Clean Sweep
Since September 11, 2001, three things in particular have been abused in the United States: our civil liberties, our finances, and our Congress.
You’re probably thinking: Congress? They’re not exactly a target for pity. And it’s true—to a degree. Previous incarnations of Congress were complicit in the first two issues, having abrogated so much responsibility to President Bush’s “muscular” executive branch, and permitting or encouraging everything from the Patriot Act to warrantless-wiretapping to unaffordable and unsustainable tax cuts and expenditures. The current 2008 Congress was not much better and the 2010 Congress is not exactly off to a great start.
Yet Congress—the Congress in office at the time of the terrorist attacks and every Congress since then—has not really been itself. Both the House of Representatives and the Senate are composed primarily of people who may be elected by the people, but who serve primarily other masters: the people who pay their bills. Yes, in theory that’s us, we the people; but we don’t pay their bills, we just pay Congressional salaries and amazing healthcare and retirement benefits. Their broader bills are paid by the wide range of outside special interests, arrayed across the entire political spectrum. This is not a left or right issue, it’s not a Republican or Democrat issue: it affects every member of Congress on each side of the aisle. I know of no exceptions, including those who are technically “Independent.”
So here’s my modest proposal for 2012: a Clean Sweep Campaign. A nation-wide movement to effect a total cleaning of house in Congress in 2012, in order to elect people whose interests are exclusively in public service and who understand that their election to Congress means they are there to serve us, the people, and no one else. The Clean Sweep Campaign would function like a seal of approval, a verification that the candidate (and elected member) followed these principles:
- Candidates must not accept any special interest funding during the campaign period. This means no money or in-kind support (like campaign staff) from unions, PACs, dedicated special interests such as the NRA or Emily’s List, and no money from businesses or lobbyists of any kind. Period, no exceptions.
- Candidates may take donations from individual constituents—but only from individuals who are able to vote for them, i.e., citizens within their constituency areas. Candidates may take donations from people with affiliations to specific interests—e.g., a voter who also supports Planned Parenthood or the Family Research Council—but no money may come directly from any outside organizations.
- Candidates may not accept bundled donations.
- Candidates may have party affiliations, as a means of describing political perspectives (to the extent that “Democrat” and “Republican” mean anything other than “self-interested”) but also cannot accept any money from them. Again, only donations from constituents may be accepted. (Political parties may provide in-kind support, such as human resource support for office management, campaign positioning counsel, or door-to-door canvassing.)
- Candidates may not have served as a lobbyist within the immediately preceding election cycle, i.e., within the last two years.
- Candidates may fund themselves, but only equal to the maximum donation received from every constituent in their district (or, for Senators, their state). Candidates may fund themselves even if they are able to raise the maximum donation from every constituent but, again, it cannot be more than a 1:1 match.
- Once elected, candidates must subscribe to the same code, including its broader implications: no junkets or trips, no paid-for dinners with lobbyists or other outside interests, and no in-kind support from outside supporters.
Is money the most problematic and pernicious influence in politics is money? Yes and no. No to the extent that “influence” covers a much wider terrain than just financing, and no because not every member of Congress is out for direct personal gain.
But yes because, more than anything else, money is the thing that influences the direction of politics. Sure, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina were defeated in California, despite the investments they made in their own campaigns; but those candidates and those campaigns were anomalies. Most of the time, the better funded candidate wins—and stays in office, well-funded, until some more significant demographic trend forcibly knocks them out.
Money is also the most easily identifiable mechanism of control, the thing that voters can use to evaluate influence. And while the Supreme Court has ruled on a few occasions that spending money is a form of expression, and therefore cannot be legally eliminated, this poses no problem for the Clean Sweep Campaign: this approach is not about passing laws regarding spending—it’s a campaign about principles of representative independence, about inviting candidates to adhere to those principles, and about providing a stamp of approval when they do so. No one would force their hand—but every effort could be made by opponents to make clear that a given candidate is not, in fact, an independent representative of their potential constituents.
