The Coffee Klatch with Robert Reich

In light of last week’s devastating senate vote on voting rights, I keep hearing “voting rights are dead.” Wrong. If voting rights are dead, American democracy is dead. And if American democracy is dead, the entire project that began (imperfectly, to be sure) in 1776 and has been a beacon for the world, is dead. I will not accept that. Nor, I assume, will you.

But what can and should be done now? I’ll get to that in a moment. First, though, it’s important to acknowledge that our two major parties are now irredeemably opposed on this core issue. Democrats are the party of democracy. Republicans — who should have been willing to at least engage in last week’s debate — are not, and should not be allowed to pretend otherwise.

There are two glaring exceptions. Kyrsten Sinema is now the most prominent anti-democracy Democrat; Liz Cheney, the most prominent pro-democracy Republican. On Saturday, the Arizona Democratic Party executive committee appropriately censured Sinema for her vote last week in opposition to changing filibuster rules to pass voting rights bills. The censure has no practical effect but delivers a strong message of condemnation and reflects the will of the party's most active and loyal members. That same day, the Wyoming Republican State Central committee held a straw poll of party activists in which Harriet Hageman, the Trump-endorsed challenger to Liz Cheney, won by a substantial margin. (The secret ballot awarded Hageman 59 votes and Cheney six.) Here again, no practical effect but a strong message. The vote comes eight months before Wyoming’s GOP primary.

The two positions — for and against democracy — are not morally equivalent, of course. Democracy is this nation’s core moral principle.

Every American who cares about this core moral principle must recommit to the task of protecting it from the growing forces seeking to destroy it. This means fighting voter suppression and election subversion with whatever tools are at hand. How?

1. Keep pressure on the 50 Republicans and two Democrats who blocked Senate action. Sinema and Manchin should face pro-democracy primary challengers when both are up for reelection in 2024 (which means organizing should start soon). Every Republican senator should be held accountable as well. If you live in one of their states, make sure you attend town meetings to voice your outrage, and organize voters against their reelection.

2. The Justice Department should announce that it will use every tool in its legal arsenal – including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution -- to enforce equal voting rights. The Voting Rights Act is not the only weapon to protect the right to vote. Congress should increase funding for the Justice Department’s civil rights division and its related work in this.

3. Democrats in Congress must seek to pass whatever pieces of the Freedom to Vote and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act they can. (Importantly, the Senate can avoid the filibuster through the use of the reconciliation process on any issue that touches on funding for easier voting access.)

4. Reforming the 1887 Electoral Count Act is no substitute for voting rights, but it’s still necessary to block states from politicizing election boards and to strengthen federal penalties against intimidating voters and election officials.

5. Biden should fully implement his March executive order calling on all agencies of the federal government to help citizens register and vote.

6. By executive order, Biden should also make Election Day a federal holiday for government employees, and also encourage states to declare Election Day a holiday.

7. If you live in a state with a Republican legislature, you need to do everything possible to block further voter suppression and subversion. Organize and mobilize others. Where applicable, use your state’s referendum process to undo some of the damage.

8. Fighting voter suppression in this fall’s midterm election calls for a voting registration drive this coming summer analogous to the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi (which I’ve recently written about). It should focus on Georgia, Florida, Arizona, Texas, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. All have important races coming up. Now as in 1964, young people could play a key role.

9. We must keep the pressure on the Justice Department to indict Donald Trump and his co-conspirators for their roles in the January 6 attack on the Capitol and in attempting to sabotage the 2020 election. (This would include recent revelations about false slates of electors in seven swing states and an executive order prepared for Trump that would have directed the secretary of Defense to seize voting machines.)

10. Finally, we should support the work of the House’s January 6 committee. Which brings me back to Liz Cheney. Her role as vice-chair of the House January 6 committee is critical to demonstrating the non-partisan legitimacy of that inquiry. I have never agreed with her policy choices on specific issues; her overall voting record has been far to the right. But on the crucial overriding issue of protecting our democracy, she is a hero – and deserves our abiding thanks and support.

Other ideas?

