As the Fix Congress First! founders put it: “This isn’t a Democratic issue or a Republican issue—it’s a fundamental question about what kind of democracy we want to have.”9
If you want to know what a democracy no longer beholden to special interests would mean for the political process, look no further than Senator Ted Kaufman of Delaware. When Kaufman, Joe Biden’s longtime chief of staff, was appointed to serve out his old boss’s term, he was originally thought of as a Senate placeholder.
But, far from biding his time, Kaufman soon emerged as one of the Senate’s fiercest critics of Wall Street and a champion of the need to push for a serious overhaul of our financial system to protect the middle class. What transformed this behind-the-scenes staffer into a fire-breathing accidental leader? A healthy sense of outrage.
In March 2010, on his seventy-first birthday, he took to the Senate floor to lambast the loss of the rule of law on Wall Street.10 He reminded his colleagues that the American taxpayer has laid out more than $2.5 trillion to “save the system,” and asked, “What exactly did we save?” His answer: “a system of overwhelming and concentrated financial power that has become dangerous … a system in which the rule of law has broken yet again.… At the end of the day, this is a test of whether we have one justice system in this country or two. If we don’t treat a Wall Street firm that defrauded investors of millions of dollars the same way we treat someone who stole five hundred dollars from a cash register, then how can we expect our citizens to have faith in the rule of law? … Our markets can only flourish when Americans again trust that they are fair, transparent, and accountable.”
Watching his determination to fix the financial system offers a window on how we can fix our political system. Aside from his personal character, which we cannot duplicate, there is a dynamic that helped turn Kaufman into a fearless crusader that we can duplicate: the absence of money as a factor in his political life.
Kaufman didn’t need to raise money to become a senator—he was appointed. And he doesn’t need to raise money for his reelection campaign—because he’s not running. So he is completely unencumbered by the need to curry favor with the moneyed interests. Kaufman is a great test case—a shining example of what it looks like when our representatives are not beholden to special interests and are only serving the public good.
Another important means of fighting the disillusionment, cynicism, and doubt that have infected the body politic in recent years is a top-to-bottom commitment to transparency. “Sunlight,” Justice Louis Brandeis famously said, “is said to be the best of disinfectants.”11 But real transparency means more than just putting up a website for every government agency. Creating a system in which the people feel confident that they know what their representatives are doing involves more than just throwing data at the problem. It requires context—and ways of helping the public yank back the curtain on the back rooms of power so it can see who is really pulling the levers.
A great early iteration of this was provided by the Sunlight Foundation during the health-care summit in February 2010.12 As part of its live streaming of the discussion, the group’s website offered a dose of transparency by showing, as each of our elected officials was speaking, a list of his or her major campaign contributors. It was simple, powerful, and spoke volumes about the extent to which many players in the summit were bought and paid for.
In the future, a souped-up version of this kind of technology will allow us to see who is funding whom, and who is carrying water for which special interest, in real time and across every imaginable platform. The Sunday political shows will be a whole different animal when we are able to effortlessly, instantly, and literally follow the money—and discover why a seemingly irrational policy becomes the law of the land.
American politics has become a rigged game. But, moving forward, innovative technology can give us the chance to level the playing field.
KILLER APPS FOR A TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY DEMOCRACY
Among those looking to use technology to improve the way our government is run is Tim O’Reilly, the tech guru CEO of O’Reilly Media. In 2004, O’Reilly popularized the term Web 2.0. He’s now at the forefront of a movement to apply the concept to the way our democracy is run: Government 2.0.
He describes Government 2.0 as “a new compact between government and the public, in which government puts in place mechanisms for services that are delivered not by government, but by private citizens.”13 It’s about “government as a platform … If there’s one thing we learn from the technology industry, it’s that every big winner has been a platform company: someone whose success has enabled others, who’s built on their work and multiplied its impact.”
Using government as a platform is all about how the massive amount of information at the government’s disposal is used, how widely it is shared, how low is the barrier for innovators to access it. After all, the Internet itself was a government project. The government built the platform and innovators ran with it. Same with GPS—a “killer app” that originated with the government.
Other examples of innovators building on government-provided information and services are popping up all over the country—and the Web. For instance, sites like Everyblock and StumbleSafely use crime statistics that are publicly available and remake them into public safety applications (kind of the opposite of a killer app!).
Many of the most interesting experiments in bringing technology and government together are going on at the local level.14 One leader who has enthusiastically embraced the new model is Newark mayor Cory Booker. “We are one part of a larger democracy that is learning how to master media to drive social change,” says Booker. “Social media is a forum where people can come together to connect, talk, mobilize, and create a larger sense of community.”
Booker has over one million followers on his very active Twitter page. Using Twitter, along with Facebook and YouTube, he maintains an open pipeline of communication with his constituents. He also uses these platforms to motivate them to take part in night patrols of troubled neighborhoods—patrols the mayor frequently joins. And he’s formed an advisory working group called the Newark Tech Corps, made up of leading tech executives who advise him on the newest technologies and how he can best adapt them to serve Newark’s residents.
We are reminded on a daily basis of the limits to what government can do.15 Going forward, it’s clear that we are going to have to forge a new relationship with our government. “Citizens are connected like never before and have the skill sets and passion to solve problems affecting them locally as well as nationally,” writes O’Reilly. “Citizens are empowered to spark the innovation that will result in an improved approach to governance.”
We can’t expect a government hobbled by centuries-old tools to deal with the challenges of the twenty-first century. That’s why Government 2.0 needs to be taken out of beta and put into practice across the nation.
MAKING OUR SCHOOLHOUSES ROCK
Next up in our extreme makeover of America: education. Fixing our broken educational system is vital to rescuing America’s middle class and preserving our standing as a First World nation. Education is the most basic tool for changing one’s life and circumstances. I think of it as a gateway opportunity: It makes everything else possible—which is why the failure of our leaders to truly address education reform is so troubling. Instead of fundamental reform, we get grandstanding and broken promises and reform in name only.
Real reform has to start with how we treat our nation’s teachers.
Teacher effectiveness is the single most important factor driving student performance, with top teachers able to boost the test scores of students up to 50 percentage points above the scores of those under the tutelage of the least-effective instructors.16
Yet, because of overly rigid union contracts, we cannot pay the best teachers more based on their performance—and we’ve seen how next to impossible it has become to fire even the worst teachers. Until we stop this insanity, our national
education report card will continue to be littered with Fs.
We also have to put an end to our obsession with testing, which was supposed to be a way of assessing reform but is now treated as actual reform. It’s as if the powers-that-be all decided that a checkup was as good as a cure. This focus on testing reduces teachers to drill sergeants and effectively eliminates from the school schedule anything not likely to appear on a standardized test—things such as art, music, and class discussions.
And cash-strapped states inevitably end up relying on multiple-choice questions instead of essays, which are up to one thousand times more expensive to score.17 So it’s good-bye analytical thinking, hello rote memorization and educated guessing. Our all-out embrace of testing has given us the standardization of education, the destruction of critical thinking, and the categorization of millions of our children as failures.
So what can we do to turn around this sorry state of affairs?
For starters, we have to start looking at things in daring and different ways. To paraphrase Einstein, you can’t solve a problem using the same type of thinking that created it. Unfortunately, in our current political climate, it’s nearly impossible to get people to stop protecting their little parcels of partisan turf and start thinking on a different level, allowing them to connect the dots and see the possibilities that might lie on the other side of the mountain.
And what I see on the other side of that mountain is a single-payer system of education.
Single payer never made it out of the gate when it came to health-care reform. But we should bring it into education reform.
In a single-payer health-care plan, the federal government provides coverage for all U.S. citizens and legal residents. Patients don’t go to a government doctor—they just have the government pay the bill. And that’s how it would work with education. In a single-payer education plan, the federal government, in conjunction with the states, would provide an education allotment for every parent of a K–12 child. Parents would then be free to enroll their child in the school of their choice.
In a single-payer health-care plan, all citizens would be free to select the physician and hospital of their choice. And, unlike in our education system, no one backing single-payer health care ever suggested that patients can see only a doctor in their own district or can be operated on only at the hospital down the street. If we don’t hold our health hostage to the value of our property, why do we do this with our children’s education? The annual educational cost per child—equalized for urban and suburban school districts across each state—would come from current education funding sources.
When it comes to quality control, in health care the guidelines incorporated by Medicare are used to manage the quality of health-care services. In education, the government would be responsible for accrediting the schools from which parents could choose.
It’s simple, sensible, and, above all, just. And maybe instead of calling for an exorcist any time the words “competition,” “choice,” or “freedom” are used in connection with education, we can start singing hosannas for an idea that preserves what is truly public in public education—the government, that is, the public, paying for it—while allowing creativity, innovation, and parental empowerment to flourish.
IT’S THE JOBS, STUPID!
In January 2010, during his State of the Union speech, President Obama declared, “Jobs must be our number one focus in 2010.”18 This was followed by a round of applause—but very little action. What else is new?
Everybody is in such total agreement we need “more jobs” that the words are in danger of becoming meaningless, of going from tangible policy to talking point. In Washington, saying you’re for jobs has become just another obligatory, perfunctory throat-clearing preamble.
But we need to move beyond the lofty rhetoric and the desultory statistics and focus on the fact that every lost job is a social calamity.19 Child abuse and neglect, divorce, crime, poor health, and drug addiction are often the devastating side effects of job loss. No country can be considered healthy when twenty-six million of its people are out of work or underemployed.
