3 In December 2018, the utility tweeted: “#BREAKING: We’re rolling out a #cleanenergy vision to serve all customers with #zerocarbon electricity by 2050 and cut carbon emissions 80% by 2030 company-wide—all while delivering affordable and reliable energy.”
4 To be fair, the president had more to say. As quoted in the Washington Post: “One of the problems that a lot of people like myself —we have very high levels of intelligence, but we’re not necessarily such believers. You look at our air and our water, and it’s right now at a record clean. But when you look at China and you look at parts of Asia and when you look at South America, and when you look at many other places in this world, including Russia, including—just many other places—the air is incredibly dirty. And when you’re talking about an atmosphere, oceans are very small. And it blows over and it sails over. I mean, we take thousands of tons of garbage off our beaches all the time that comes over from Asia. It just flows right down the Pacific, it flows, and we say where does this come from. And it takes many people to start off with.”
5 On another occasion, in a moment reminiscent of Back to the Future, the president confused ozone depletion with climate change, complaining in one breath, “I want to use hair spray. They say, ‘Don’t use hair spray, it’s bad for the ozone,’” and then declaring that when it comes to “the global warming … a lot of it’s a hoax.”
6 In his dissent in Citizens United, Justice John Paul Stevens dismantled the majority’s myopic view of corruption. “Corruption operates along a spectrum, and the majority’s apparent belief that quid pro quo arrangements can be neatly demarcated from other improper influences does not accord with the theory or reality of politics,” he wrote. “It certainly does not accord with the record Congress developed in passing BCRA [McCain-Feingold], a record that stands as a remarkable testament to the energy and ingenuity with which corporations, unions, lobbyists, and politicians may go about scratching each other’s backs.”
7 The FEC, through its rule making, has determined that “primarily” constitutes just over 50 percent, meaning that these phony “social welfare organizations” can spend nearly 50 percent of their money on politics without running afoul of the statute. The FEC must have been using an abridged dictionary when it issued its rules.
8 The only reason he might actually head to Berkeley would be if he thought he could get more judges as a result.
9 The FEC is hardly a stern watchdog. To avoid a violation of the rules, it required Fiorina’s super PAC to change its official designation from Carly for America to CARLY for America, which technically removed Fiorina’s name. “CARLY” officially stands for “Conservative, Authentic, Responsive, Leadership for You.”
10 Although it surely does not fall into the category of an explicit quid pro quo, President Trump’s recent award of a Presidential Medal of Freedom—the nation’s highest civilian honor—to Sheldon Adelson’s wife, Miriam, a doctor and philanthropist, certainly raised eyebrows. (Trump has benefited from Sheldon Adelson’s dark-money generosity.) Previous winners of the medal include the historian David McCullough, the astronaut Sally Ride, Justice Antonin Scalia, the architect Maya Lin, General Colin Powell (twice), and the novelist Toni Morrison.
11 The idea that power is as much about preventing things as it is about getting things done has a long heritage. Writing to John Adams in 1813, Thomas Jefferson recognized that “mischief may be done negatively as well as positively.”
12 The Koch family has long swum in the currents of the American far right. The father, Fred Koch, was a founding member of the John Birch Society. His son David ran on the Libertarian presidential ticket in 1980; its platform, described in press accounts, called for the abolition of Social Security, the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, the EPA, welfare, the postal service, and public schools—and the list goes on.
13 This tactic revived a play from the tobacco industry, which had spent millions to discredit the emerging science that linked smoking to a range of diseases. Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity, understood the stakes. “If we win the science argument, I think it’s game, set, and match for them.”
14 According to Gallup, in 2007, 61 percent of Americans agreed that global warming was caused by the “effects of pollution from human activities” while 35 percent attributed it to “natural changes in the environment.” By 2010, those numbers were 50 and 46 percent, respectively. In 2008, 40 percent of Americans agreed that “global warming will pose a serious threat to you or your way of life.” By 2010, that number fell to 32 percent.
15 In 2015, after one of Washington’s relatively uncommon snowstorms, Inhofe brought a snowball from outside onto the Senate floor in order to disprove, once and for all, the idea that climate change could possibly be real.
16 Riding the wave were new members of Congress like Morgan Griffith, of Virginia. Griffith would serve on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, where he has claimed that global warming was actually good for the Vikings. He has also wondered whether evidence of melting ice caps on Mars meant that human beings couldn’t be responsible for melting ice caps here on earth.
17 According to the State Department, the pipeline would not result, as some alleged, in 29 million tons of incremental emissions annually since the oil would be developed whether or not the pipeline was built. Instead, the incremental emissions were 0.24 million tons in the first year (due to construction) and 1.44 million tons (due to operations) every year thereafter—an infinitesimally small fraction of global emissions and roughly 0.05 percent of Koch Industries’ annual emissions.