My motivation isn’t partisan: I’m not looking to elect more Democrats or Republicans, or to bolster the likes of the (equally corrupt and secretly funded) Tea Partiers. Political balance is important, as long as it is functional and effective in representing it’s constituency. But our Congress is not that. They don’t hear—can’t hear—the voices of their own people through all of the outside influences, factors that have little to do with the political realities of their states or districts, or about the long-term future of the country. And when they wave their well-funded flags in our faces, and proclaim their allegiance to our own interests, well … just take a look at the budget deficit, or the failed healthcare reform, or the not-even-failed-because-it-never-got-started effort to address long-term funding challenges for Social Security and Medicare, or shockingly absent prosecutions of bankers and investors who helped cause the financial crises, or … well, I could go on. Just take a look and ask yourself whether you think the people you elected to represent you in Congress are even close to fulfilling their responsibilities to you and your neighbors. I know mine aren’t.
It’s time to clean House (and Senate), and what better way than with a Clean Sweep.
War Torn
In 1994, at the time of the Rwandan genocide, I was working for a small foundation in Washington, DC. My boss and I were both outraged by the dithering response of then-President Bill Clinton’s administration. He sat on numerous policy making boards around town, and knew lots of people—in government, in non-governmental organizations, in other foundations and think tanks. Call after call my boss made seemed to result in sympathy, lots of people agreeing that the situation was messy, but not much in the way of actual action.
One day, I came in to work and the two of us discussed it again. For me, the Rwandan genocide was reminiscent of American dithering during the holocaust, the kind of inaction so well documented by historians like David Wyman: we can mythologize Franklin Delano Roosevelt all we want, but in the end, addressing the mass murder of Jews (and others) was not a policy priority. For my boss, a producer of the movie Shoah, there was a sense of immediacy to the world’s failure to live up to the “never again” theme. He felt he needed to act, and where his phone calls had little impact, he thought a public platform might: he rounded up some big names, people whose opinions might matter to the Clinton administration, and took out full page ads in the Washington Post and New York Times calling on the US government to act.
This bit of history has been on my mind as I read the news about the attacks on Libyan government troops and military installations, in support of rebel groups that were about to be routed—and as I read the mostly ambivalent comments of people on Facebook, Twitter, and news sites. Suddenly, the United States and a selection of allies (including, shockingly, the typically risk-averse French) are launching another war. Maybe. Or maybe they just aim to degrade Libya’s military capabilities enough to give the rebels a (pardon the pun) fighting chance against Colonel Qaddafi.
I am not comparing Libya and Rwanda; the situations are very different. But the ambivalence people feel (including, it seems, our own president) strikes me as very similar. Especially when combined with the mental and financial exhaustion that comes from all this fighting abroad with uncertain goals, limited investments and thus limited impact, and a weariness over the enduring cycle of bad news.
In one of its opinion pieces this week, The Economist wrote encouragingly of military intervention in Libya. It included this argument: “Democracies wisely set obstacles in the way of those who seek to put the world to rights by fighting—however good their motives. Bitter experience in Iraq has taught how liberators soon come to be seen as oppressors. … At the same time, democracies shrink from the idea that might is right. After the genocide in Rwanda, nations took on a duty to stop mass-killing if they could. Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Liberia all showed that outsiders can in fact help avert catastrophes. The Arab awakening is all about human dignity and the rights of ordinary people—values that the West lives by and seeks to promote. For the West to turn its back on Libya’s rebels and to stand aside while its allies shoot protesters in Bahrain betrays its own values.”
Of course, The Economist neglects to mention Darfur, in Sudan, where we largely failed to stop the killings until it was too late. Or the multi-year war in Congo, also known as “Africa’s world war,” where more than 5 million people have been killed, and many more raped or brutalized, in another ethnically driven conflict. The Egyptians managed to overthrow Mubarak without outside military interference. Amidst all this, should we really treat the Libyans differently? How do we draw the line between Libya and Syria, where new reports suggest more protests and more crackdowns are also happening? And it must be acknowledged that we do this all while we rationalize military inaction in Bahrain, presumably because it would hurt the Saudi troops on the ground there, and thus our relationship with another major oil producer.
I sincerely wish the Libyan people well, and hope for their freedom amidst desperate circumstances. But consider me among the ambivalent, working hard not to veer much further towards the cynical.
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Updates: Some other articles of interest, from a few different sources, supporting reasons to be cautious about our Libyan engagement:
- In the National Journal, Megan Scully writes of the costs of this initiative.
- In the National Review, John Derbyshire writes of some of the criticism of President Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron for this whole engagement.
- In my view, the New York Times has been a bit of a cheerleader for this mini-war–but they have a piece by David Kirkpatrick that makes clear how little we really know about what to expect as an end-result in Libya.
And The Oscar Goes To…
The Oscars are tonight and I have no plans to watch, as usual. Unlike in most years, I do feel a sudden compulsion to see one movie win. My pick: Gasland deserves the Oscar for best documentary, for being (as my wife aptly noted) a cross between An Inconvenient Truth and Erin Brockovich.
Directed by Josh Fox, the movie is disturbing and compelling, a race against an unseen clock to expose the devastation to drinking water and the environment caused by hydraulic fracturing (aka “hydrofracking”), a process for extracting natural gas from underground rock formations. The race is one that affects millions of people living along the east coast and those states just inland, to see whether the process of leasing land for hydrofracking and allowing new wells to be drilled can be stopped before the hydrofracking contaminates the water supply for about 16 million people. (So far, the outcome does not look good for those of us living in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and even Delaware.)
There are many, many problems one can point to in our society, from the financial shenanigans that helped bring about our recent depression, to our fundamental failure to confront “third rail” political issues like the funding of Social Security or Medicare and healthcare. What makes this story about hydrofracking especially powerful is that it connects all the dots on the spectrum: corporate malfeasance, political intransigence, bureaucratic expediency (because, yes, bureaucracies can be efficient when they want to be), hard science, loose medicine, and personal tales of loss in the face of all of the above.
Meanwhile, as if reporter Ian Urbina was watching the movie with me yesterday, the New York Times is running a story today about hydrofracking and its associated problems—though as usual (in service to “objectivity”) the article does what the documentary does not, in pointing out that there are always at least two sides to the story and that questions about “facts” remain.
In this case, it seems to me there are three sides: government officials who say all the right things about being watchdogs for the public good (while clearly failing); energy companies that downplay the known science (and working to hide what isn’t yet known) because it’s better for business that way; and environmentalists and average citizens who are witness to the devastation wrought by hydraulic fracturing, not least through the demonstrably flammable water emanating from the tap. Those scenes are a consistent highlight of the movie. Sadly, the Times neglects even to mention Gasland; this is all the more ironic given the scope of coverage the news organization is dedicating to the Oscars.
Our collective failure to confront this and other issues is more complicated than what is, or is not, reported in the news media. (Though that’s certainly one good starting point for a discussion.) Where An Inconvenient Truth may have been more abstract—it’s difficult to really grasp the implications of planetary changes you cannot see with your own eyes, as this recent episode of This American Life (#424, aired 14 January 2011) so ably demonstrated—Gasland is direct and in your face. A hard-to-avoid truth: your drinking water, and mine, may soon be ruined. If that’s not worth fighting for, what is?
Complicity Through Passivity
If it takes two to tango, it takes at least as many to collaborate, in every sense of that word. Coming on the heels of my column last week about Israeli intransigence on peacemaking with Palestinians—while embracing the Germans in the years after the holocaust and every year since—I was stuck by the parallels in two reviews in the current New York Review of Books. First is Ian Buruma’s review of Alan Riding’s new book “And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris”; Buruma focuses his review around those writers and artists who collaborated with the Nazis, those who didn’t, and the large swath of gray in between. He writes:
“Some French artists and intellectuals such as Jean Paulhan were active in the resistance, but for the most part the cultural elite made no special contribution. Should more have been expected of them? This is the question running through Riding’s book. The fact that writers were more harshly treated after the war than collaborating businessmen or bureaucrats suggests that it was certainly seen that way by many people in France. Sartre, for one, believed that intellectuals had a higher calling than other people. De Gaulle seemed to agree. He refused to save Robert Brasillach from execution (even as real killers, like René Bousquet, went on to enjoy successful careers in government), because, as he put it, ‘in literature, as in everything, talent carries with it responsibility.’ Unlike Americans, the French have traditionally treated their writers and thinkers with reverence. Was this trust betrayed?”
Decades after the war, this may feel like a question that is largely academic (so to speak). Where the issue has relevance is for contemporary situations that are, if not precisely analogous, then at least comparable in raising questions about how intellectual elites (or even mere mortals) respond under pressure. A few pages after Buruma comes David Shulman’s review of “What Is a Palestinian State Worth?,” the new book by Palestinian philosopher Sari Nusseibeh. Describing Nusseibeh and the environment in which he and other Palestinians and Israelis coexist, Shulman writes:
“Last July I heard Sari Nusseibeh speak at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities at an evening honoring its retiring president, Menahem Yaari. … Nusseibeh used the occasion of the academy lecture to deliver a damning indictment of the Israeli academic establishment for its truly astonishing passivity over the past forty-three years of occupation. Although, in general, the government is probably right in seeing the Israeli universities as a natural breeding ground for leftist—that is, liberal and peace-oriented—opinion, Nusseibeh is also right. Like everyone else, Israeli academic intellectuals as a group have failed to mount a sustained and politically effective protest against the occupation and the accompanying colonial project of settling Israelis in the territories. Like most other Israelis, with some notable exceptions, they live within the system and tolerate its misdeeds. The large audience at the academy listened to Nusseibeh’s scathing critique that evening with what seemed to me, for the most part, a stony and impassive silence.”
That observation speaks for itself. And while the Israelis are not engaged in systematic murder in the mode of the Nazis, it is difficult to deny the reality of the oppressive occupation of the West Bank and, previously, Gaza—raising questions of complicity through passivity.
Likewise the interview on NPR last night with Sameh Shoukry, Egypt’s ambassador to the United States. Shoukry was by turns direct (e.g., in response to a question about who is in charge and what has been communicated about it, Shoukry says “…as of yet, we have not received any definitive information related to the process of governing.”) and slightly evasive. He concluded by noting that the future looks bright for Egypt and its children—but, of course, Ambassador Shoukry was appointed by now deposed President Hosni Mubarak, which surely raises questions about his own role in government, past and future.
Complicity through passivity. It is an interesting concept, challenging as much for its lack of nuance as for its wide applicability. Are we, Americans, complicity in the loss of our own civil rights, through Big Brother-esque laws like the Patriot Act, by not protesting more loudly? Yes. (And kudos to the new members of Congress who, in the midst of other, less positive tendencies, have also tried to put the brakes on the renewal of this terrifying piece of legislation.) Are we complicit in the ethically problematic (if questionably legal) tactics—from torture to targeted assassination—practiced by our government? Slavery. Segregation and oppression of minorities, from Native Americans to African-Americans to the GLBT community. Support for dictators, from Marcos to Mubarak.
With Egyptians now optimistically looking to a freer future, after the fall of a regime the United States supported for three decades, we must ask ourselves these questions again. We may not agree on the answers; indeed, we may not come up with much of an answer at all. But the world would—will—be a better place if we confront these issues, ask the right questions about our own actions, and seek to achieve the higher values we espouse rather than the realpolitik that is more easily reached.