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Wall Street may be having a bad week, but top bankers are doing wonderfully well. After a blockbuster year, the five biggest Wall Street banks just paid out $142 billion in bonuses and compensation for 2021. This was $18 billion more than in 2020. JPMorgan Chase reported record profits, and Citigroup’s annual profit more than doubled. Let me remind you (as if you need reminding) that 2020 and 2021 were not exactly blockbuster years for the rest of America.

In the first three decades after World War II, American companies made money by making things, selling them at a profit, and investing the profits in additional productive capacity. This helped create the largest middle class the world had ever seen. In those years, the financial sector accounted for 15 percent of U.S. corporate profits.

Then something happened. By the mid-1980s, the financial sector claimed 30 percent of corporate profits. By 2001, 40 percent — more than four times the profits made in all U.S. manufacturing.

Why this dramatic change? Indulge me a moment as I quote from a New York Times op-ed I wrote more than forty years ago (May 23, 1980):

The paper entrepreneurs are winning out over the product entrepreneurs.

Paper entrepreneurs – trained in law, finance, accountancy – manipulate complex systems of rules and numbers. They innovate by using the systems in novel ways: establishing joint ventures, consortiums, holding companies, mutual funds; finding companies to acquire, “white knights” to be acquired by, commodity futures to invest in, tax shelters to hide in; engaging in proxy fights, tender offers, antitrust suits, stock splits, spinoffs, divestitures; buying and selling notes, bonds, convertible debentures, sinking-fund debentures; obtaining government subsidies, loan guarantees, tax breaks, contracts, licenses, quotas, price supports, bailouts; going private, going public, going bankrupt.

Product entrepreneurs – engineers, inventors, production managers, marketers, owners of small businesses – produce goods and services people want. They innovate by creating better products at less cost.

Our economic system needs both. Paper entrepreneurs ensure that capital is allocated efficiently among product entrepreneurs. But paper entrepreneurs do not directly enlarge the economic pie. They only arrange and divide the slices. They provide nothing of tangible use. For an economy to maintain its health, entrepreneurial rewards should flow primarily to product, not paper.

Yet paper entrepreneurialism is on the rise. It dominates the leadership of our largest corporations. It guides government departments, legislatures, agencies, public utilities. It stimulates platoons of lawyers and financiers.

It preoccupies some of our best minds, attracts some of our most talented graduates, embodies some of our most creative and original thinking, spurs some of our most energetic wheeling and dealing. Paper entrepreneurialism also promises the best financial rewards, the highest social status.

The ratio of paper entrepreneurialism to product entrepreneurialism in our economy – measured by total earnings flowing to each, or by the amount of news in business journals and newspapers typically devoted to each – is about 2 to 1.

Why? Our economic system has become so complex and interdependent that capital must be allocated according to symbols of productivity rather than according to productivity itself. These symbolic rules and numbers lend themselves to profitable manipulation far more readily than do the underlying processes of production.

It takes time and effort to improve product quality, exploit manufacturing efficiencies, develop distribution and sales networks. But through strategic use of accounting conventions, tax rules, stock and commodity exchanges, exchange rates, government largesse, and litigation, enormous profits are possible with relatively little effort.

When paper entrepreneurs look for solutions to America’s declining productivity and international competitiveness, they come up with paper remedies to stimulate large-scale capital investment: accelerated depreciation, tax credits, government subsidies, relaxation of antitrust laws. 

Product entrepreneurs focus on techniques for improving output: better quality controls, improved labor-management relations, more effective incentives for managers and employees, more aggressive marketing and sales.

If we are to increase the economic pie, we will need to redress the balance of entrepreneurial effort. Which strategies will stimulate more paper, and which more product?  

I wish I had not been as prescient. Yet the dominance of finance over much of the American economy since 1980 didn’t happen by accident. It needed the help of politicians — including presidents (both Republican and Democrat) — who changed laws and regulations to encourage it.

Ronald Reagan’s Securities and Exchange Commission allowed corporate raiders to use borrowed money to buy and dismantle American companies. The raiders (now more politely called “private-equity” managers) sold off divisions, squeezed costs, and fired workers—all to maximize “shareholder value.” The result may have been “efficient” in the narrowest sense of the term but it was socially disastrous. Manufacturing employment plummeted. Unions died. Great swaths of the Midwest and South were abandoned. Men without high school degrees suffered knockout blows. The typical wage — which had been rising steadily since the end of World War II, in tandem with the increasing productivity of the nation — began to stagnate (adjusted for inflation). For men without college degrees, real wages started a long decline.