18 Such bills are known as “side-side” amendments. Both parties commonly use them to obscure hard votes. They typically never pass.
19 There are some who argue that my decision on Keystone was a decision to support the oil-and-gas industry. An evaluation of my work in the Senate proves the contrary. I led the effort to prevent drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I have fought against the Trump administration’s rollbacks of methane standards for the oil-and-gas industry and to protect pristine areas in Colorado and elsewhere from drilling.
20 After Trump’s election, I met with the leader of a major labor union to help make sense of the result. He told me that although his members may not have tracked the nuances of the debate over Keystone XL, it left them with a clear impression: Republicans were for pipelines; Democrats were against them. As a consequence, most of his rank and file voted for Trump.
21 I have nothing against dentists. I recently had an emergency root canal in Washington and am grateful to my dentist for his work. As for traffic, whenever I complain about it, my environmentalist wife responds, “We’re not in traffic, we are traffic.” As for comparative measures of congressional popularity, I once took a chart to the Senate floor to show where we ranked. Here are some actual data: the IRS had a 40 percent approval rating; Paris Hilton had 15 percent; Communism had 11 percent. The approval rating for Congress was 9 percent. Fidel Castro came in behind, at 5 percent. I expect that Castro’s rating has improved since his death.
22 Justice Anthony Kennedy, the author of Citizens United, expected that in the “cyber age” unlimited corporate spending would be paired with immediate disclosure. In a 2015 interview, he admitted that disclosure was “not working the way it should.”
23 Teddy Roosevelt captured this vanishing Republican tradition in a 1910 speech: “I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us. I ask nothing of the nation except that it so behave as each farmer here behaves with reference to his own children. That farmer is a poor creature who skins the land and leaves it worthless to his children. The farmer is a good farmer who, having enabled the land to support himself and to provide for the education of his children, leaves it to them a little better than he found it himself.”
24 Unlike those who deny climate science, we c
an present actual numbers. Over the last decade, extreme weather events, which are made worse by climate change, have cost our country $350 billion. By the end of the century, climate change could result, each year, in $150 billion in lower labor productivity, $74 billion in coastal property damages, and $53 billion in agricultural losses.
25 Contrary to politicians who claim to be “originalists,” James Madison argued for a government that looked forward while retaining a regard for the past. He wrote in “Federalist No. 14,” “Is it not the glory of the people of America, that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience?”
GIVING AWAY THE STORE
Ignoring the rise of inequality and the shrinkage of opportunity. Giving
tax cuts to the wealthy. Pretending there is no deficit.
How’s that for a plan?
I. A White-Noise Rant
The episode was almost funny, like an outtake from Saturday Night Live, but it was simultaneously disturbing. The time: November 2017. The place: a room in the Library of Congress, a Gilded Age temple to books, learning, and democracy on Capitol Hill. The venue had been set aside for a meeting between a number of Democratic senators and several members of the Trump administration. The senators had been gathered by Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia. The administration team was led by Gary Cohn, the former Goldman Sachs executive who was then serving as director of the National Economic Council. The ostensible purpose of the meeting was to discuss President Trump’s tax bill, which none of us had yet seen—the Republican leadership had been working on it with privileged lobbyists behind closed doors and would spring it on all of us without hearings a few hours before a vote—and whose bounty would fall overwhelmingly into the pockets of the wealthiest Americans. Democrats were hoping to make a few changes on the margins as the bill hurtled toward its inevitable passage. I am not a cynical person, but a realist might describe the meeting as one where the administration pretended to listen and many of the senators pretended that they were being listened to.
At one point during the meeting Gary Cohn took a phone call, left the room, then returned and put his phone on speaker and placed it faceup on the table. The caller was President Trump, then in Japan. Presumably the purpose was to help make the case for his tax bill, but instead the president began reciting the itinerary of his state visit—as if reading from a travel agent’s Enjoy Your Trip summary—and then did the same for his forthcoming visit to China. After ten minutes or so, Cohn tried to nudge the president back to the topic of the tax bill. Trump responded with many disjointed words—not a pitch to skeptics but more like a white-noise rant for a roomful of supporters. The main thrust of his argument was that his accountant had told him he was going to be “killed” by his own tax bill.1 As the president’s monologue went on, everyone in the room—senators, administration officials, staff members—began to ignore it. Conversations started between one person and another and then a third. Soon the din was at barroom level. No one was listening to the president. Trump never noticed; he was still talking. Finally Gary Cohn went over and picked up the phone, holding it in his hand. He did not know what to do. Administration officials looked at the senators with embarrassment. “See what we have to deal with?” their expressions seemed to say. Finally one senator made a suggestion, perhaps recalling how he’d dealt with a rambling uncle. He said to Cohn, “Just tell him he’s breaking up and hang up the phone.” Which is what Cohn eventually did.
