The Boy Who Could Change the World

by Aaron Swartz

  Chomsky, Noam. 2006. Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (Macmillan). ISBN 0805079122, 234.

  Clearly there is a democratic disconnect—the members of Congress are not executing the will of the voters. The analysis above suggests several possibilities why.

  •Candidate selection: Perhaps only fans of insurance companies decide to run for Congress—or, more likely, only fans of business in general (who are predisposed to insurance companies’ pleas).

  •Campaign finance: Even if these aren’t the only people who run, they are likely to be the people who best get along with the major fund-raisers, PACs, and other key sources of money.

  •Campaign tactics: This money, in turn, is what’s necessary to run a modern campaign—complete with TV ads and mailers and expert pollsters. As a result, it’s the best fundraisers who tend to win.

  •Staff selection: When they get to Congress, even good candidates hire tired and acculturated staffers. Thus their ambitious reforms are sabotaged by internal defenders of the system with divided loyalties.

  •Staff ethics: Attracted by their own “revolving door” (there’s a lucrative market for former staffers), staffers are focused more on doing what their future employers might want than on what would best serve the public. And with their dual duties between congressional office and campaign, perhaps they get distracted by the pressing needs of the campaign and neglect what’s best for the country.

  •Lobbyists: Or maybe it’s lobbyists who are screwing the whole thing up. The money they have to write bills and suggest strategies certainly gives them a big advantage over interests that can’t afford to lawyer up. And the money they raise for candidates gives them a powerful hold on those candidates’ attention. Finally, if you can’t beat them—join them. Many former legislators get jobs as lobbyists where their past service for the industry is repaid with a lucrative position.

  Part Four: Change

  There have been many, many ideas about how to reform Congress. We can categorize them in two basic ways: by the part of the process they address (candidate selection, campaigns, staff, lobbyists) or by the tactics they adopt (restrictions, incentives, tools). Some of these ideas have even been adopted—but as members of Congress themselves must usually vote on them, it’s not clear how much the proposed changes are intended to address the substance as opposed to the perception of corruption.

  Candidate Selection

  While it’s commonplace for members of Congress to urge more people to “get involved in the process,” I’m not aware of any examples of formal congressional attempts to recruit more candidates. (After all, who wants more competition?)

  Instead, the biggest efforts have come from outside the official system. As mentioned above, Progressive Majority works hard to identify and recruit progressive activists. And each party has an arm focused on candidate recruitment—although the goal is usually finding someone who can raise enough money to win a seat for the party, rather than adjusting the makeup of Congress as a whole.

  It’s possible to imagine you could make a significant difference by increasing these efforts—finding more and better people to run. At the moment, even when someone wins by random fluke, it’s rarely the sort of decent, honest person you’d want to win—and even when it is, the cult of experience forces them to behave the same way as everybody else. If more good people ran, even if nothing else changed, there’s a chance they could win at least occasionally and thereby inject a modicum of decency into the process.

  Campaign Finance

  Since Watergate, the bulk of campaign reforms have consisted of caps and disclosures. At present, federal campaigns are not allowed to raise more than $2,400 from an individual and more than $5,000 from a bona fide political action committee (PAC) in any two-year cycle. (Corporations are prohibited from donating directly; instead their employees must voluntarily donate to a bona fide PAC.) At the same time, all major contributions and expenditures have to be publicly disclosed.

  The main effect of disclosure has been to create a string of TV ads and campaign attacks along the lines of “You took X million dollars from Y bad guy.” It’s not clear how effective these attacks have been in any particular case, but they’ve undoubtedly contributed to a culture of assuming all legislators are bought and paid for. Unfortunately, the only people who can run campaigns without taking sizable amounts of money from bad guys are multimillionaires who self-finance, and on the whole they don’t seem to be much of an improvement over the normal candidate.

  The main effect of the caps has been to create a bustling market in figuring out how to evade them, culminating with the recent Citizens United decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that outside groups (including corporations) can spend unlimited campaign money on basically anything, as long as they don’t coordinate their spending with the candidate. The result is a culture of coordination-without-coordination on top campaigns, where senior staffers will leak the details of their campaign strategy to the Capitol Hill press, where outside groups read it and figure out how to fill in the gaps. Obviously it’s not the same as being able to direct how the money is spent, but it doesn’t seem so different that it’s made a noticeable impact on campaigning. As a result, campaign finance laws are largely seen as a dead letter.

  The most serious proposal to address the problem is that of Fair Fight Funds. Under such a system, a candidate could opt-in to public financing of their campaign. In exchange for agreeing not to raise outside money, they would be given an initial chunk of money to fund a basic campaign (say $500,000), as well as an extra dollar for each dollar their opponent raises. (In some versions they receive $0.90 or $1.10 instead of $1.)

  For example, imagine John Q. Public decides to run against Montague T. Moneybags. Public opts in to public financing and receives $500,000. Moneybags holds a big fund-raiser and raises $600,000. The government then gives Public an extra $100,000 to level the playing field. While the cost to the government is theoretically unlimited, there’s not much incentive for Moneybags to keep raising big money if he knows Public is going to get another dollar for each new dollar Moneybags raises.

  This plan really would neutralize the effect of money while being totally voluntary, but some legal experts believe the Supreme Court would find it unconstitutional, on the grounds that giving money to Public unconstitutionally discourages Moneybags’s exercise of his First Amendment right to speech. (The present Supreme Court does seem to have an irrational distaste for campaign finance legislation. In response, some have argued that we need a constitutional amendment to push them to stop striking down strong laws.)

  In the meantime, public financing supporters have scaled back their hopes. Instead, their current plan allows Public to receive the $500,000 but he then must raise the additional money through small-dollar contributions. Such a system has two major flaws: first, a well-connected Moneybags can still wildly outraise an honest Public; second, even raising small-dollar contributions will bias a member toward the affluent upper middle class that already has a strong taste for political engagement. (Recall that American inequality is so severe that anyone making over $87,000 a year is in the top 20% and anyone making over $154,000 is in the top 5%.* Having candidates responsive to them rather than major corporations would be an improvement, but perhaps not a major one.)

  DeNavas-Walt, Carmen, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Robert Mills. August 2004. “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2003.” U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports P60-226. .

  Some find even this implausible. Instead, in desperation, they’ve turned to the outside world—with ideas for new technology, like ActBlue, that makes it easier for average Americans to donate money to political candidates over the Internet.

  There’s an unresolved theoretical question that would determine whether such a path is actually practical. If the more money you raise, the more l
ikely you are to win, then it’s hard to imagine ever raising enough from individuals to be able to take on the hundreds of millions a major corporation can spend. But the stories of failed self-funding candidates suggest this isn’t the case. Senate candidate Jeff Greene (D-FL) spent over $23 million trying to win the primary, while his opponent Kendrick Meek won by 26 points after spending closer to $7 million. Meg Whitman (I) spent $173 million trying to become governor of California, but still lost by 11 points to Jerry Brown (D), who spent $40 million.

  A more hopeful answer is that there’s some “threshold of viability” above which more money doesn’t make a significant dent. In a $200 million race every voter has undoubtedly heard from every candidate, even if they hear from one candidate three times more than the other. If this were true, our new fund-raising technique would only need to get decent candidates up to that threshold. (This would also be good news for public financing techniques that only provide candidates with base funds.)

  The truth is probably somewhere in between—increasing amounts of money has diminishing returns, but they’re still nonzero. And even raising Meek’s $7 million would be difficult to do from independent donors. But perhaps it would not be impossible—small donors contributed hundreds of millions to the Obama campaign (although he picked up an equal amount from big donors). Figuring out how to harness that potential is a key goal for the campaign finance community going forward.

  Campaign Tactics

  Others, especially Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), have focused on changing the tenor of campaigns. Wyden’s “Stand by Your Ad” provision attempted to discourage negative campaigning by forcing each candidate to say “I’m [STATE YOUR NAME] and I approved this message” once during each commercial. This doesn’t seem to have done much to change the tenor of campaigns, although it does shorten ads by a few crucial seconds.

  Wyden has also proposed limiting the amount of time during which members of Congress can fund-raise. This proposal has been much less successful and while it may help somewhat in lightening Capitol Hill’s moneygrubbing culture, it’s difficult to picture how it could have a significant impact on the overall problem.

  There is room, however, for an outside revolution in campaign tactics. It’s not enough to bring more people into the process if they’re simply left as suckers to be ripped off by the existing pack of campaign strategists. Instead, someone needs to help them run innovative, cost-effective campaigns that give them a real shot even on a limited budget. The new science of effective campaigns can provide key guidance on what works and what doesn’t, and innovative new technology can help lower the cost of campaign tactics.

  Staff Selection

  If, as I’ve argued, the cult of expertise is a key reason why the congressional offices of even courageous members are so timid, then the solution is simple: bringing more bold people from the outside world into the halls of Congress. This could be done with a large-scale cultural campaign to make working in Congress seem appealing, or with a smaller-scale campaign aimed at pressuring new members to hire from outside the inner circle.

  Staff Ethics

  Within the halls of Congress, staff behavior is regulated even more heavily than campaigns. But while requiring every political staffer to carry two phones may preserve some façade of decency, it seems difficult to say it’s seriously lessened the amount of politics that occurs in Capitol office buildings. Nor is it at all clear that too much politics is a major cause of this democratic deficit.

  As odd as it seems, I haven’t seen anyone propose that Congress prohibit the dual-employment system of political/congressional staffers. Of course, the major problem with any such reform is that the man at the top—the member himself—inevitably has both jobs.

  There are some constraints on “revolving-door” activity—including some outright prohibitions on becoming a lobbyist within a particular time and some “cooling-off” periods requiring delays before you go to lobbying your old colleagues. As with most such restrictions, these regulations help lessen the most egregious aspects but don’t even come close to solving the problem. But revolving-door staffers seem like a minor enough phenomenon that even a total ban on the practice probably wouldn’t make much of a dent in the democratic deficit.

  Lobbyists

  There’s a further game of cat-and-mouse when it comes to taking gifts from lobbyists. With every scandal the rules get tighter and the lobbyists get cleverer. At the moment, for example, lobbyists are prohibited from buying members of Congress expensive meals, but there is a so-called appetizer exemption, with the ridiculous result that lobbyists are now forced to serve members of Congress expensive meals in small pieces while everyone stands up.

  Lobbyists have similarly been forced into a system of restriction and disclosure. The restrictions are much more minor, amounting merely to a prohibition on outright bribes (strong restrictions on lobbying would presumably run afoul of the First Amendment) while the disclosure seems even more pointless (what is anyone going to do with the fact that Lobbyist X has been paid by Special Interest Y?).

  An outside strategy again seems to have more promise. Just as the power of small contributions can be harnessed to make them more powerful in elections, they can be combined for lobbying purposes as well. A congressman doesn’t owe a favor to a donor who gave him $15, but he does owe one to an online group that raised him $200,000 in $15 contributions. Existing online groups have been reluctant to take advantage of this influence, possibly because their natural transparency makes it harder for them to pretend they’re not violating ethics rules, but it’s a promising avenue for the future.

  The alternative would be to figure out some way of severing campaign contributions from lobbying, but it’s difficult to imagine how to do this practically. Even if lobbyists weren’t permitted to touch campaign contributions themselves (and even that requirement is of dubious constitutionality), there’s no reason their clients couldn’t make contributions which the lobbyists could then call in as favors. Like campaign contribution caps, any regulation is likely to be full of loopholes.

  Members have their own revolving door—and revolving-door restrictions. But as with staffers, the problem seems minor enough that even tough restrictions wouldn’t make much difference. A cushy lobbying job is a nice dessert for a career well served, but the campaign contributions are the financial meat of the meal.

  Conclusion

  The good news, for those of us outside the Beltway, is that we don’t need to wait for Congress to fix itself. The most effective solutions outlined here can be done by any outside group—and there are a number of people starting to do them. What’s needed is not some final law that will solve our problems, but a group of outside activists creating their own reform. It may not be easy, but that just means we better get to work.

  Keynes, Explained Briefly

  http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/keynes

  September 24, 2009

  Age 22

  If you read the economic textbooks, you’ll find that the job market is a market like any other. There’s supply (workers) and demand (employers). And the incredible power of market competition pushes the price (wages) to where those two meet. Thus massive unemployment is about as likely as huge unsold piles of wheat: if people aren’t buying, it’s just because you’re setting the price too high.

  And yet, as I write, 17.5% of the country is unemployed. Are they all just insisting on being paid too much? Economists are forced into the most ridiculous explanations. Perhaps people just don’t know where the jobs are, some say. (Maybe the government should run ads for Craigslist.) Or maybe it just takes time for all those former house-builders to learn new jobs. (This despite the fact that unemployment is up in all industries.) But they’re typically forced back to the fundamental conclusion of the textbook: that people are just demanding to be paid too much. It might be for the most innocent of reasons, but facts are facts.

  John Maynard Keynes’ great insight was to see that all of this was nonsense. The jo
b market is a very special market, because the people who get “bought” are also the people doing all the buying. After all, why is it that people are hired to farm wheat? It’s because, at the end of the day, other people want to buy it. But if lots of people are out of a job, they’re doing their best to save money, which means cutting back on purchases. And if they cut back on purchases, that means there are fewer people for business to sell to, which means businesses cut back on jobs.

  Clearly something is badly wrong with the basic economic theory. So let’s go through Keynes’ masterpiece, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, and understand his theory of how the economy works.

  When you get your paycheck at the end of the week, you spend it. But presumably you don’t spend all of it—you put some money away to save, like you were told as a child. Saving is seen as a great national virtue—thus all those Public Service Announcements with talking piggy banks. Everyone knows why: put some money away today and it’ll be worth more tomorrow.

  But there’s a kind of illusion involved in this. Money isn’t worth anything on its own; it’s only useful because it can buy things. And it buys things because it pays other people to make them for you. But you can’t save people in your bank account—if fifteen million people are out of work, they can’t put their time in a piggy bank for when things are looking up. The work they could have done is lost forever.

  So yes, some people can save while others borrow from them—you can let your neighbor buy two iPods in exchange for letting you buy four next year—but the country, as a whole, cannot. At the end of the day, someone has to buy the things we can make. But if everyone’s saving, that means people aren’t buying. Which means the people making stuff are out of a job.