The American Prospect #301

8

Ways to Raise Wages for American Workers

BY HAROLD MEYERSON

Criminal Justice and Christian Mercy

BY ABBY RAPOPORT

Eco-Disaster: The Plowing Under of the Northern Plains

BY JOCELYN C. ZUCKERMAN

Lehman Brothers’ Class Reunion

BY STEVE BRODNER

M A R / A P R 2 014

IS THERE HOPE FOR THE SURVIVORS OF THE DRUG WARS?

BY MONICA POTTS

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contents

VOLUME 25, NUMBER 2 MAR /APR 2014

PAGE 12

PAGE 38

PAGE 56

PAGE 71

NOTEBOOK 7 THE DOCTOR IS OUT BY AMELIA THOMSON-DEVEAUX 12 LEHMAN BROTHERS’ REUNION BY STEVE BRODNER 14 THE CONVERSATION JOSHUA STECKEL & ANDREW DELBANCO

FEATURES 16 IS THERE HOPE FOR THE SURVIVORS OF THE DRUG WARS? BY MONICA POTTS 28 PLOWED UNDER BY JOCELYN C. ZUCKERMAN 38 WHO ATE THE AMERICAN ECONOMY? STEVEN PEARLSTEIN ON THE RISE OF SHAREHOLDER CAPITALISM HAROLD MEYERSON ON HOW TO INCREASE AMERICANS’ WAGES 56 THE QUALITY OF MERCY BY ABBY RAPOPORT

CULTURE 71 GLORIOUS, GHASTLY NEWS BY PAUL WALDMAN 76 PIKETTY’S TRIUMPH BY JACOB S. HACKER & PAUL PIERSON, HEATHER BOUSHEY, AND BRANKO MILANOVIC 81 LOVING THE OPERA IN HD BY DEBORAH WEISGALL 86 SIT AND WAIT FOR THE SADNESS BY MONICA POTTS 89 FRANCIS AND HIS PREDECESSORS BY MOLLY WORTHEN

COLUMNS 5 PROSPECTS THE INEQUALITY PUZZLE BY ROBERT KUTTNER 92 COMMENT THIS YEAR’S MODERATES BY ABBY RAPOPORT Cover photo by Jamelle Bouie; art above by Steve Brodner, Jason Schneider, John Ritter, and John Cuneo

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contributors

HAROLD MEYERSON, editor-atlarge, claims to have been working at the Prospect since the Franklin Pierce administration.

He writes about the declining fortunes of working Americans. “With widespread collective bargaining and full employment nowhere on the horizon,” he says, “we need to rewrite the tax code to get corporations to reward their workers again.”

STEVEN PEARLSTEIN is a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist for The Washington Post and a professor of public affairs at George Mason University. His article is adapted from a paper he wrote for the Brookings Institution’s Center for Effective Public Management. “In the debate over the causes of rising income inequality,” he says, “changes in norms of corporate behavior have been overlooked.”

MONICA POTTS is a Prospect senior writer and a fellow at the New America Foundation. She profiles low-income men in Baltimore trying to get jobs after years of drug-dealing and prison time.

“Men are typically not the focus of anti-poverty policy,” she says. “As the drug wars are waning, I thought it was important to see how these men transition to a life off of the streets.”

ABBY RAPOPORT is a Prospect staff writer. She profiles Mark Osler, an evangelical Christian and former prosecutor who has helped lead the efforts to reform prison sentencing. “Over the course of reporting the story,” she says, “the Obama administration began to increasingly embrace the presidential-­ pardon power.

It made Osler’s work all the more relevant.”

JASON SCHNEIDER is a Toronto-based illustrator who, over the past two decades, has concentrated on business and financial topics.

Initially trained in classical portraiture, his mostly figurative work displays a sense of play with a touch of the sentimental, all qualities that enliven this month’s package on shareholder capitalism and workers’ wages.

PAUL WALDMAN is a Prospect blogger and contributing editor.

He writes about recent changes in media and our evolving fears and hopes about how they might change us. “Even when you look back decades,” he says, “the same kinds of concerns about how media will push us apart or pull us dangerously together keep coming up.”

MOLLY WORTHEN is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina and the author of Apostles of Reason.

She writes about Pope Francis.

“All the fuss over Francis—is he conservative or liberal? A reformer or a culture warrior?—tells us something about Christian anxieties in the 21st-century ‘post-Christian’ West,” she says.

JOCELYN C. ZUCKERMAN is a contributing editor at OnEarth and has written for Fast Company, Gourmet, and The New York Times Magazine. She reports on the devastation of the northern prairies.

“I had heard that more and more of our country’s land was being converted to corn and soy,” she says, “but until I got out to the Corn Belt, I couldn’t have imagined the scale of it.”

PUBLISHER JAY HARRIS EDITOR-IN-CHIEF KIT RACHLIS FOUNDING CO-EDITORS ROBERT KUTTNER, PAUL STARR EXECUTIVE EDITOR BOB MOSER ART DIRECTOR MARY PARSONS CULTURE EDITOR SARAH KERR EDITOR-AT-LARGE HAROLD MEYERSON SENIOR EDITORS CHRISTEN ARAGONI, GABRIEL ARANA WEB EDITOR CLARE MALONE SENIOR WRITER MONICA POTTS STAFF REPORTER ABBY RAPOPORT RESEARCH EDITOR SUSAN O’BRIAN WRITING FELLOW AMELIA THOMSON-DEVEAUX EDITORIAL INTERNS GAVIN BADE, MICAH ESCOBEDO, ELAINE TENG CONTRIBUTING EDITORS SPENCER ACKERMAN, MARCIA ANGELL, ALAN BRINKLEY, TOM CARSON, JONATHAN COHN, ANN CRITTENDEN, GARRETT EPPS, JEFF FAUX, MICHELLE GOLDBERG, GERSHOM GORENBERG, E.J. GRAFF, BOB HERBERT, ARLIE HOCHSCHILD, CHRISTOPHER JENCKS, RANDALL KENNEDY, JOSH KUN, SARAH POSNER, JOHN POWERS, JEDEDIAH PURDY, ROBERT D. PUTNAM, RICHARD ROTHSTEIN, DEBORAH A. STONE, NOY THRUPKAEW, MICHAEL TOMASKY, PAUL WALDMAN, WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, MATTHEW YGLESIAS CO-FOUNDER ROBERT B. REICH VICE PRESIDENT, STRATEGY & DEVELOPMENT AMY CONROY ADVERTISING MANAGER ED CONNORS, (202) 776-0730 X119, ECONNORS@PROSPECT.ORG BOARD OF DIRECTORS JANET SHENK (CHAIR), SARAH FITZRANDOLPH BROWN, LINDSEY FRANKLIN, JAY HARRIS, STEPHEN HEINTZ, ROBERT KUTTNER, MARIO LUGAY, ARNIE MILLER, KIT RACHLIS, MILES RAPOPORT, ADELE SIMMONS, PAUL STARR, BEN TAYLOR AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT ACME PUBLISHING SERVICES SUBSCRIPTION CUSTOMER SERVICE 1-888-MUST-READ (687-8732) SUBSCRIPTION RATES $29.95 (U.S.), $39.95 (CANADA), AND $44.95 (OTHER INTERNATIONAL) REPRINTS PERMISSIONS@PROSPECT.ORG