It wasn’t just Reagan. Bill Clinton (with the advice of Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers) opened the door to more financial speculation by refusing to regulate highly-leveraged derivatives (the opaque, highly profitable instruments of financial speculation that Warren Buffet called “financial weapons of mass destruction”) and by supporting Republican efforts in Congress to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act (the Depression-era law that required the separation of commercial and investment banking) and allow the creation of megabanks. 

When the financial bubble inevitably burst, Barack Obama endorsed the Bush administration’s Wall Street bailout and appointed many of the same team of Clinton-era economic advisors who, while working under Rubin in the 1990s, had laid the groundwork for the financial crisis by encouraging speculation. Obama did what they then recommended: restore the profitability of Wall Street banks rather than reduce the power of finance and help millions of Americans who lost their homes. 

The bailout of Wall Street came without strings. The Obama administration did not fire any Wall Street CEOs. It did not rein in their egregious pay. It did not prevent the big banks from buying back their stock or handing out generous dividend payments to their stockholders. It imposed no losses on the banks’ shareholders and creditors. It did not insist that banks stop their lobbying to obstruct reform the financial industry. Instead, Obama (and his economic advisors, headed by Laurence Summers) shifted the costs of Wall Street’s speculative binge onto ordinary Americans -- deepening public mistrust of a political system increasingly seen as rigged in favor of the rich and powerful.

A direct line runs from public anger over the bailout of Wall Street to the Occupy movement and the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, on the left; and to the Tea Party movement and the election of Donald Trump, on the right.

I saw it and heard it in early 2016 in Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Iowa where I conducted focus groups: Whenever I mentioned the establishment presidential candidates Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton, people told me they didn’t stand a chance. Instead, the people I interviewed were excited by Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. (A remarkable number said they supported both.)

Again and again, I heard references to the bailout of Wall Street as proof that the economy was “rigged” against ordinary Americans, and that America needed a president who would champion average working people. As Americans went to the polls later that year, 75 per cent said they were looking for a leader who would “take the country back from the rich and powerful.” They obviously didn’t get one. Trump masqueraded as a tribune of the working class but was a Trojan horse for the rich and powerful.

We are still living with the political and social consequences of America’s turn to financial entrepreneurship. The five biggest Wall Street banks could not have scored record profits these past two years were they not back to many of the same practices that caused them to implode in 2008 and the rest of America to pay the price. Inequalities of income and wealth are far wider now than they were when Wall Street’s bubble burst. I suspect even more Americans today feel the system is rigged by the rich and powerful than they did a few years ago.

It doesn’t have to remain this way. We are not prisoners of bad decisions made in the past. We can and should rein in Wall Street, break up its five giant “too-big-to-fail” banks, support local and state banks, resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act’s divide between investment and commercial banking, tax all financial transactions — and rebuild jobs and wages on the product side of the American economy.

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What can possibly explain Manchin’s and Sinema’s votes against voting rights this week? Why did they create a false narrative that the legislation had to be “bipartisan” when everyone -- themselves included -- knew bipartisanship was impossible? Why did they say they couldn’t support changing the filibuster rules when only last month they voted for an exception to the filibuster that allowed debt ceiling legislation to pass with only Democratic votes? Why did they co-sponsor voting rights legislation and then vote to kill the very same legislation? Why did Manchin vote for the “talking filibuster” in 2011 yet vote against it now?

I’ve suggested that the answer to all these questions could be found in the giant wads of corporate cash flowing into their campaign coffers. But as I’ve watched the two senators closely and spoken about them with members of Congress as well as Hill staff, I’ve come to the conclusion this isn’t it – or at least not all of it.

The corporate money explanation leaves out the single biggest factor affecting almost all national politicians I’ve dealt with: Big egos. Manchin’s and Sinema’s are now among the biggest.

