“There is a feeling today among too many Americans that we might not make it. Not that the end is near, or that doom is around the corner, but that a distinctly American feeling of inevitability, of greatness—culturally, economically, politically—is gone. That we have become Britain. Or Rome. Or Greece. A generation ago Ronald Reagan rallied the nation to deny a similar charge: Jimmy Carter’s worry that our nation had fallen into a state of “malaise.” I was one of those so rallied, and I still believe that Reagan was right. But the feeling I am talking about today is different: not that we, as a people, have lost anything of our potential, but that we, as a republic, have. That our capacity for governing—the product, in part, of a Constitution we have revered for more than two centuries—has come to an end. That the thing that we were once most proud of—this, our republic—is the one thing that we have all learned to ignore. Government is an embarrassment. It has lost the capacity to make the most essential decisions. And slowly it begins to dawn upon us: a ship that can’t be steered is a ship that will sink.
The clue that something is very wrong is the endless list of troubles that sit on our collective plate but that never get resolved: bloated and inefficient bureaucracies; an invisible climate policy; a tax code that would embarrass Dickens; health care policies that have little to do with health; regulations designed to protect inefficiency; environmental policies that exempt the producers of the greatest environmental harms; food that is too expensive (since protected); food that is unsafe (since unregulated); a financial system that has already caused great harm, has been left unreformed, and is primed and certain to cause great harm again.”
-Lawrence Lessig, from the introduction to Republic Lost
A single thread ties together all the problems that our nation faces: the influence of money in politics. The threat is in plain sight to all. It is an economy of influence, a politics of money rather than a system that represents the citizens who elected the politicians.
As Lessing notes:
“For the single most salient feature of the government that we have evolved is not that it discriminates in favor of one side and against the other. The single most salient feature is that it discriminates against all sides to favor itself. We have created an engine of influence that seeks not some particular strand of political or economic ideology, whether Marx or Hayek. We have created instead an engine of influence that seeks simply to make those most connected rich.”
The corruption of our democracy caused by money and power in the pursuit of more money and ever-greater power has destroyed our democracy. While Lessing does not consider the evil doers, evil people and believes, on the contrary, that corruption is actually practiced by decent people (“people we should respect, people working extremely hard to do what they believe is right, yet decent people working with a system that has evolved the most elaborate and costly bending of democratic government in our history. There are good people here, yet extraordinary bad gets done.”)
The result of this corruption is bad governance and the inability of government to get any of its most important work done. Our government simply no longer fulfills the wishes of the people who voted to put them in office, whether on the Left or on the Right. Our government no longer functions as a representative democracy. It is not by the people – for the people.
As a result, we the people have lost trust. Our democracy is in many respects a charade. As faith and participation declines, especially among those who live in the middle, between the extremes of the left and the right, the extremists at both ends drive our policy.
Few people approach this challenge with the intellectual rigour of Lessig, who is Director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University and a professor at Harvard Law School. He spent almost 10 years fighting to reform the nation’s copyright laws, an effort that produced a half-dozen books and the creation of the Creative Commons licensing system. Four years ago he launched an infinitely harder challenge — the reform of Congress itself. He left Stanford University and moved to the east coast to teach at Harvard in 2008 where he began the research and activity that gave rise to his latest book.
Lessing’s first effort at congressional reform was Change Congress, a grass-roots movement to gather pledges from elected officials to reform campaign financing, and pledges from potential donors to not give money to officials who hadn’t taken such a pledge.
A review in The Atlantic notes:
“As an academic, Lessig has the research chops to find the anecdotes that best fit the narrative case he’s making, and to lay them out in wonderful detail. But his real gift is in the art of stringing them together into a story. That means that this book is as persuasive as it is enjoyable to read. This is very good indeed, because if Lessig is to succeed, he’ll need to persuade a great many people.”
Sadly, this excellent book reminds us how extremely difficult this problem will be to solve. The Atlantic reviews continues:
“Not only is it (this problem) rooted in the deepest part of the political system, but there are a host of interests who will fight any reform. The businesses and individuals who make large contributions to government will oppose reforms because they are a threat to their power. Politicians will oppose them because they threaten the system that allows them to stay in power. And lobbyists will fight them because ultimately they threaten their entire profession.”
As Lessing details just how badly our political system is at representing the public’s best interest, he also provides amazing details of a system gone wrong. The facts he’s assembled to document his argument are reason enough to read the book. He takes a close look at food subsidies and tariffs to portray the dysfunction. This one example is a window into a system gone wrong.
The manipulation of commodity prices began during the Great Depression. While well-intended at the time, this ended up enduring beyond its purpose, producing huge financial benefits for individuals and businesses who found ways to influence the political process so as to never have to give them up.
There was a time in the early 1930s when the cost of staple foods from flour and rice to milk and eggs was high enough that starvation was an unintended consequence. In response, the government introduced tariffs to protect domestic farmers, and subsidies to lower the cost of food, a system that has been in place for close to a century and has seen political money twist it into policy that could no longer ever be justified by any actual benefit served to consumers.
In fact, the list of policies that produce more harm than good is extensive and ever-growing Consider that today we place tariffs on sugar so that sugar in the U.S. is two to three times as expensive as in other countries. And we subsidize corn production: the US government spent $73.8 billion between 1995 and 2009 subsidizing corn, driving its price close to zero. One result of these policies is that High Fructose Corn Syrup was nonexistent in 1980, but accounted for 41 percent of all sugar consumed by Americans by 2006. Cattle raised in the U.S. are now fed almost entirely corn, which they don’t digest well, requiring antibiotics on a massive scale and producing poorer quality meat. And even though the subsidies account for huge outlays for the federal government and the tariffs make products more expensive for Americans (the sugar tariffs cost the overall economy an estimated $3 billion per year, while providing $1 billion of extra profits to domestic sugar producers), they’ve proved impossible to eliminate under the current system. Every time a politician floats the idea of reforming the Farm Bill, he or she is reminded that a small percentage of the money the beneficiary companies make is allocated to campaign contributions, and crucial for the reelection of a large number of senators and representatives.
Lessing details another example as he looks at the influence of the financial industry. In a November interview with The Boston Review he noted that, in the first quarter of 2011, Congress — awash in special interest money from banks attempting to push through a bill allowing them to collect per-transaction debit-card fees — spent more time on that issue than on unemployment, the deficit, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, health care or global warming.
“There is not one congressman who decided to run for Congress because he thought, ‘I’m going to deal with the problem of the banks’ swipe fees,’ “ Mr. Lessig explained in the interview. “It’s only because if you can dance as a congressman with a little bit of uncertainty of which side you’re going to come down on in this controversy, millions of dollars gets showered down upon you because there’s $19 billion on the table depending on how this issue is resolved.”
The New York Times notes: “Mr. Lessig’s analysis of the distorting effects of money is, in the main, dead on.” The Times goes on to explain, “With billions of dollars at stake, corporations — and powerful interests in general — have consistently found ways both to avoid and evade obstacles. Those with power have an unbroken record of finding ways to navigate around reform laws or turn regulatory standards to their own advantage.
“For example, the primary users of the Freedom of Information Act are not journalists and crusaders seeking to reveal illicit activities; they are businesses seeking to find out what government regulators are up to and what their competitors have disclosed to government agencies.
To understand what’s wrong with America, this book is a must-read. Depressing, but essential to see how dangerously off track our democracy has gone.