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Prospects

The Inequality Puzzle

BY ROBERT KUTTNER

I

n January, a team of prestigious economists published an authoritative study showing that there had been no decline in intergenerational mobility during the past three decades. The paper, by Harvard’s Raj Chetty and three colleagues, using some 40 million Internal Revenue Service records, found that if you were born in the bottom fifth of the income distribution in 1980–1982, you had about the same chance of moving to the top quintile (about 1 in 12) as someone born at the bottom 30 years earlier.

This result was surprising. In recent years, the ability of the affluent to pass along class advantage has intensified in countless ways. Young people from wealthy families are more likely to get into elite colleges and less likely to finish college hobbled with debt.

Parents can subsidize unpaid internships useful for networking. The children of the affluent can get help with starter homes, in districts with excellent public schools. And when (grand) children come, they often can count on Mom and Dad to pay for good preschool, and so on.

The wider the income extremes, the more money the elite has to spend assuring that their progeny stay in the family social class. The worse life becomes for ordinary people, the more incentive the rich have to extend privilege to their kids.

Meanwhile, the opportunity ladders that help young adults without affluent parents have been kicked away. College tuitions have increased far faster than

incomes, school loans have been substituted for grants, housing has become less affordable, pay scales for entry-level jobs have flattened, spending on social supports for the poor has declined.

So how could intergenerational mobility not have worsened? Conversations with several longtime students of the subject, including Christopher Jencks of Harvard, Tim Smeeding of the University of Wisconsin, and Miles Corak, a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, suggest the following caveats.

First, the optimism is premature. Inequality began widening in the mid-1970s. The data in the Chetty paper end with young adults born in the early 1980s, people now in their early thirties. Typically, however, income peaks in one’s late forties or early fifties. The true statistical verdict on declining mobility won’t be in for a few decades, as today’s young complete the life course.

Second, a comparison of different countries suggests that greater inequality produces greater immobility. A recent study by economist David Howell, published by the Center for American Progress, demonstrates that in countries with more equal income distributions, such as Denmark or Finland, people who begin life at the bottom have at least double the chance of making it to the top as their American counterparts. The same social supports that produce a more equal society give young people from humble origins a better shot at surpassing their parents. By contrast, a

highly unequal America is a highly immobile America.

Third, because inequality has become more extreme, the consequences of getting stuck at the bottom are more severe. During the postwar boom, we had both rising economic growth and increasing income equality.

The economy’s structural changes could be offset with sensible policies—if we had the political will.

There was more mobility, in the sense that your living standards improved over time, even if you stayed in the same quintile as your parents. By contrast, polarization today produces stagnation in both senses.

Finally, even if intergenerational mobility has not worsened statistically (yet), it was already dismal three decades ago in the Reagan era and is nothing to be proud of. All of which raises the question, why aren’t we doing more to remedy these extremes?

Something is profoundly wrong with both the economy and the democracy when ordinary people

can’t get ahead because nearly all of the gains go to the top. America as the land of opportunity is our national myth. Does any serious person doubt that America would be a more attractive place if family incomes rose with average productivity? If they did, median household income would be well over $80,000, instead of stuck around $50,000. And can anyone argue that our (meager) rate of growth depends on the astronomical paydays of investment bankers and corporate CEOs? Some say that structural changes —globalization, technology—are behind the rising inequality. Even so, these could be offset with sensible policy. For instance, if we properly regulated the abuses of Wall Street, the top 1 percent would not capture so much of our total national income. If we restored progressive taxation and spent the money on opportunity programs and public infrastructure, we could create both more economic ladders and more good jobs.

The most important fact to appreciate is that concentrated wealth translates into concentrated political power. The remedies that could reverse the increasing inequality are outside mainstream politics today, because the wealthy get to define what’s mainstream.

Even Democrats like President Barack Obama are advised not to use the word inequality, for fear of their sounding like class warriors.

So economic inequality is far from hopeless. But before we can fix our unequal economy, we need to fix our unequal politics. 

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 5

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The Doctor Is Out Conservative governors are pushing abortion politics onto health boards— and threatening doctors’ independence on other medical issues.

BY A M E L I A T H O M S O N - D E V E A U X

j es se l en z

O

n a Friday evening in June 2012, Jim Edmondson walked out of a meeting room in a sprawling government conference center north of Richmond, Virginia, and into a jostling scrum of reporters. “They were asking me questions with all these microphones in my face,” he says.

“It was a shock to see so many media people.”

In Edmondson’s eight-year tenure as a consumer advocate on the Virginia Board of Health, he could

count on one hand the number of times he’d looked up and seen even a single newspaper reporter in the room. State regulatory boards’ proceedings rarely catch the public’s eye, and the health board was no exception. The members approve most regulations unanimously; the most dramatic issue they’d handled during his time, Edmondson says, was a decision about where companies should be allowed to dump solid waste. Although the governor

controls appointments to the board, Edmondson, a real-estate developer who had served on a Northern Virginia health regulatory panel for 15 years before his appointment to the state board, had no inkling of his colleagues’ political leanings. “We were regulating shellfish-packing plants,” he says. “Politics didn’t come into it.”

That was before the 2011 legislative session, when the Virginia General Assembly rammed through an 11th-hour amendment

to a bill about nursing homes.

The amendment subjected the state’s 21 abortion clinics, which by law could only perform firsttrimester procedures, to the same health standards as hospitals—including wide corridors, sinks in every room, and customized awnings over the front door. The regulations, part of a national anti-choice strategy to shrink the number of abortion providers, were a victory for Virginia’s Republican governor, Bob McDonnell, who was being touted as a potential vice-presidential nominee. But the law didn’t spell out the details of the new guidelines. That task was delegated to the Board of Health.

Typically, whenever the state imposed new health-care guidelines, the board would

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 7

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“grandfather” existing facilities, allowing them to delay any necessary architectural changes until the next major renovation. “Our job was to work with hospitals or restaurants, or whatever it was, to keep them open,” Edmondson says. But Ken Cuccinelli, the Republican attorney general elected alongside McDonnell, told the board that because abortion providers had not previously been licensed or regulated by the Department of Health, a grandfather clause was inappropriate.

“The message was, ‘We’re going to make an exception only for these clinics,’” Edmondson says. Without the grandfather clause, abortion providers would face unfeasible renovation costs. Pro-choice groups estimated that 17 could close, leaving just four clinics to care for Virginia’s two million reproductive-age women.

Activists on both sides of the abortion debate began to deluge the health board’s quarterly meetings in Richmond. On that day in June, the lowceilinged conference room was packed with doctors and protesters; posters with gruesome images of aborted fetuses bobbed next to signs imploring the board to “protect choice.” After Edmondson proposed an amendment to the regulations that would exempt the existing clinics, Anna Jeng, a public-­health professor in her second year on the board, came close to tears as she admonished her other colleagues for wavering on the issue.

“I told them, you can be conservative or liberal, but you have to be fair,” she says. Late in the day, the board voted 7-4 to grandfather the existing abortion clinics.

Almost immediately, a staff attorney from Cuccinelli’s office rose to chastise the board. “She basically said, ‘What you just did is not going to fly,’” Edmondson says. One of the board members who had supported the amendment, stricken with sudden qualms, tried—and failed—to call a revote. Later that month, Cuccinelli announced that not only would he refuse to certify the vote—a necessary step before the rules could go to the governor for final approval—his office would not defend individual board members who might be sued

8 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAR /APR 2014

by anti-abortion activists over the amended regulations.

At its next meeting, the board changed course. Only Edmondson and Jeng voted to exempt the clinics. A year later, 2 of the state’s 21 clinics had shut down, saying the cost of renovation was too high. The remaining clinics have until this summer to comply.

By the time Edmondson’s term expired in June 2013, its composition had shifted dramatically. Three of McDonnell’s appointees were affiliated with anti-choice groups. In his final weeks as governor, this past fall, McDonnell declined to reappoint Jeng, although she was eligible for another term. In her place, he nominated a former blogger for Virginia’s conservative Family Foundation.

THE DRAMA OVER VIRGINIA’S regu-

lations was just one manifestation of the Tea Party backlash that launched conservative majorities into 26 state legislatures in 2010 and rekindled the abortion wars. Between 2011 and 2013, legislators in 30 states passed 205 restrictions on abortion, more than in the entire previous decade.

The focus of the laws also began to shift, from measures designed to make women rethink their decision— mandatory waiting periods, counseling, ultrasounds—to policies crafted to drive abortion providers out of business with red tape and building codes.

Prior to 2010, most state health and medical boards were similar to Virginia’s—largely free of political and ideological squabbles. But like McDonnell, a batch of freshly elected Republican governors realized that the boards’ expansive purview and relative obscurity made them ideal for imposing restrictions on doctors and clinics without the hassle of going through the legislature. Medical boards can censure doctors and strip them of their licenses; public-health boards are responsible for imposing and enforcing building codes in medical facilities.

With minimal fuss and little public attention, a board stacked with antichoice nominees can target abortion in one of three ways: It can impose new building codes, ban a specific procedure, or discredit individual doctors by revoking their license.

Since 2011, Republican governors in four states have appointed at least

12 medical-board members with explicit ties to anti-abortion groups.

Since 2011, the Republican governors of Virginia, Iowa, Kansas, and Ohio have appointed at least 12 doctors and consumer advocates with explicit ties to anti-choice organizations to health and medical boards.

The total number of nominees with an anti-choice agenda is surely higher; it can be difficult to tell, until he or she is already on the board, whether a particular surgeon or pharmacist, for instance, opposes abortion rights.

The strategy has been extraordinarily effective, partly because prochoice groups can’t fight back without explaining to their followers what the boards do and why they matter. “It’s hard enough to raise awareness about something happening in their state legislature,” says Elizabeth Nash, state issues manager for the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports legal abortion. “Most people don’t even know these boards exist.”

So far, the mainstream medical community is keeping its distance from the issue, although having unabashedly political members on the boards that regulate the profession makes some doctors nervous. “Medical boards exist to ensure that patients get the best care,” says Angela Janis, a psychiatrist in Wisconsin who serves on the board of Physicians for Reproductive Health, a pro-choice group. “If their decisions aren’t based on facts and medical evidence, what’s to stop them from bringing personal ideology into my field?”

IN THE SUMMER OF 2008, Iowa’s

Planned Parenthood, seeking to expand abortion access for rural women, began to use telemedicine.

Instead of traveling to cities, women who opted for a telemedicine abortion would make an appointment at their local clinic and videoconference with a doctor in Des Moines about their decision. After talking to the patient and reviewing her test results, the doctor would remotely unlock a drawer in the satellite clinic containing two abortion pills. The woman would take the first pill in front of the doctor and the second at home, effectively inducing a miscarriage. Independent researchers evaluated the program in its first year and determined that not only was

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THE ENDANGERED ABORTION PROVIDER The heyday of the abortion clinic was in the early 1980s. Since then, more than 1,000 abortion providers have shut down. Two major waves of anti-abortion activism fueled the trend. In the early 1990s, anti-choice insurgents threatened—and sometimes committed—violence against doctors and clinics. Many providers buckled under the pressure and closed their doors. In the late 1990s, activists turned to state legislatures, imposing restrictions on women seeking abortions and the clinics that offer them. These efforts escalated after the 2010 elections.

1981

TEXAS: Eleven of the state’s 36 abortion clinics closed in November 2013, after failing, per a new requirement passed earlier that year, to secure admitting privileges with local hospitals. In February, the Texas Medical Board suspended a Houston doctor’s medical license for performing more than 200 abortions without hospital-admitting privileges since the law went into effect.

OHIO: Three of the state’s 14 clinics have

closed since June 2013, when Republican lawmakers slipped a provision into the state budget mandating that abortion providers must have transfer agreements with a local hospital—but that public hospitals could not enter into these agreements. Two more clinics are in danger of closing.

2011

VIRGINIA: Two of the state’s 21 abortion clinics closed after failing to update their facilities to meet hospital-style regulations implemented in 2011. The remaining clinics have until this summer to comply.

MICHIGAN: At least six of Michigan’s 41 clinics have closed since 2011, thanks in part to a wide-ranging set of abortion restrictions passed late in 2012.

ARIZONA: Between 2009 and 2014, state

legislators passed a cascade of laws regulating abortion clinics. In 2009, there were 19 abortion providers in the state. By 2012, there were six.

MISSOURI: Today, Missouri is one of four states Number of abortion clinics per 250,000 women of childbearing age (15–45):

■ fewer than 3 ■ 10–19.99 ■ 3–4.99 ■ 20+ ■ 5–9.99

with only one stand-alone abortion provider.

State legislators are currently considering extending their waiting period for abortion from 24 hours to 72 hours, which could compel women to seek the procedure at clinics in other states.

DOCTORS HAVE ALWAYS been targets

source: guttmacher institute

telemedicine abortion safe, patients preferred it to in-person treatment.

Telemedicine was one of the prochoice movement’s first breakthroughs in years, and anti-abortion activists knew it. Beginning with Nebraska in 2010, 14 states preemptively banned the practice by requiring doctors to perform an in-person exam before prescribing the pills. Telemedicine proved trickier to uproot in Iowa. Faced

Sullenger, who spent two years in prison in the early 1990s for attempting to blow up an abortion clinic, had been lodging complaints with boards across the Midwest for years. The goal was for regulators to revoke abortion doctors’ or clinics’ licenses, which they rarely did. The Iowa Board of Medicine was no different. After convening a subcommittee to examine Operation Rescue’s allegations, it closed the case without further investigation.

While the board was deliberating, though, Republican Terry Branstad was elected governor. On the stump, Branstad had condemned telemedicine abortion, calling it “misguided” and “dangerous.” Although he won in a landslide, the Democrats kept their state senate majority and refused to consider a ban.

The Board of Medicine, on the other hand, could be easily reshaped.

After Democrats in the senate blocked the nomination of an activist affiliated with Operation Rescue, Branstad tapped Frank Bognanno, a priest. It was the end of the 2012 legislative session, and the Democrats gave in. “If the priest didn’t get confirmed, Branstad would have nominated someone else who opposed abortion,” says Tom Courtney, a Democratic state senator.

By the summer of 2013, the Board of Medicine was entirely composed of Branstad appointees. In August, it approved a petition coordinated by Operation Rescue that would require physicians to dispense abortion pills in person. In response to a lawsuit from Planned Parenthood, a state judge granted an emergency stay. The board’s decision will be reviewed in court later this year.

with a Democratic governor and legislative majority, the radical antiabortion group Operation Rescue filed a complaint with the Iowa Board of Medicine in the spring of 2010, arguing that telemedicine abortion posed an unacceptable safety risk to Planned Parenthood’s patients.

Although health-board complaints usually originate with patients or doctors, Operation Rescue’s Cheryl

for anti-abortion activists—in no state more than Kansas. In 2002, Operation Rescue moved its headquarters to Wichita to oust George Tiller, one of a handful of doctors left in the country who offered third-trimester abortion. Cheryl Sullenger began filing complaints with the Board of Healing Arts—Kansas’s medical-licensing board—demanding that it revoke Tiller’s license. The board opened several investigations of Tiller but never found him guilty of misconduct.

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 9

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After an anti-abortion zealot murdered Tiller in 2009, anti-choice activists shifted their attention to one of his former colleagues, physician Ann Kristin Neuhaus. Under a 1998 Kansas law, Tiller could only perform late-term abortions if a second physician confirmed that the patient would suffer “substantial and irreversible harm” by continuing her pregnancy. Under the law (which has since been amended), psychological distress counted as “substantial harm.” Neuhaus owned a first-­ trimester abortion clinic in another part of the state and had worked as a consultant for Tiller, coming to his Wichita clinic once a week to conduct mental-health exams for third-­ trimester abortion patients. There were rape victims, women with cancer, and women with non-viable fetuses. She saw girls who hadn’t realized they were pregnant until they were seven months along. Neuhaus frequently diagnosed her patients with depression, anxiety, or acute stress.

Less than a year after Tiller’s death, the Board of Healing Arts, responding to one of Sullenger’s complaints, opened an investigation of Neuhaus.

By then, in 2010, Neuhaus was pursuing a new career. After leaving Tiller’s clinic in 2006, she had returned to school to study public health and found a job as a research instructor at the University of Kansas. Now Sullenger was alleging that in 2003, Neuhaus had failed to adequately examine and document her talks with 11 underage girls who had sought thirdtrimester abortions at Tiller’s clinic.

The records of her conversations with the girls were purposely sparse; Neuhaus says she tried to exclude all identifiable details lest the documents fall into the wrong hands. (Her fears were not unfounded: In 2006, Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly broadcast confidential details from Tiller’s archives on his show.) But she says the examinations were sound. “The youngest of the girls was ten,” she says. “It was a case of rape and incest. How could anyone argue there wasn’t going to be some kind of adverse psychological effect if she had that baby?”

Republican Sam Brownback, a virulent opponent of abortion, was

10 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAR /APR 2014

SEVEN STATES, SEVEN STEALTH ATTACKS Just since 2011, seven state health and medical boards—and, in some cases, health departments—have placed restrictions on abortion doctors and clinics. Each adopted a different strategy, with varying levels of success. Pro-choice groups have found it hard to fight back. Anti-abortion activists in other states are taking note.

ALASKA After an attempt to narrow the circumstances under

which low-income women can use Medicaid for an abortion failed in the legislature, the Department of Health and Social Services issued regulations in January prohibiting the use of state funds for elective abortions. A judge put an emergency hold on the rule pending litigation.

IOWA After the Board of Medicine dismissed a complaint

against a remote delivery system for medication-induced abortion, Governor Terry Branstad, a Republican, replaced every board member with appointees who included a Catholic priest and an anti-abortion former state legislator. The Branstad-­ appointed board then voted to shut down the program.

KANSAS In 2012, the Board of Healing Arts voted to revoke the license of Ann Kristin Neuhaus, a doctor who had provided secondary consultations for George Tiller, the third-trimester abortion provider who was murdered in 2009. Neuhaus is fighting the decision in state court.

LOUISIANA In 2010, the Department of Health and Hospitals

revoked the operating license of one of the state’s seven abortion providers, but a judge overturned the decision. The department is now working on “emergency regulations” for the state’s abortion clinics, a previous version of which required women to undergo a regimen of blood tests at least 30 days before the procedure.

MISSISSIPPI In 2012, Governor Phil Bryant, a Republican,

removed Dr. Carl Reddix from the Board of Health because of his loose ties with the state’s only abortion clinic. The following year, Bryant nominated Terri Herring, then the director of the Pro-Life America Network, to a vacant seat on the board.

Bryant withdrew Herring’s name after criticism but said he’d renominate her in the future.

OHIO Since 2011, Governor John Kasich, a Republican, has

made three explicitly anti-choice nominations to the Medical Board, including the director of Ohio Right to Life and a former Right to Life board member.

VIRGINIA In 2011, the legislature asked the Board of Health to

write new hospital-style regulations for abortion providers.

When the board voted to exempt existing clinics until their next major renovation, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, a Republican, refused to certify the new rules and warned the individual board members that if they were sued over the regulations, his office would not defend them. The board reversed its vote, subjecting existing clinics to the new regulations.

elected governor in 2010. His first appointment to the Board of Healing Arts was Richard Macias, a lawyer for Operation Rescue. In 2012, the board revoked Neuhaus’s medical license. Its case rested heavily on the testimony of a forensic psychiatrist who flew in from Washington, D.C., and acknowledged that she knew little about Kansas’s standard of care.

In the aftermath of the decision, Neuhaus learned that she would be responsible for the cost of the proceedings—more than $90,000.

She filed an appeal with a Kansas district court, but she is still waiting to hear whether the judge will overturn the board’s decision. “In my entire life I wouldn’t be able to pay that back,” she says. “I’d have to file for bankruptcy. I’d probably lose my house.”

Apart from the financial stakes, Neuhaus says she’d like to get her medical license back so that she can conduct more-advanced clinical trials in her research job, which focuses on health disparities in low-income communities. She won’t be returning to an abortion clinic. “Nobody in their right mind should go into that line of work anymore,” she says. “The American Medical Association, state medical societies—they’re too chickenshit to defend us. That’s the kind of support that it will take, or we’ll get to a point where there are no abortion providers left.”

IN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS, Ohio is

the ultimate bellwether. At other times, it’s a place where some of the nation’s shrewdest anti-choice policies are created. Under Governor John Kasich, a Republican, that tradition has continued. In the fall of 2012, Kasich appointed Mike Gonidakis, the head of the anti-abortion group Ohio Right to Life, to a consumer position on the State Medical Board. The following year, Republican lawmakers added a budget amendment that required abortion providers to read a statewritten script before offering an abortion and to tell their patients about the existence of a fetal heartbeat. If physicians didn’t follow the rules, they could be sued or subjected to professional discipline. The law invites disgruntled patients and their relatives to sue their

charlie neibergall / ap images

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doctors or file complaints with the medical board.

That made Ohio one of 17 states to pass laws requiring doctors to give women information that—according to the vast preponderance of medical evidence—is false. Five states mandate that doctors spell out a link between abortion and breast cancer.

In 12 states, they must falsely inform patients about the ability of the fetus to feel pain. For doctors, it’s bad enough that politicians are ordering them to lie to their patients. Having anti-choice figures on the boards that regulate physicians ensures that if doctors violate the law, they could lose their license or their business.

Gonidakis says that in Ohio, at least, those concerns are unfounded.

“I know the difference between serving on the medical board and serving with Ohio Right to Life,” he says.

“My work isn’t ideological, and all the meetings are public. You can see exactly what I say and what I do. We license doctors and massage therapists and genetic counselors. It’s really not about abortion.”

Local pro-choice groups who track Gonidakis’s work agree that he has not overreached thus far. But Kasich has appointed at least two other anti-choice board members. And,

In Iowa, a doctor in Des Moines can use telemedicine to prescribe medical abortions to women in local clinics around the state— a program the governor and health board are trying to shut down.

Pro-choice groups will find it nearly impossible to turn the tide unless the mainstream medical community starts to speak up.

increasingly, the anti-abortion agenda seeps into even seemingly unrelated matters. Last summer, when the State Medical Board of Ohio discussed the licensing of genetic counselors, a cardiovascular surgeon appointed by Kasich raised fears about prenatal testing for disorders. Was there a way, he wondered, to stop overzealous genetic counselors from pushing pregnant women with fetal anomalies toward abortion? “It was very odd,” says Shawn McCandless, a genetics professor who testified before the board. “The question implied that genetic counselors advocate for termination of pregnancy.

That’s just not true. It’s also not pertinent to whether these counselors should be licensed by the state, yet we spent a lot of time discussing it.”

Family practitioners and gynecologists could be drawn into this web. For instance, anti-choice advocates continue to insist, despite overwhelming research to the contrary, that certain forms of long-acting birth control cause abortion. Will sanctions be imposed for doctors who fail to inform patients of this alleged threat? What about controversial reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization and gestational surrogacy? They could become the next flash points.

Arthur Lavin, a pediatric doctor in

Cleveland and a co-chair of the group Doctors for Health Care Solutions, says the encroachments of ideological health boards extend far beyond abortion—and threaten to make a “hash” out of medicine. “Why would we ever open up the door to allowing the politics of the day dictate to doctors what they should do with a patient in the room?” Lavin asks. “Now you’ve got to kowtow to whatever issue is red-hot today. What if tomorrow the hot issue is gastric bypass surgery?”

National health and medical organizations are nevertheless reluctant to wade into the fray. The American Medical Association declined to comment for this story about the rising numbers of anti-choice appointees. So did the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the Federation of State Medical Boards, and the American Public Health Association.

Carole Joffe, a medical sociologist at the University of California, San Francisco, says the medical establishment’s wariness isn’t surprising. “I’m assuming these organizations are choosing their battles carefully, knowing that any involvement with abortion will lead to controversy,” she says.

“It’s unfortunate that they are not speaking up more forcefully because appointees to these boards are enormously consequential for the medical profession as a whole.”

With Republicans occupying 29 governor’s mansions, anti-choice activists’ influence on health and medical boards won’t lessen anytime soon. Instead, they likely will be emboldened by Iowa, Virginia, and other states’ successes. Pro-choice groups will find it nearly impossible to turn the tide unless the mainstream medical community gets involved.

That seems unlikely to happen without collateral damage to doctors who don’t perform abortions. “You can imagine a world in which boards with a majority of people with a political agenda would revoke the licenses of doctors who don’t agree with their politics,” Lavin says. “More than anyone, you count on your doctor to tell you the truth. Now, telling the truth could lose us our jobs.” 

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 11

say you’ve played a

leading role in tanking the economy. Say you ran Lehman Brothers—ran it into the ground in 2008, causing a global financial panic and the most severe and intractable recession since the 1930s. Would you suffer the consequences?

Be dumped from other boards? Be reduced to selling pencils on the street and dining on ramen noodles? Not exactly. Behold the erstwhile Lehmanites— what they did then and what they’re doing now. art by steve brodner

Sir Christopher Gent

then: board member now: GlaxoSmithKline non-executive chairman

Scott Freidheim

then: executive vice president, co-chief administrative officer now: Investcorp International vice chairman

Thomas Russo

then: vice chairman, chief legal officer now: AIG executive vice president and general counsel

John D. Macomber

then: board member now: JDM Investment Group principal

John F. Akers

then: board member now: W.R. Grace and Company board member

Joseph M. Gregory Jr.

then: president, COO (2004¬2008) now: unemployed; suing to recover $233 million in deferred compensation from Lehman

Henry Kaufman

then: board member now: Henry Kaufman and Company president

Roland Hernandez

then: board member now: Hernandez Media Ventures founding principal; MGM Resorts International board member

Jesse Bhattal

then: Asia-Pacific CEO now: Lazard senior adviser

Roger Berlind

then: board member now: theatrical producer (most recently, Lucky Guy)

Michael Ainslie

then: board member now: private investor

Marsha Evans

then: board member now: Weight Watchers International board member

Jeremy Isaacs

then: CEO of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East now: JRJ Group founding partner; Marex Spectron board chairman

Ian Lowitt

Hugh “Skip” McGee

then: head of global investment banking; now: Barclays Americas chief executive

then: CFO (2008) now: Marex Spectron CFO

Herbert “Bart” McDade

then: president, COO (June–­ September 2008) now: River Birch Capital founder and partner

Michael Gelband

then: head of global capital markets now: Millennium Management global head of fixed income

Erin Callan

then: CFO (2007–2008) now: After working at Credit Suisse, left to concentrate on family (wrote a March 2013 New York Times op-ed, “Is There Life after Work?”)

Richard S. Fuld Jr.

then: chairman and CEO now: Matrix Advisors managing member/owner; lost his securities license in 2012

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 13

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The Conversation J O S H UA S T E C K E L a n d ANDREW DELBANCO

I

n the fall of 2006, Joshua Steckel left his job as a college counselor at an elite private school in Manhattan for a public high school in Brooklyn. His new work, guiding low-income students, put him on the front lines in the effort to bring more socioeconomic diversity to the nation’s selective four-year campuses. Far from assuming that college was a choice, many of the students who entered Steckel’s cubicle had internalized the message that higher education was a world from which they were excluded.

Steckel’s book, Hold Fast to Dreams, folds his students’ stories into a larger social perspective on the barriers that exclude low-income teenagers from the nation’s colleges. The book, a collaboration between Steckel and his wife, the writer Beth Zasloff, follows ten of Steckel’s students as they apply to and then enter college.

The students’ challenges are vast and varied. Mike lives in a homeless shelter, caring for his younger brothers while his mother, struggling with abdominal cancer, looks for work. Aicha and Santiago are undocumented immigrants, restricting the already-limited financial aid they can receive.

Rafael is a manager at a pharmacy in Brooklyn; his family, which depends on him, wonders why he is considering college at all. Nkese, a student at Bates College, chafes at the casual racism she experiences from her roommates and in the classroom. Ashley is accepted to Williams College only to realize, at the end of her freshman year, that she can better achieve her goals—and stay closer to her mother—at a community college in Manhattan. But eventually, and in different ways, the students thrive.

Andrew Delbanco, the Mendelson Family Professor of American Studies at Columbia University, wrote of the vanishing ideal of democratic education in his 2012 book, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be. Delbanco traces the notion that college, rather than being simply a credentialing process, is a crucial time for character formation, when young adults develop an independent sense of ethical responsibility. When selective universities increasingly accept only the children of the wealthy, this mission is lost.

As a result, our democracy—which relies on college to expose its young citizens to new points of view—suffers.

Steckel and Delbanco’s exchange has been edited for concision and clarity. —AMELIA THOMSON-DEVEAUX

Andrew Delbanco: Hold Fast to Dreams was an eye-opening book for me.

You give such a vivid sense of the obstacles that lowincome kids are up against when they’re applying to college, as well as once they

get there. It’s especially valuable because, along with all the legitimate anxiety today about the affordability of college for the middle class, there’s a prevailing view that poor kids get a special break in the college

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sweepstakes—that they will qualify for big scholarships. I often hear people say, “Oh, once upon a time it was tough to be a minority kid, but today it’s an advantage.” Yet your book shows how students of color who don’t come from privileged families face difficult cultural problems along with financial barriers in getting to and through college.

Sometimes the barrier can even be the attitude of their own parents, as in the case of the mother of Nkese, the student who decides to attend Bates College, in rural Maine. Nkese’s mom had heard about drinking and date rape, which are very real problems on America’s campuses, and so from her point of view, sending her daughter off to Bates was to send her to an unsafe place.

But of course from the white, middle-class, suburban perspective, the place where Nkese grew up—inner-city Brooklyn—is the dangerous place, and they think of college as a safe zone.

Joshua Steckel: When I spoke with Nkese’s mom, Peggy, about this amazing opportunity Nkese had at Bates, she pointed out that Maine is 97 percent white.

My assumption had been— why wouldn’t you want to get out of East Flatbush?

I had to understand that Bates is a campus and a lifestyle that is totally separate from the world in which Peggy brought up her daughter. This story isn’t just about me or just about Nkese. It’s an illustration of a vast national gap in understanding the experiences of low-income kids, even after they get to college. We wrote about a young man named Rafael who went to another selective liberal arts college;

often during his first year he would be stopped by public safety and asked what he was doing there. Another student, Angelica, spoke about a time when an African American friend was asked—in all seriousness— if his mother was like Tyler Perry’s Madea.

At Columbia University’s American Studies program, we have a partnership with a campus organization called the Double Discovery Center, which helps mostly minority kids from families where nobody’s gone to college to not only get into college but also through it successfully. We sponsor conversations between high school students and the college students who’ve already gone through the program, and one of the most persistent themes they bring up is what you were just talking about: how to adjust to a community where most people are white.

That’s why when these students find their place on campus they ultimately have so much to contribute. Nkese had a difficult first year at Bates, and it was not at all clear that she would continue. But by the end of her time there, she had the ear of the Board of Trustees, and they made some powerful policy changes to ensure that the campus was a more equitable place. It’s not an exaggeration to say she reshaped the conversation about difference within that campus community.

That idea’s at the heart of what the American college is about—to be a place where students can learn from each other as well as from their teachers and their textbooks.

The opportunity here is not just for the kids you’re writing about—it’s for their fellow students, because they

bring a set of experiences that those other students are never likely to encounter. We can only be true to that mission if we take this concept of difference and diversity seriously. Difference and diversity can so easily become empty buzzwords. Every college puts out a brochure with pictures of students with different skin tones, but that visual diversity doesn’t necessarily speak to the kind of diversity that you’re writing about.

Yes, and that’s tied to something you talk about in your book—how central it is for college to provide real connections between students whose life experiences and ways of looking at the world are so different from one another. It’s an engine of our democracy.

It has the power to shape and preserve the values that we think of as distinctly American.

The big challenge we all face is to wake the public up to the fact that this danger to our democracy is real and growing and needs to be addressed. We do not want to be a society where a significant number of our citizens feel hopeless. It seems from your book that it’s hard for these kids to push themselves, because they look around at their friends and families, and it’s a big stretch for them to believe that dreaming and trying will lead anywhere.

That’s the crux of the problem. At the end of the book, we tell a story about my five-year-old nephew Noah, who came home from school one day and told his mom that his five-year-old classmate asked him where he’s going to college. Noah was pretty stressed out and said, “Mom, do I have to go to college?” She said, “No,” and he replied, “Will

d e l b a n c o p h o t o : c o lu m b i a u n i v e r s i t y

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you call and let them know I’m not coming?” Even in an unconscious way, he knew he had a reservation. My students feel the opposite of Noah. They feel like getting to college takes extraordinary efforts, and they understand even then how much of an effect serendipity has in determining their educational outcomes. One of the students we wrote about, Mike, shared his feeling that it was all an extremely difficult thing to do alone, especially when you’re a kid who feels like you don’t have a lot going for you. You have to have someone else who can see possibilities you wouldn’t otherwise see and help guide you through the process. But it also wasn’t about me. There’s nothing that I am doing that other people out there aren’t doing and that can’t be institutionalized. The kids who need that support the most are getting it the least. They need the intensive advocacy and support that our most privileged students receive every step of the way.

The contrast with the world you left—the Upper East Side private school— was also powerful. I was struck by that moment when you took some of your students to meet with a college admissions counselor at a private school in Manhattan and when you walked into that plush lobby, one student looked around in confusion and said, “Is this a school?”

At the private school where I used to work, my office was adjacent to the headmaster’s office.

It was clear how valuable the position of college counselor was. At my new public school in Brooklyn, my office was a cubicle full of boxes and broken furniture, three floors away

from most of my students.

When I brought these three young women to the Hewitt School—well, it’s a beautiful school in an old townhouse.

Immediately, we ran into one of my former students, wearing a tweed sports jacket. It was so clear how difficult it was for the young women from the public school to make that transition into this environment and still try to be themselves. Would an admissions counselor be able to hear what was so compelling about a kid if they spoke a different way or their application didn’t have the same packaging? They didn’t always, and there were moments when I felt extraordinary frustration and a sense of deep injustice.

At the end of that first year, I remember feeling that my most compelling students were getting denials at colleges that my wonderful but less-high-achieving kids in the private-school world were gliding into.

But we also need to acknowledge that for most private colleges, if they undertook a determined effort to admit and support a significantly greater number of low-income students, it would be tough on their budget. It would require some fairly fundamental rethinking of priorities. Unfortunately, it’s not surprising that we’re not seeing that in most cases.

The budget issues are real and huge. But I also think that there is a lot of rhetoric that makes it sound like money’s not the issue, that the problem is with the kids’ qualifications. So many times, I’ve heard admissions officers say, “We don’t want to take kids and set them up for failure.”

I run into that a lot when I’m out there speaking about

college and the challenges our institutions face. People will say this is just idealistic liberal dream talk, and the qualified applicants from poor neighborhoods simply are not there. That is total nonsense.

Most of our colleges just aren’t looking hard enough for them—in rural areas as well as in the inner city. Part of that is because test scores are a poor measure of the capacity to perform in college and to contribute to college and beyond. The only thing that test scores reliably align with is family income.

Steckel

Delbanco

We need to rethink what those test scores mean when talking about this specific population of students.

Skidmore brings in 40 to 50 kids each year through their Opportunity Programs, and those kids’ average SAT scores are 300 points lower than the college’s average admitted student.

And those kids are actually graduating at a higher rate.

It’s clearly benefiting the colleges too. A lot of people would expect that kids of the sort you are advising would be totally focused on their post-college employment prospects. But in fact the students you write about are also awakening to other possibilities and are eager to learn things that they didn’t know anything about—like

the young woman who gets fascinated by German literature, of all things. College in America is supposed to be about self-discovery and enlargement of the mind and heart and spirit, not just getting a credential that enables you to succeed in the job market. There’s this insidious sense that liberal education—that’s for the privileged class, that’s for people who can afford to spend some time thinking about what they want to do with their lives. It’s not for young people who come from families worried about meeting their expenses. In fact, liberal education must be for everybody if we’re going to sustain a democracy, and your book conveys that’s what these kids want for themselves. They don’t just want to be slotted into a particular job track.