Thus came to an end a colloquy at the highest levels between the executive and legislative branches of government on the most significant change to the American tax code for at least a generation. And as I left that meeting, I could not help but marvel at the distance—the practical and moral distance—between the way we conducted business at that meeting and the way my constituents in Colorado conduct their own affairs in schools and towns and counties and cities. Not to mention the distance between what the administration was proposing to do—filling the overflowing coffers of the wealthiest Americans while plunging the nation deeper into debt—and what ordinary citizens care about and need.2
Over nine years, I have held countless town hall meetings throughout Colorado. I almost never give a speech but instead begin every meeting by offering to address any questions or criticisms people may have. The Coloradans in attendance always have thoughts about a broad range of national concerns—the economy and our budget deficits, America’s standing in the world, climate change, the Supreme Court, immigration—as well as issues that have particular resonance for Colorado, such as energy production (renewable or not), access to public lands, sage grouse, wildfires, and marijuana. If I had to boil it all down, the abiding concern that people express is that they are working hard but can’t afford health care, housing, higher education, or early childhood education. They worry that they cannot save for the future and that their children will have less opportunity than they did. It is obvious to them that the partisan show in Washington has nothing to do with what’s on their minds. This knowledge rightly produces frustration and, sometimes, outrage. In 2016, with a shady real estate dealer and reality TV star as the Republican presidential nominee, many Americans decided they were angry enough to want to “blow it all up.”
Washington was dysfunctional and incompetent before Donald Trump arrived. He has made matters much worse. All Americans now bear responsibility for setting things right. To appreciate what is required, it is critical to understand the economic challenges we have faced over decades and, more important, what they mean to our democratic republic, to every one of us no matter our economic standing, and to the next generation’s political and economic prospects. Some will argue that we need a sustained period of shared prosperity before we dare try to reform our broken politics. Others say it’s the other way around. I’ll leave this chicken-and-egg question to the political scientists and commentators. My own view is that as Americans we have no choice but to try to accomplish both.
II. The Opportunity Deficit
Debates over debt and taxes sometimes seem to occur on an abstract level, as if they exist in a galaxy far away from the lives of ordinary people. And sometimes they occur—as the meeting at the Library of Congress demonstrated—in a way that resembles farce (because a farce is what it is). But these debates have real consequences for the lives of ordinary Americans.
Consider tax cuts for the wealthy. It’s bad enough that we’re enacting tax cuts we can’t afford in order to put money in the pockets of people who don’t need it. When spending and revenue are misaligned, the deficit gets out of hand and the national debt goes through the roof. In the eyes of some, that is in fact the plan: it sets the stage for a rollback of the essential functions of government that we can “no longer afford.” This is what the slogan “Starve the beast” is all about: create a fiscal situation so frightening that the elimination of key programs seems like a prudent option. Often on the chopping block are programs that represent investments in the future—investments in education, infrastructure, and basic research and science. More recently, programs that help provide a minimally comfortable life for tens of millions of people have captured the attention of deficit scolds. I’m getting a little ahead of the story, but the most recent round of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the tax cuts that President Trump was pushing for in his rambling-uncle phone call from Japan, have exploded the deficit to such a degree—upwards of $2 trillion—that the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has publicly pasted a target on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
The larger context here is the long-term erosion in the circumstances faced by 90 percent of all Americans. Wealth has always been distributed unequally in the United States, as it is throughout the world, but the distribution has not been this unequal since 1928, th
e year before the Depression began.3 From the 1940s through the 1970s, the broad classes of poor and middle-class Americans held more than 60 percent of the country’s wealth. The wealthiest Americans held roughly 40 percent. Today, as before the Great Depression, the basic pattern of wealth distribution has flipped. Today, the top 10 percent of American households hold 80 percent of the wealth. Within that group, the top 0.1 percent (a mere 160,000 families) hold 22 percent of the wealth. That 22 percent is almost exactly the same amount of wealth held by the “bottom” 90 percent of American households—or nearly 290 million people.4
Money may not buy you happiness, but higher income and greater wealth bring obvious benefits, most of which start with the word “better”: better housing in safer neighborhoods, better schools, better health care, better career options, larger savings and retirement accounts, a longer life, and greater opportunity for your children. The opposite is also true. The less money you have, the fewer benefits you enjoy. The Trump administration recently declared that “the war on poverty is largely over and a success.” This is false. Tens of millions of Americans, including millions of children, live below the poverty line. Those just above it—poor working people and their families, along with a significant number of the elderly—are exposed to extraordinary levels of economic risk.
Historically, we have accepted these inequities confident that in America we have the right and ability to rise. When confronted by the hard facts of poverty or the growing challenges of middle-class families, we have consoled ourselves with the belief that Americans enjoy the opportunity to advance and thereby offer a better life to their children. We believe that the opportunity to improve our prospects in the long run offsets the short-term effects of poverty and economic inequality.
The Land of Flickering Lights Page 12