Before February of last year, almost no one outside West Virginia had ever heard of Joe Manchin, and almost no one outside of Arizona (and probably few within the state) had ever heard of Kyrsten Sinema. Now, they’re notorious. They’re Washington celebrities. Their photos grace every major news outlet in America.

This sort of attention is addictive. Once it seeps into the bloodstream, it becomes an all-consuming force. I’ve known politicians who have become permanently and irrevocably intoxicated by it.

I’m not talking simply about power, although that’s certainly part of it. I’m talking about narcissism – the primal force driving so much of modern America, but whose essence is concentrated in certain places such as Wall Street, Hollywood, and the United States Senate.

Once addicted, the pathologically narcissistic politician can become petty in the extreme, taking every slight as a deep personal insult. I’m told that Manchin asked Biden’s staff not to blame him for the delay of “Build Back Better,” and was then infuriated when Biden suggested Manchin bore some of the responsibility. “You want to understand why Manchin stabbed Biden in the back on voting rights?” one House member told me this week. “It’s because he’s so pissed off at Ron Klain [Biden’s chief of staff].” I’m also told that if Biden wants to restart negotiations with Manchin on “Build Back Better,” he’s got to rename the package because Manchin is so angry he won’t vote for anything going by that name.

Paradoxically, a large enough slight played out on the national stage can also enthrall a pathologically narcissistic politician. Several people on the Hill who have watched Sinema at close range since she became a senator tell me she relished all the negative attention she got when she gave her very theatrical thumbs down to increasing the minimum wage, and since then has thrilled at her burgeoning role as a spoiler.

The Senate is not the world’s greatest deliberative body, but it is the world’s greatest stew of egos battling for attention. Every senator believes he or she has what it takes to be president. Most believe they’re far more competent than whoever occupies the Oval Office. Yet out of one hundred senators, only a handful are chosen for interviews on the Sunday talk shows, only one or two are lampooned on SNL, and very few get a realistic shot at the presidency. The result is intense competition for national attention.

Again and again, I’ve watched worthy legislation sink because particular senators didn’t feel they were getting enough credit, or enough personal attention from a president, or insufficient press attention, or unwanted press attention, or that another senator (sometimes from the same party) was getting too much attention.

Barack Obama didn’t enjoy glad-handing senators, even though he got to the presidency through that august body — which proved a huge handicap when it came to legislating. Bill Clinton would talk to senators (or, for that matter, to almost anyone else) all the time, but Clinton had too much confidence in his own charm to give individual senators the ego boosts they wanted — thereby rubbing the most narcissistic of them the wrong way (Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey voted against Clinton’s healthcare plan because he wanted more attention; New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was lukewarm on it because he felt he wasn’t adequately consulted).

Some senators get so whacky in the national limelight that they can’t function without it. Trump had that effect on Republicans. Before Trump, Lindsay Graham was almost a normal human being. Then Trump directed a huge amp of national attention Graham’s way — transmogrifying Graham into a bizarro creature who’d say anything Trump wanted in order to keep the attention coming.

Not all senators are egomaniacs, of course. I had the good fortune to work closely with the late Paul Wellstone, who was always eager to give others credit while being the first to take any blame. I know several now serving who have their egos firmly in check — including Mark Kelly, Raphael Warnock, Sherrod Brown, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. Most of the rest lie on an ego spectrum ranging from inflated to pathological.

Manchin and Sinema are near the extreme. As I said, neither had much national attention prior to the last February. But once they got a taste of the national spotlight, they couldn’t let go. They must have figured that the only way they could keep the spotlight focused on themselves was by threatening to do what they finally did this week — shafting American democracy.

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Across America, hospitals are pushed to the limit because so many health care workers have quit just as Omicron is surging.

But hospitals aren’t alone, and Omicron isn’t the only culprit. We’re witnessing one of the most profound changes in the American labor force in a half century, at least since middle-class women entered paid work in large numbers during the 1970s. Only this time, women and men aren’t entering work. Many are leaving it (or at least, the way work has been organized).

For decades, work has had a total grip on most people's lives because there have been so few alternatives to either working full time (often 50 or 60 hours a week, sometimes at two or more jobs), or not working at all and worrying about making ends meet. Instead of working to live, most of us have been living to work.

