantly, away from those who don't. Fine. I'm sure the number of people thinking this is a good idea is growing, yes?
No. Take union membership.
The conventional view is that American labor's collapse was inevitable and natural, driven by global economic changes that have swept unions aside everywhere. But a quick glance abroad indicates that extreme union decline was not foreordained. While unions have indeed lost members in many Western nations (from a much stronger starting position), their presence has fallen little or not at all in others. In the European Union, union density fell by less than a third between 1970 and 2003. In the Untied States, despite starting from much lower levels, it fell by nearly half. Yet we do not need to gaze across the Atlantic to see a very different picture of union fortunes. In Canada, where the rate of unionization was nearly identical to the United States' a few decades ago, unions have seen little decline despite similar worker attitudes toward unions in the two nations.
If economic forces did not dictate the implosion of American unions, perhaps American workers have simply lost interest in joining unions. Wrong again. In fact, nonunionized workers have expressed an increasing desire to be unionized since the early 1980s. In 2005, more than half of nonunionized private-sector workers said they wanted a union in their workplace, up from around 30 percent in 1984. Compared with other rich democracies, the United States stands out as the country with the greatest unfulfilled demand for union representation.
(Hacker & Pierson, ibid., pp. 57-58. I big bad bolded. Graph source here.)
Okay, people want unions just as the likelihood that they can get a job with such representation is falling. What about the bugaboo of dreaded wealth redistribution? Aren't people fine with the wealthy keeping their booty? No again. Though "as measured by roll-call votes, the already dramatic rate of rightward movement in the GOP has actually accelerated in the past two election cycles (Hacker & Pierson, ibid., p. 264), today about "half of Americans advocate heavy taxation of the rich in order to redistribute wealth, a higher percentage than was the case in 1939." (How could I not underline?!?) Further, polling on the public mood finds that "in 2004, the public mood was more liberal than at any point since 1961." (Hacker & Pierson, ibid., footnote.)
So the non-moneyed are skewing left, just as the monied drive policy right. The media, bought by those monied few with every commercial interruption, fall into the same pattern and fail to even note these simple facts.
On that note, I'll let President Kennedy have the last prediction:
