by Ralph Nader
First, for each agenda, divide the subject between procedural and substantive convergence. We can agree on a general policy or stance without having to also agree on the exact implications or use that would be made of a policy. For example, years ago LibCons agreed on the value of the federal and state Freedom of Information acts, which were directed to having a more open government. These laws can be used by anybody, regardless of who they are, and the requesters cannot be denied because of their motivation. So, let us imagine, one researcher may dig into the background of a Democratic governor’s actions because the examiner is looking to expose corruption, while another may be looking into this same material because he or she is a partisan Republican desiring to expose any member of the other party. Each would have equal right to the records. Procedural stage 1 having been accomplished, with Freedom of Information acts passed, LibCons will have to decide whether they agree on exactly what files or internal reports to obtain at any given time. That is the substantive stage.
Second, some of these initiatives can be advanced based on various positions or actions of the LCs over time that occur independently of one another, as long as they are solidly based on the principles and philosophies of liberalism and conservatism.
Third, whether or not there is a likelihood of the proposed reform being adopted or enacted in its entirety, the proper mindset is to aim high, but recognize that only a partial realization is possible at a given time. If one doesn’t score the rare home run, then a single, double, triple, or run-saving catch or throw can be considered real progress.
Fourth, it may be worth the effort if we just commence a public discussion and debate on the topic. After all, everything starts with a conversation. Given the impoverishment of public and political dialogue these days, talking about something overcomes rooted self-censorship and shatters the taboos that have frozen freedom in the first place. If you visit our group’s website, www.debatingtaboos.org, you’ll see some actual debates shown on C-SPAN on usually taboo subjects as well as commentary about the necessity of confronting these typically unmentioned topics.
Fifth, in any given convergence, there will be uneven contributions by the LCs because one or the other has the most experience, best Rolodex, or more fire in the belly behind the desire to join together. This, naturally, is to be expected and welcomed. An illustration is Head Start, launched mostly by eager liberals but now backed by many conservatives because of its efficient effectiveness at early childhood education.
Sixth, even with concurrence on the goals, there will likely be difference over the means. Taxation reform is a prime illustration of this point. Conservatives and liberals are both in favor of it, but they have quite different ideas of how it should be done. Knowing this from the beginning may signal a temporary no-go or mean that each member of the alliance, having launched the demand for change together, can then proceed on their own to put forward their version of how it should be done.
Seventh, it is likely that the pioneers in any early convergence move will receive criticism from loyalists and invite career retaliation, ostracism, or some other expressions of disapproval. Pioneers must be prepared and able to stay true to their convictions.
Eighth, we can reasonably ask at what point on the continuum of LC collaboration can the effort be deemed to reach convergence? Is it when one L and one C converge? Or is there a critical mass needed to show that the convergence is really underway? The question is as hard to answer as this one: When does the Mississippi become a river, starting from its origins in drops of water in Minnesota that turn into rivulets, then brooks, streams, and tributaries? It is all in the flow, the direction, and the expanding replenishment. The various publics will notice when the takeoff occurs.
Ninth, when the LCs lock arms and get going, they will have to come together over what advocacy tools to use and what arenas to enter, considering what is available in a democratic society. Should they work through legislatures? The courts? Regulatory or procurement agencies? Should they work with entrepreneurs (commercial or nonprofit), those in the academic world, media, the retired, prominent persons, the enlightened super-rich, whistle-blowers, shareholders, grassroots campaigns? Ls and Cs often have different contacts, backgrounds, and tastes in connection with such levers of change, and how they are applied will have to be worked out in the same spirit of convergence.
Tenth, one noteworthy benefit of working on alliances is that the very experience with convergence stimulates the depth of our basic humanity and sense of justice. It is too easy to be cut off from others by narrow worldviews. Well-meaning, serious people are not immune to the infinite capacity of humans to self-deceive, to make their brain’s capabilities prisoners of their cloistered, tunnel-vision minds. And when it involves the monistic merchant or commercial mind, especially that fostered by Big Business, we find this perspective responsible for some of the most astonishing absurdities. This is particularly visible in the way Big Business executives predicted calamities for their industries that are now seen as accepted, commonsense reforms and regulations. Businessmen publicly predicted that ending slavery and child labor, women achieving the vote, the creation of Social Security, and the introduction of auto and workplace safety would wreck their industries. (See http://crywolfproject.org.)
Eleventh, these convergences require resources. First, money—the fuel for the solid development of effort. Convergers should devote real time and imagination to securing (if possible) a few enlightened super-rich, who may be in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, and composed of a different perspective toward life, the future, and posterity than that of their younger affluent friends. Our country is laden with leaden fortunes, basking in lassitudinous investments, some of whose possessors can be brought forth to advance our society in a way that would invigorate these generous donors with fresh significance. Let what follows be a preliminary menu of sorts for their tasting.
5
Getting to the Actions: Convergences Ahoy!
This is the point where we need to go over the reforms and directions list, looking at the key places where a convergence exists in potentia but needs to be coordinated for effective action. The first seven items on the list focus on economics in connection with such matters as the government’s relationship to business contractors and the minimum wage.
1. Get the Department of Defense to audit its budget.
Even people accustomed to reading the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and investigative media reports about the mind-boggling waste, duplications, and corporate frauds in the Pentagon are astounded to learn that the Department of Defense cannot or will not make an annual audit of its sprawling $527 billion yearly budget, not counting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.1 GAO auditors stationed at the Pentagon report every year to their principal—Congress—that the DOD’s books are unauditable! Congress shrugs. That is half of the entire discretionary budget of the US government. Unauditable budgets mean huge monies go astray. There is, for example, no audit trail for the $9 billion unaccounted for in the first months of the Iraq war.2 One year the GAO caught the Air Force buying billions of dollars in spare parts because the service did not know that they already had these parts in some warehouses somewhere.3
Now there has been no polling on the public’s attitude toward this colossal accounting gap, but I’ll bet a demand for an auditable Pentagon budget would be supported by more than 90 percent of the population. Who in their right mind would run an operation like this? Well, someone who is big enough and can get away with it because the organization’s funding pipeline, wrapped in patriotic flags, coming from Congress, and swarming with lobbyists for uncontested corporate contractors, is almost untouchable. Just about everybody knows this inside Congress, but they find it easier to self-censor and benefit from “feathering in their nest,” as Howard Dean calls it, than to stand up against the policies that the Lockheed Martins, the Raytheons, the Boeings, and the General Dynamics corporations call a jobs program, especially as one or another of these firms and th
eir subcontractors have operations in nearly every congressional district—420 out of 435, according to Dean.4
Still, setting the objective of having a Department of Defense budget capable of being audited is a perfect candidate for convergence. Anyone opposing this demand couldn’t pass the laugh test. People from the Left-Right constituencies would flock to this cause if it gained traction, and if it became a reality, nobody would be more relieved than the GAO, plus the internal, beleaguered Pentagon auditors themselves and, maybe, the secretary of defense himself. Along these same lines, an analogous LR convergence-friendly demand would be that our legislators disclose all government budgets without exception.
2. Establish rigorous procedures to evaluate the claims of businesses looking for a government handout, which would end most corporate welfare and bailouts.
There are so many one-way corporate subsidies, handouts, giveaways, bailouts, and bloated contracting programs pouring out of Washington, DC, that there is no existing government compilation of them all. The reaction to the way Bush and Obama bailed out the Wall Street crooks and speculators was a flood of criticism from all directions, including from the Tea Partiers and the Occupy Wall Street participants. Those who voted for the string of bailouts in Congress were made to feel that the country would be backed onto an economic cliff if they didn’t go along with the plans of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who hailed from the lucrative helm of Goldman Sachs.
If we had a series of tests, proving such things as the validity and value of their claims, that corporate welfare seekers must pass, first in Congress and then in the agency or department that selects the takers, we would definitely cut out most of these multibillion-dollar freeloaders.
Presently, it is purely corporate lobbying and campaign cash that drives these gravy trains through Congress. Take the atomic energy industry, for example. Why should taxpayers bear the risk for tens of billions of dollars, the cost of financing and insuring atomic power plants? It is justified by the atomic power utilities saying the private financial markets won’t loan and insure these white elephants without 100 percent federal government loan guarantees and the taxpayers’ assumption of most of the liability in case of a disastrous meltdown. These reasons are not good enough. Such claims by the industry have never been carefully evaluated. Putting more rigorous, data-based criteria in the law as part of an annual approval process for any money disbursement to corporations would make Congress less vulnerable to sheer pressure politics from the corporatists.
Here’s a perfect place for an LR coalition. Why wouldn’t liberals and conservatives band together to stop these scandalous raids on the taxpayers? Many would, except those who are too occupied fighting battles over social issues and dialing for campaign dollars to take on corporate welfare reform that would lead to convergence.
3. Restore efficiency in government procurement.
At this point, government purchasing, a multitrillion dollar business—annually at the federal, state, and local levels—is overripe for huge savings and for obtaining better products and services. For too long, the full text of many procurement contracts has not been made public, too many are left without competitive bidding, and more often they are not even monitored during and after their completion. A bipartisan move passed Congress in 2004 requiring all agencies to put summaries of these contracts online. Similar bipartisan support exists for putting the entire texts online, as Indiana and Texas have done, but there has been no vigorous push to get this enacted as a result of the quiet opposition of the vendor industry, which does not like the sunlight. With entire texts online, more competitors are likely, taxpayer groups and the media can regularly monitor them for adherence or improvement in the terms on the next round, and scholars can delve deeply into this enormous, often sweetheart, contract state.
In 1988, the Center for Study of Responsive Law held a conference in Washington, DC, on government procurement to stimulate innovation, stressing how a fine-tuning of such contracts can create larger civilian markets. Earlier in this book, I noted the example of auto safety, in which air bags were introduced to cars via purchases by the government. One example in which procurements stimulated positive directions was the use of generic drugs by US Army purchase practices around World War II. And for years the navy, for economic reasons, was buying solar photovoltaics for remote locations. Solar energy advocates have used this fact in their activism.
Feelers for convergence have appeared in Congress (with Republican senator Tom Coburn teaming with Democrats), at the state level, in the literature, and in concrete examples, enough to suggest it is time to move to a larger stage. It is to be expected that objections will come from strict libertarians, who will say the true change would be to get the government out of most of these activities. That is another discussion, which will have to be gone through category by category. Here the convergent focus should be on the best and most honest use of the taxpayer dollar now.
4. Link the minimum wage with inflation.
A bottom-up convergence effort will be needed here to give the 70 percent plus support this measure has with the public a cutting edge in Congress. Over thirty million workers—hailing from varying political persuasions—are laboring at between the current $7.25 an hour (by far the lowest rate among the Western world’s large countries) and the $10.50 per hour they would be getting if the 1968 minimum wage had been adjusted for inflation. This demand is going to get across-the-board support because a conservative worker at Walmart or McDonald’s is not going to put any (perceived) antigovernment ideology ahead of his or her desire to put bread on the family table. And properly so.
Leading traditional conservative thinkers, with few exceptions, believed we needed to have a minimum, mandatory level of worker well-being. The exceptions do not believe in any minimum wage whatsoever, arguing, among other things, that it reduces the number of jobs that will be available. This is a stance that has been decisively rebutted by knowledgeable, published scholars, including Robert Pollin and other prominent economists.5
At least 70 percent of the population is behind an adjusted minimum wage, including Rick Santorum and, until 2012, Governor Mitt Romney. With the outraged reactions that will be voiced when, for example, the full personal stories of what it is like for Mom and Dad to try to make it on $7.25 to $10.50 per hour when the bosses, like the CEOs of Walmart and Target, are making $11,000 or more per hour, reach the mass media, who has to worry about the claims of well-rewarded, armchair columnists?
5. Enact taxation reform, and gather uncollected taxes.
Taxation appears to be one of the more divisive issues among conservatives and liberals. Hardly a press opportunity goes by without no-tax, conservative (his description) House Speaker John Boehner decrying “all of the over-taxing, over-regulating, and over-spending that’s going on in Washington.”6 Now switch to David Stockman, another Reagan conservative and former head of the White House’s budget office in the early eighties. Retired after a long investment banking career, Stockman recently condemned the “simplistic and reckless idea that the way to stimulate the economy is to cut taxes anytime, anywhere, for any reason [which has] become embedded [in the GOP]. It has become a religion, it has become a catechism. It’s become a mindless incantation.”7
In fact, total income taxes paid by corporations or individuals as a percent of income and GDP in the United States is at the lowest level in decades.8 That is a major reason why government deficits are expanding. Having less and less revenue to meet the spending levels of government, including its unpaid-for wars, results in trillion-dollar-plus deficits a year. Stockman says this plunge into red ink started with George W. Bush, who put forward massive increases in defense spending and large reductions in the revenue base while not making any effort at cutting spending of the corporate state.
What is Stockman’s favorite tax? It would be one levied on financial transactions—in effect a sales tax on Wall Street speculation—one that could raise big money daily. Showing that on
e can never stereotype conservatives, even ones like Stockman, who would cut all kinds of federal social service and boondoggle military programs, he describes Wall Street in these words: “We have a massive casino that is doing nothing but churning transactions by the millisecond, robots trading with each other, as a result of the Federal Reserve juicing the system continuously with overnight money that’s free. There’s no productive value for Main Street or the real U.S. economy.”9
A speculation tax on the hundreds of trillions of dollars annually spent chasing derivatives would not have to be more than one-half of 1 percent to raise $300 billion a year. The European Commission proposed such a tax as well. Eleven European countries already have some lesser form of transaction tax.10
Such a tax is an easy sell to shoppers, who have to pay a 6 to 8 percent (or more) retail sales tax in stores when they buy the necessities of life. LR shoppers is where the convergence can start, but to get off the ground it would need some high-profile political leadership and media reporting and commentary. I’ve often joked that we won’t get such a financial transaction tax, one championed, by the way, by many an organized nurses’ rally, unless leading financial columnists for the New York Times, Floyd Norris and Gretchen Morgenson, get on the issue.
But I think it is more promising to start a dialogue outside the box of this LR wrangling over the tax rates for income, capital gains, and dividends (I believe they should all be taxed at the same rate). Thinking outside the box, we might consider proposing that before taxes on work or labor, there should be taxation of what society likes the least or dislikes the most, so as to diminish these activities. For example, tax carbon pollution, a policy favored by Exxon/Mobil, several leading Republicans, liberal and conservative economists, and many environmentalists. And tax financial speculation; hike gambling taxes and taxes on addictive products like tobacco, alcohol, and certain addictive drugs; raise the penalties on corporate crime along with other harmful activity; and do all that before going for worker incomes.