Yet in recent months there’s been something of a sea change. The so-called “quit rate” of workers voluntarily leaving their jobs has reached record levels. The labor-force participation rate (the percent of people of working age who are in the workforce) is remarkably low for this point in a recovery. More workers are on strike than at any comparable period in the last thirty years.

As secretary of labor, I used to hear people complain that they needed more work or better pay. Now, I’m hearing lots of people say “I don’t want to work this hard any more,” or “I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend the rest of my life in this rat race,” or “They can’t pay me enough to sacrifice my life like this,” or “I want to be in control of my life.”

The GenZ’s I teach are even more adamant about not devoting their lives to work. “Life is too short” — they tell me.

The pandemic has surfaced many issues that have been smoldering for years -- mandatory overtime, stagnant wages, dangerous working conditions, insecure employment, employment discrimination, and lack of paid sick leave or paid family leave.

It has also forced -- or allowed -- many people to reconsider what they want from work and from their lives.

Donald Sull, Charles Sull, and Ben Zweig recently conducted a massive study of workplace data for the MIT Sloan Management Review, including more than a million Glassdoor reviews. What are employees complaining about at companies losing the most workers in this tsunami of resignations? Interestingly, not mainly pay. Complaints about pay ranked 16th of the issues that predict quits. The biggest predictor is a toxic culture – workplaces that fail to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion; that don’t make workers feel respected and valued; and make them to feel insecure. No one likes to be underpaid. But it turns out people like disrespect and insecurity even less. 

When Australian researchers recently reviewed data on more than 1,000 workers, they discovered that working for a companies that “fail to reward or acknowledge their employees for hard work, impose unreasonable demands on workers, and do not give them autonomy” triples the odds that workers will suffer major depression. 

I’m no soothsayer, but as I look ahead I’m fairly certain we’re going to see companies and nonprofits moving toward more flexible work, autonomous work, and mandatory limits on work hours. They have no choice if they want to recruit and retain reliable employees.

We’re also going to see far more self-employment, more people moving to locales around the country where housing is cheaper, and, in general, more of us seeking to simplify our lives.

I also expect increasing demands for public policies that reduce the amount of time we have to spend working and give us more control of our own labor – such as a universal basic income, a ban on mandatory overtime, a shorter workweek, Medicare for all (de-coupling health insurance from work), paid sick leave and paid family leave, and more tax incentives for profit sharing and self-employment.

We’re not facing the end of work, but we are facing the end of work as we know it. It’s about time.

What do you think?

PS: By the way, if you haven't had a chance to listen to my conversation with Michael Moore, we touched on what’s happening to work and a variety of other issues related to power and the economy.  It was great to catch up (and Mike even promised to do a TikTok collaboration with me in 2022). Enjoy:

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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 (due to a parliamentary maneuver, it will be the first time the Senate will actually debate voting rights) but the effort is doomed 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:

* 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).

* 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).

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

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

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

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

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

* 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.

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

* 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 commitment to continue fighting for a democracy and an economy that works for everyone — against the resistance of the moneyed interests that have never done as well as they’re doing now.

What else do you think Biden and his administration should do now?

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The convergence today 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 1964, 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.

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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 do 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 founders’ 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.

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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.

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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 just introduced 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.

What do you think?

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Yesterday, a member of our group named Emmet Bondurant, a distinguished constitutional lawyer from Georgia, commented on this page about the filibuster:

The biggest lie of all is the Senate’s claim that it “is the greatest deliberative body in the world.” The filibuster makes the Senate the least deliberative legislative and least democratic legislative body by allowing a minority of Senators to prevent the Senate from debating, much less voting on, any legislation that is opposed by the minority party.

A decade ago, when Emmet and I served on the board of Common Cause, he brought a case before federal courts, arguing that the filibuster is unconstitutional. He didn’t get very far. (The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia decided against Common Cause on dubious grounds, and the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.) But this was before the high court became crammed with so-called “originalists” who believe the Constitution should be interpreted to mean what the Framers thought when they drafted it.

Originalism is an absurd position, of course. American society is so different today from what it was in the eighteenth century that any attempt to apply precepts from that time to this time is doomed to failure. But why not test the sincerity of the originalists sitting on today’s Supreme Court with an issue that the Framers would find a no-brainer? All evidence suggests they would agree with Emmet that the filibuster violates the Constitution.

The Framers went to great lengths to ensure that a minority of senators could not thwart the wishes of the majority. After all, a major reason they convened the Constitutional Convention in 1787 was because the Articles of Confederation (the precursor to the Constitution) required a super-majority vote of nine of the thirteen states, making the government weak and ineffective.

This led James Madison to argue against any super-majority requirement in the Constitution the Framers were then designing, writing that otherwise “the fundamental principle of free government would be reversed,“ and “It would be no longer the majority that would rule: the power would be transferred to the minority.” And it led Alexander Hamilton to note “how much good may be prevented, and how much ill may be produced” if a minority in either house of Congress had “the power of hindering the doing what may be necessary.”

This is why the Framers required no more than a simple majority in both houses of Congress to pass legislation.

They carved out only five specific exceptions requiring a super-majority vote only in rare, high-stakes decisions: (1) impeachments, (2) expulsion of members, (3) overriding a presidential veto, (4) ratification of treaties, and (5) amendments to the Constitution. By being explicit about these five exceptions to majority rule, the Framers underscored their commitment to majority rule for the normal business of the nation. They would have rejected the filibuster, through which a minority of senators continually obstructs the majority.

So where did the filibuster come from? The Senate needed a mechanism to end debate on proposed laws and move to a vote. The Framers didn’t anticipate this problem. But in 1841, a small group of senators took advantage of this oversight to stage the first filibuster. They hoped to force their opponents to give in by prolonging debate and delaying a vote. 

This was what became known as the “talking filibuster” — as popularized in Frank Capra’s other great film, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (a perfect compliment to his “It’s a Wonderful Life”). But contrary to the admirable character Jimmy Stewart plays in that film, the result was hardly admirable.

After the Civil War, the filibuster was used by Southern politicians to defeat Reconstruction legislation, including bills to protect the voting rights of Black Americans. Finally, in 1917, as a result of pressure from President Woodrow Wilson and the public, the Senate adopted a procedure for limiting debate and ending filibusters with a two-thirds vote of the Senate (67 votes). In the 1970s, the Senate reduced the number of votes required to end debate down to 60, and no longer required constant talking to delay a vote. 41 votes would do it.

Throughout much of the 20th century, filibusters remained rare. (Southern senators mainly used them to block anti-lynching, fair employment, voting rights, and other critical civil rights bills.) But that changed in 2007, after Democrats took over the Senate. Senate Republicans, now in the minority, used the 60-vote requirement with unprecedented frequency.

After Barack Obama moved into the Oval Office in 2009, the Republican minority — led by Mitch McConnell — blocked virtually every significant piece of legislation. Nothing could move without 60 votes. A record 67 filibusters occurred during the first half of the 111th Congress — double the entire 20-year period between 1950 and 1969. By the time Congress adjourned in December 2010, the filibuster count had ballooned to 137. Between 2010 and 2020, there were as many cloture motions (959) as during the entire 60-year period from 1947 to 2006 (960).

Now we have a total mockery of majority rule. McConnell and his Republicans are stopping almost everything in its tracks. Just 41 Senate Republicans, representing only 21 percent of the country, are now blocking laws supported by the vast majority of Americans. This is exactly the opposite of what the Framers of the Constitution intended. To repeat: They unequivocally rejected the notion that a minority of Senators could obstruct the majority. 

My humble suggestion, therefore: Senators whose votes have been blocked by the senate minority should themselves take the issue to the Supreme Court. If anyone has standing to make this argument, they surely do. If the conservative majority on the Court stands by its “originalist” principles, they’ll abolish the filibuster as violating the Constitution. (At the very least, the filibuster should not be allowed to block laws that are required to preserve democratic rules and norms. It must be lifted to enact voting rights legislation, such as the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.)

If you like my argument — which is essentially Emmet’s — please suggest it to your favorite Senator.

What do you think?

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe