Robert Reich: How Biden Can Get His Mojo Back – OpEd

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By Robert Reich

This week may be a nadir for the Biden administration. After Krysten Sinema’s very public refusal to budge on the filibuster, voting rights legislation is stuck. Senate Democrats plan to go through the motions, but it will be an empty gesture as long as the filibuster remains. Similarly, after Joe Manchin’s refusal to agree to Biden’s “Build Back Better” package, Biden’s social and climate measure is also stalled (last Friday was the first time since July that millions of American families with children didn’t receive a monthly child benefit; further payments are stymied).

Meanwhile, the Omicron variant continues to surge in most of the country, increasing public anxieties about the pandemic. Yet the Supreme Court rejected Biden’s vaccine-or-testing mandate for large employers. Inflation continues to accelerate due to supply bottlenecks — which are likely to worsen as China locks down to avoid Omicron — thereby eroding real (inflation-adjusted) wages.

To put it bluntly, Biden is in deep trouble. So is America.

How can Biden regain momentum? Here are ten steps he should take, starting this week:

1. Reach out to Murkowski, Collins, Romney, and any other possibly principled senate Republican, to gain support for any reasonable compromise on the filibuster (even a “talking filibuster” would be better than the current standoff).

2. Accompany this with a speech about how often the filibuster has been used to block popular legislation, especially over the last dozen years, why it’s fundamentally anti-democratic, and what it’s blocking now — voting rights and highly popular measures in “Build Back Better” (reducing prescription drug prices, universal pre-K, the addition of hearing and dental insurance to Medicare, subsidized childcare, the expanded child tax credit, paid leave, and measures to reduce climate change).

3. Urge Schumer to initiate separate votes on these popular measures. Let the public see how Republicans use the filibuster to stop them.

4. Urge Democrats to run next November against a Republican Party that refuses to get anything done for the working class.

5. Issue an executive order on drug pricing, such as requiring Medicare to obtain the lowest possible drug prices.

6. Issue an executive order to roll back Trump’s Medicaid work requirements and boost funding for groups helping people enroll in ACA plans.

7. Issue an executive order relieving former students of up to $10,000 of college loan debt owed the federal government.

8. As to Omicron, provide clear public health guidance around masking and testing. Explain when and where rapid tests and masks can be obtained free of charge.

9. Ask OSHA to immediately redraft its vaccine-or-testing mandate to focus on large employers with the highest incidence of COVID.

10 Meanwhile, remain upbeat but realistic. Remind the public of the economic successes so far — record job growth, new businesses forming at record rates, poverty below its pre-pandemic levels, the start of $1 trillion in infrastructure investments, the speed of your vaccination rollout, your stimulus package last spring that helped many who receive health insurance in individual marketplaces and offered enticements for states to expand Medicaid. Celebrate the recent victories of unionized workers and call for more and stronger unions. And reassure the public of your commit to continue fighting for a democracy and an economy that work for everyone — against the resistance of the moneyed interests that have never done as well as they’re doing now.

Robert Reich: Why Isn’t Corporate America Behind The Pro-Democracy Movement? – OpEd

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By Robert Reich

Capitalism and democracy are compatible only if democracy is in the driver’s seat.

That’s why I took some comfort just after the attack on the Capitol when many big corporations solemnly pledged they’d no longer finance the campaigns of the 147 lawmakers who voted to overturn the election results.

Well, those days are over. Turns out they were over the moment the public stopped paying attention.

A report published last week by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington shows that over the last year, 717 companies and industry groups have donated more than $18 million to 143 of those seditious lawmakers. Businesses that pledged to stop or pause their donations have given nearly $2.4 million directly to their campaigns or leadership political action committees.

But there’s a deeper issue here. The whole question of whether corporations do or don’t bankroll the seditionist caucus is a distraction from a much larger problem.

The tsunami of money now flowing from corporations into the swamp of American politics is larger than ever. And this money – bankrolling almost all politicians and financing attacks on their opponents – is undermining American democracy as much as did the 147 seditionist members of Congress. Maybe more.

Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema — whose vocal opposition to any change in the filibuster is on the verge of dooming voting rights — received almost $2 million in campaign donations in 2021 despite not being up for re-election until 2024. Most of it came from corporate donors outside Arizona, some of which have a history of donating largely to Republicans.

Has the money influenced Sinema? You decide: Besides sandbagging voting rights, she voted down the $15 minimum wage increase, opposed tax increases on corporations and the wealthy, and stalled on drug price reform — policies supported by a majority of Democratic Senators as well as a majority of Arizonans.

Over the last four decades, corporate PAC spending on congressional elections has more than quadrupled, even adjusting for inflation.

Labor unions no longer provide a counterweight. Forty years ago, union PACs contributed about as much as corporate PACs. Now, corporations are outspending labor by more than three to one.

According to a landmark study published in 2014 by Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern professor Benjamin Page, the preferences of the typical American have no influence at all on legislation emerging from Congress.

Gilens and Page analyzed 1,799 policy issues in detail, determining the relative influence on them of economic elites, business groups, mass-based interest groups, and average citizens. Their conclusion: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” Lawmakers mainly listen to the policy demands of big business and wealthy individuals – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns and promote their views.

It’s likely far worse now. Gilens and Page’s data came from the period 1981 to 2002 – before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to big money in the Citizens United case, prior to SuperPACs, before “dark money,” and before the Wall Street bailout.

The corporate return on this mountain of money has been significant. Over the last forty years, corporate tax rates have plunged. Regulatory protections for consumers, workers, and the environment have been defanged. Antitrust has become so ineffectual that many big corporations face little or no competition.

Corporations have fought off safety nets and public investments that are common in other advanced nations (most recently, “Build Back Better”). They’ve attacked labor laws — reducing the portion of private-sector workers belonging to a union from a third forty years ago, to just over 6 percent now.

They’ve collected hundreds of billions in federal subsidies, bailouts, loan guarantees, and sole-source contracts. Corporate welfare for Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Tech, Big Ag, the largest military contractors and biggest banks now dwarfs the amount of welfare for people.

The profits of big corporations just reached a 70-year high, even during a pandemic. The ratio of CEO pay in large companies to average workers has ballooned from 20-to-1 in the 1960s, to 320-to-1 now.

Meanwhile, most Americans are going nowhere. The typical worker’s wage is only a bit higher today than it was forty years ago, when adjusted for inflation.

But the biggest casualty is the public’s trust in democracy.

In 1964, just 29 percent of voters believed that government was “run by a few big interests looking out for themselves.” By 2013, 79 percent of Americans believed it.

Corporate donations to seditious lawmakers are nothing compared to this forty-year record of corporate sedition.

A large portion of the American public has become so frustrated and cynical about democracy they are willing to believe blatant lies of a self-described strongman, and willing to support a political party that no longer believes in democracy.

As I said at the outset, capitalism is compatible with democracy only if democracy is in the driver’s seat. But the absence of democracy doesn’t strengthen capitalism. It fuels despotism.

Despotism is bad for capitalism. Despots don’t respect property rights. They don’t honor the rule of law. They are arbitrary and unpredictable. All of this harms the owners of capital. Despotism also invites civil strife and conflict, which destabilize a society and an economy.

My message to every CEO in America: You need democracy, but you’re actively undermining it.

It’s time for you to join the pro-democracy movement. Get solidly behind voting rights. Actively lobby for the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Use your lopsidedly large power in American democracy to protect American democracy — and do it soon. Otherwise, we may lose what’s left of it.

Robert Reich: Need A Pick-Me-Up? Let Me Introduce You To Two Young People – OpEd

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By Robert Reich

These are hard times to keep your spirits up. Thinking you might need a bit of a boost, I’d like to introduce you to two young people who give me hope about the future of American politics.

The first is Chloe Maxmin. I met her a few years ago when, still in her early-twenties and an unapologetic progressive, she had been elected to the Maine House of Representatives. She was the first Democrat ever to represent her district — Maine’s Lincoln County, the state’s most rural. The county also among the poorest, where 1 in 5 children grow up in poverty. And it’s staunchly conservative, having voted Republican by an average of 16 percentage points in the preceding three elections.

When I met her, Maxmin was preparing to run for the state Senate. Several old Maine pols (I lived in Maine back in the last century and know its politics quite well) told me she didn’t stand a chance. But in 2020 she won — and in the process, knocked off the state Senate’s Republican leader, the most powerful Republican politician in Maine.

How did she pull off these upsets? I’ll get to that in a moment.

Maxmin exudes optimism, energy, and tenacity. She is also very smart. She says she’d always imagined running when she was in her thirties. She thought she needed a couple of graduate degrees, a settled life, and maybe a family to welcome her home. But in 2018, as the climate crisis worsened, she realized there was no need and no time to wait.

The second person I’d like to introduce you to managed both her campaigns. Canyon Woodward was brought up in a rural part of Southern Appalachia. Maxmin and Woodward met each other in college and decided that the only way to begin solving the climate crisis and the injustices it was spawning was to get involved in politics from the ground up. Both had watched for years as rural America was abandoned by Democrats. They decided to buck that tide.

So, how did Maxmin and Woodward to it? They developed the most grass-roots of all grass-roots strategies.

Maxmin herself knocked on tens of thousands of doors. She connected with persuadable Trump voters who had never before spoken with a Democratic candidate. But she didn’t just talk to them. She had conversations with them, then followed up with more conversation. Those conversations were about “kitchen-table” issues — problems that were on the voters’ minds, as well as their thoughts and values.

As she describes it, during her campaign for the Maine House she walked down a dirt road leading to a nondescript trailer. After knocking on the door, it cracked open to reveal a man who was reluctant to hear from her. She introduced herself nonetheless and asked him about the issues he cared about most in the coming election. After they talked for a time, he told her: “You’re the first person to listen to me. Everyone judges what my house looks like. They don’t bother to knock. I’m grateful that you came. I’m going to vote for you.”

When I asked about her approach to politics, Maxmin told me rural communities are moral communities that respond more to personal stories and values than to specific policies. Building trusting relationships is the key. This takes time and effort and demands humility and a willingness to learn. As Maxmin and Woodward explain in their book, Dirt Road Revival: How to Rebuild Rural Politics and Why Our Future Depends On It (to be published in March):

“Things move at the speed of relationship in rural America. You don’t jump straight into business and take care of things as quickly as possible. An essential part of the culture of living and organizing in rural America is slowing down and building relationships. It is the touchstone on which our future—and all hope of transforming how we relate to politics and one another—depends. And a good relationship starts with a handshake. This small gesture is about establishing a modicum of trust and human connection. To show up, look someone in the eye, and shake their hand is to plant the seeds of possibility and connection. It’s also what is lacking in today’s politics. A voter told us one day, “I don’t identify with either party. I vote for the person. I vote for whoever has the firmest handshake.”

Maxmin has already got a “green new deal” bill through the legislature. She’s well on her way to being one of the nation’s most effective state legislators on climate justice.

What’s the larger political picture here? The Democratic Party’s abandonment of rural America has proved a strategic mistake. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won almost every urban center, but Trump swept the vast stretches of less populated country in between. Exit polling revealed that Trump won nearly two-thirds of the rural vote, while losing by a similar margin in cities and evenly splitting the suburban vote.

When the American electoral system was created, over 95 percent of Americans lived in rural communities. Now, fewer than 20 percent do. But the nation’s electoral system remains locked in the founder’s two eighteenth century inventions — both of them premised on America’s widely-dispersed rural population: the Electoral College, and a Senate in which each state gets two senators.

As Americans have clustered in megalopolises along the East, West, and Gulf coasts, the Electoral College has become increasingly unrepresentative. Democratic presidential candidates have won the popular vote in seven out of the past eight elections dating back to 1988, but the Electoral College has elected Republican candidates in three of them.

The same power imbalance is now reflected in the Supreme Court, where Republican presidents who failed to win the popular vote have appointed five of the nine sitting justices.

The Senate is also becoming less and less representative of America. Today, the ten most populous states in the union are home to half the US population, but their twenty senators make up only a fifth of the US Senate. The other half of the population, spread out over forty smaller states, elects four-fifths of the Senate. This means half of the country gets four times the number of US senators per person as the other half. A state like California, with 40 million people, has the same number of senators as Wyoming, with 579,000.

It will be many years (if ever) before these anachronisms are remedied. Entrenched power doesn’t easily yield to reform.

So as a practical matter — at least in the foreseeable future — the only way Democrats can retain and enlarge their political power is by winning over more of rural America. Maxmin and Woodward are charting the way.

Robert Reich: Mickey – OpEd

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By Robert Reich

The convergence of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and of the Senate’s unwillingness to protect voting rights causes me to remember my childhood friend and protector, whom I knew as Mickey.

I was always very short for my age, which made me an easy target for bullies. To protect myself, I got into the habit of befriending older boys who’d watch my back. One summer when I was around 8 years old I found Mickey, a kind and gentle teenager with a ready smile who made sure I stayed safe.

Years went by and I lost track of Mickey. It wasn’t until the fall of my freshman year in college that I heard what had happened to him. Several months before, Mickey had gone to Mississippi to register Black voters during what was known as “Freedom Summer.” On August 4, Mickey – his full name was Michael Schwerner — was found dead, along with two other civil rights workers, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman. The three had been brutally tortured and murdered.

Eventually I learned what had happened. On June 21, the three were stopped near Philadelphia, Mississippi by Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Ray Price, for allegedly speeding. That night, after they paid their speeding ticket and left the jail, Price followed them, stopped them again, ordered them into his car, and took them down a deserted road where he turned them over to a group of his fellow Ku Klux Klan members who beat and killed them, and buried their bodies in an earthen dam then under construction.

The state of Mississippi refused to bring murder charges against any of them. Price and Neshoba County Sheriff Laurence Rainey, also a Klan member, along with 16 others, were arraigned for the federal crime of conspiracy to violate the civil rights of the murdered young men. An all-white jury convicted Price and sentenced him to six years in prison (he served four) and found Rainey not guilty.

Freedom Summer had brought together college students from northern schools to work with Black people from Mississippi to educate and register Black voters. Although about 40 percent of Mississippi’s population was Black, most of them had been frozen out of the polls through poll taxes, subjective literacy tests, and violence. It had been that way since 1877. The system was enforced by white supremacists who could commit crimes with impunity because the entire region had become a one-party state. Mickey Schwerner, Chaney, Goodman, and other civil rights workers had sought to reestablish the principle of equality before the law.

After their murders, Freedom Summer continued. Activists were emboldened rather than intimidated by the racial terror orchestrated by Mississippi officials. Almost 1,000 white volunteers bolstered the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee’s efforts to organize Freedom Schools, literacy and civics classes, voter registration and integrated libraries.

Then in 1965, with the intrepid leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. and others in the civil rights movement, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, protecting the right of Black people to vote. After that, the stranglehold of the white supremacists on the one-party South loosened.

But the regressive forces of racism and violence did not disappear. On August 3, 1980, Ronald Reagan launched his presidential campaign with a rally at the Neshoba County Fair (only a few miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi), where he defended state’s rights and the unwinding of civil rights advances. On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court, in the case of Shelby County v. Holder, gutted the Voting Rights Act by holding that its formula for deciding which jurisdictions had to get pre-clearance from the Justice Department before changing their voting laws was outdated.

Now, in response to record voter turnout in the 2020 election, 19 states have passed over 30 new laws making it harder to vote. At the same time, Republican-dominated legislatures are gathering into their hands the power to negate popular votes. And the United States Senate, although nominally under Democratic control, is at this point unwilling to enact legislation to override these restrictions or restore the Voting Rights Act.

We seem to be headed back to the society Michael Schwerner, James Cheney, and Andrew Goodman fought against with their lives.

Robert Reich: Why Should Members Of Congress Be Able To Make Money On Inside Information? – OpEd

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By Robert Reich

It infuriates me when members of Congress — whether Republican or Democrat — squander the public’s trust. There’s so little of it left to squander. So when I find a conflict of interest by members of Congress for which there’s an easy remedy, I’m ready to shout it from the rooftops. And when I discover Congress won’t take action, I’m ready to scream.

Today I want to talk about a very big conflict, with a very easy remedy. And I’d like your help getting the word out and putting pressure on Congress to adopt it.

First, some background. Unless you have special insider information about what’s going to happen to the economy or to certain companies — information that very few other investors have — the buying and selling of individual shares of stock is a terrible investment strategy. This is why the vast majority of Americans who invest in the stock market invest in index funds that are tied to the performance of the stock market as a whole.

So why do many members of Congress continue to invest in individual stocks? Could it possibly be that they learn useful things about what’s going to happen to the economy or individual companies before the rest of us do?

It certainly seems so.

In January 2020, a handful of senators — including Richard Burr, Dianne Feinstein, and Kelly Loeffler — made significant stock trades after receiving a classified briefing on COVID-19. This was January 2020, mind you — well before the public knew the full extent of the threat.

Then in the early weeks of the pandemic, nearly 75 federal lawmakers bought stocks in COVID-19 vaccine makers Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, or Pfizer.

I could give you a lot more examples, but you get the point. Even if these were innocent investments that weren’t based on inside knowledge, they certainly smell like insider trades. At the least, they create the appearance of self-dealing. They undermine public trust.

A huge amount of information about the economy and individual companies courses through Congress every day. Much of it is not available to the public. Some of it indicates what’s likely to happen to a particular company’s share prices. There is no possible way to guard against the misuse of this information for personal profit. So why allow individual stock trades? There is simply no legitimate reason why members of Congress (or their families) should be trading individual shares of stock.

(By the way, “Insider” has just published the most complete and detailed public accounting to date of the stock transactions of individual members of Congress — one for the Senate and one for the House. It’s eye-opening. But disclosure alone won’t solve the conflict-of-interest problem because it’s impossible to tell whether the transactions were based on inside information.)

There’s an obvious solution: Bar members of Congress from trading individual stocks.

The proposed Ban Conflicted Trading Act does just this. Lawmakers would have six months after being elected to sell their individual stock holdings, transfer them to a blind trust over which they have no control, or hold onto them until they leave office without trading them. (Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia is about to introduce legislation that would also bar family members of our representatives and senators from trading stocks.)

This is an easy and appropriate fix. It doesn’t penalize members of Congress or their families. They can still invest in index funds, like most other stock market investors. They just can’t trade individual stocks.

But Congress has yet to hold a vote on this bill. Why?

Last April, Ron Lieber of the New York Times asked newly elected members of Congress if they would pledge not to trade individual stocks while in office. Few were willing. Most didn’t even respond.

It gets worse. Last month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected the idea of banning politicians and their families from trading stocks while in office. (She was asked about it by a reporter from “Insider,” which recently published an investigation about lawmakers’ trades.)

I’m a big admirer of Nancy Pelosi. But, with due respect, she’s dead wrong on this one.

With distrust in government near an all-time high, even the appearance of a conflict of interest hurts our democracy. Members of Congress are elected to represent the interests of the people, not the money in their brokerage accounts. Banning members of Congress from trading individual stocks should be a no-brainer.

Congress should pass the Ban Conflicted Trading Act. Now. You might suggest this to your own members of Congress.