The current job crisis is simply too large and too stubborn—and the suffering too great—to do anything less than be as bold as possible.
The first thing we should do is have the federal government offer direct aid to local and state governments. Since August 2008, more than 150,000 state and local jobs have been eliminated, and the states’ combined budget gap for fiscal 2010 and 2011 is $380 billion.20, 21 The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that state and local deficits could cost the country an entire point off the GDP, which would, in turn, lead to the loss of another 900,000 jobs next year.22 This is why the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) recommends the federal government spend $150 billion on aid to state and local governments over the next year and a half, an investment that would save up to 1.4 million jobs.23
Congress and the president should also push through a muscular plan to create public-service jobs. “The federal government could provide jobs by … providing jobs,” writes Paul Krugman.24 “It’s time for at least a small-scale version of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration.… There would be accusations that the government was creating make-work jobs, but the W.P.A. left many solid achievements in its wake. And the key point is that direct public employment can create a lot of jobs at relatively low cost.”
In fact, the EPI estimates that one million jobs designed to “put unemployed Americans back to work serving their communities” could be created with an investment of $40 billion a year for three years.25 This approach is also favored by Princeton’s Alan Blinder.26 “Direct public-service employment is straightforward,” he says. “As long as the new government jobs do not compete with the private sector, the net job creation should be one-for-one. So hire people to repair parks, not shopping malls.”
We may have missed the chance to put rebuilding America’s infrastructure front and center in the big stimulus package Congress passed in 2009, but we absolutely must redouble our efforts to do so, in the process creating millions of high-paying jobs that can’t be outsourced.
One way to finance the massive rebuilding effort that is needed is through a national infrastructure bank.27 Modeled after the European Investment Bank, which has been successfully investing in European energy, telecommunications, and transportation infrastructure projects for more than fifty years, the U.S. version would use federal seed money to leverage private dollars for investment in high-priority rebuilding projects across the country.28
An investment of $25 billion in government funds could leverage more than $600 billion worth of projects.29 That won’t cover the $2.2 trillion needed to bring our infrastructure up to an adequate condition, but it’s a significant start—and would be a powerful engine for job creation.30
Washington needs to get its act together.31 The creation of a national infrastructure bank was first proposed in 2007. And even though President Obama threw his weight behind the legislation in early 2008, Congress was still holding hearings on the matter in mid-2010. It’s time to up the intensity and move this idea from the drawing-board stage to the action stage, fixing roads, bridges, sewers, and electrical grids and laying high-speed rail tracks.
We also need to pass a comprehensive legislative package to plug the drain of jobs heading overseas. It must include tax credits for companies that keep and create jobs for American workers and close loopholes that encourage employers to ship jobs abroad.
It would also be smart to incentivize green jobs. Investing in renewables will both lessen the likelihood of another disaster, like the BP one in the Gulf, and tap into a multibillion-dollar world market, creating an explosion of well-paying high-tech jobs and nurturing the next generation of job-creating entrepreneurs.
To take just one example, as the rest of the economy was shedding jobs in 2009, the solar energy industry added nearly twenty thousand.32 The Solar Energy Industries Association estimates that the
solar industry could add up to 200,000 jobs over the next two years if Congress renews various incentive programs that are expiring in 2010.33
Another way of promoting the green economy would be the creation of a national green bank, which, in the words of John Podesta and Karen Kornbluh of the Center for American Progress, would “open credit markets and motivate businesses to invest again,” and “enable clean-energy technologies—in such areas as wind, solar, geothermal, advanced biomass, and energy efficiency—to be deployed on a large scale and become commercially viable at current electricity costs.”34
Such a bank would help loosen the available credit for small businesses and establish a reliable source of funding for entrepreneurs who wish to devote themselves to green technologies and start-ups.
Reed Hundt, the Federal Communications Commission chair under President Clinton, is the head of a group called the Coalition for Green Capital, whose goal is “to establish a government-run non-profit bank that would fill the void that exists in clean-energy legislation in America today.”35 According to Hundt, a green bank would create “about four million jobs.”36 Hundt’s proposal has been included in several House and Senate climate and energy bills. And he is in talks with state governments to help them set up their own green banks.
Small businesses have long been the biggest creators of American jobs. According to a May 2010 report by the Congressional Oversight Panel, “More than 99 percent of American businesses employ 500 or fewer employees … and create two out of every three new jobs.”37 And there are many ways we can help support them: Expand the Small Business Administration’s lending programs; enact a one-year payroll tax holiday (creating a moratorium on Social Security, Medicare, and FICA taxes that will encourage businesses to hire new workers); offer businesses a tax credit for every job created over the next twelve months; and use bailout funds left in the TARP program to bail out Main Street (via increased lending to small businesses and funding of public services being cut by states and cities).
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