When Beth and I began this project, we were focused on documenting students’ experience with the process of applying to college. But then we had the opportunity to stay with the students for a longer period. We saw how consistently they were striving after education as a pathway to value and meaning in their lives. No matter how vocational or pre-­ professional they wanted to be in their education, that theme cut across all their stories. Ashley, the young woman who starts at Williams College and ends up at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, even after she’s decided to do nursing, it’s amazing how much personal, spiritual, and intellectual growth there is for her at the community college.

Yes, often people think— oh, all that personal-growth stuff, that’s what adults

preach, not what college students really want. It’s true that more and more students, even at our elite institutions, are opting for fields like business or economics, which they see as a direct road to a lucrative career. But what your book conveys is that the desire for a broader education, a surprising education, comes from within these kids—it’s not something that somebody’s telling them they need or ought to want.

It’s something they want to find for themselves. In your book, you’re quite focused on trying to get your advisees into selective residential liberal arts colleges. Those are great institutions, but those colleges are never going to be able to accommodate all the kids who deserve a mindopening college education.

So it’s critical that we focus on our public institutions, including community colleges, and make sure they are places where young people can have mind-opening experiences because inevitably, many more people are going to attend those institutions than the small residential colleges. Public institutions must continue to be bridges into the middle class and into democratic citizenship.

Absolutely. We can be doing a much better job of making sure that the kids who are populating our community colleges also have the opportunity to grow intellectually and personally. Especially since as we divest funds from our public institutions, they’re getting a lot less support.

Yes, at least we’re looking for solutions—cost savings, efficiencies, finding private support to close some of the gap left by declining public funds—but I’m not sure we’ve looked in the right places yet. 

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 15

IS THERE HOPE FOR THE SURVIVORS OF THE DRUG WARS? CRIMINALIZED AND DISCARDED, FALLING AT THE BOTTOM OF EVERY STATISTIC, THEY WANT SOMETHING BETTER.

BY MONICA POTTS PHOTOS BY JAMELLE BOUIE

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MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 17

ravis Jones got out of prison in 2007, but he talks about his time there like it ended yesterday. It surprised him, he says, the stuff he missed. He knew he’d long for his family, and his girlfriend, but it was the absence of everyday things that kept him from feeling human. “When you open your refrigerator and that cool air hits you? I missed it like crazy,” he says. “They cut the lights on you, and they flip the switch. Little things like that.”

But when he was released, returning to a compact corner of the unfinished basement of his girl’s mom’s house in West Baltimore, he turned it into a cell: bed, TV, weight bench, stacks and rows of books, DVDs, and video games, accumulating dust and teenage-boybedroom smell. He rarely left. When he did, he was jumpy. He was no fun at parties. “It seemed like when he came home, he was still locked up,” says his childhood friend Kendall

IT’S THE KIND OF PLACE WHERE A WALK TO THE 7-ELEVEN COULD GET YOU ROBBED, WHERE EVERYONE IS HUSTLING ALL THE TIME. Wilson. “It seemed like he was still in jail for a long time, just in the basement.”

Travis is 32. He’s short, at five feet six, but broad and muscular. He keeps his hair shaved close to his head and maintains a slim goatee. He has a way of sitting with his legs splayed and his head hanging slightly forward but his eyes looking up and his mouth unsmiling—halfrelaxed and half-tensed. Around new people, he’s shy and suspicious that they’re talking about him behind his back, but he can be funny, too, and draw a crowd around him. In the basement, Travis spent a lot of time reading, as he had in prison (Black Boy, Native Son, books about Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela). He binge-watched premium cable. The Wire. (“It was sad how Dukie ended up being a fiend.”) The new show that the guy who played Omar, Michael K. Williams, is in. (“I like him better on Boardwalk Empire.”) Game of Thrones. (“Khaleesi, she shaped herself up toward the end. She turned out to be a real force. When she freeing slaves you know I always get behind that. I ain’t like her at first; I fucks with her now.”)

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He played a lot of video games with his girl, Joyce Fisher, and a few other friends who’d stop by. Travis especially liked Call of Duty. He’d always wanted to be a Marine, but when he’d finally caught the charge that sent him to prison in Hagerstown, Maryland—police found vials of crack in his house—he’d given up on that. Just like he had on everything else.

When his stepdad left after two years of marriage to his mom, Travis was 14. They’d done father-and-son things like go fishing together on weekends and been close in a way he never was with his own dad, who was in the Navy and had never lived with him. His stepdad’s absence fed Travis’s teenage rebelliousness. He dropped out of school his junior year. His mom blames his attention deficit disorder, which was diagnosed when Travis was 12. (“Did she talk about the ADD?” he asked me one day and shook his head. “She always brings up that ADD.”) But Travis says he just acted out. He’d been a Boy Scout and his mom was a teacher, and he wanted to fit in. “Nobody likes a church boy,” he says.

Travis grew up in the same West Baltimore neighborhood where he now lives with Joyce, who is ten years his senior. It’s the kind of place where a walk to the 7-Eleven could get him robbed and where everyone is hustling all the time. People talk about the 1980s as the good days, when guys in the neighborhood could do well for themselves, when crack and heroin pumped money through the streets and gave neighborhoods an economy of their own; now, there is just violence, little money, and a lot of prison.

As a teenager, Travis came into frequent contact with police, but his first arrest didn’t happen until he’d just turned 19 and was charged with firearm possession and resisting arrest. The judge gave him probation and said she would dismiss the charges if he made it through without a violation. (“I violated that shit like six times,” he says.) A year later, he was picked up because he and a friend had beaten a man so badly the victim required stomach staples and had a contusion on his kidney. (“I didn’t think he was beaten that bad at the time, but it caught up with us.”) Travis says the guy had hit on a 13-year-old girl in the neighborhood, asking if she’d gotten her menstrual cycle yet. The charges were dropped when the victim failed to show up and testify. (“I guess somebody told him what’s what.”)

When Travis was 21, about a year before he landed in prison, his best friend was killed right in front of his face.

“His homeboy died—he did go a little bit harder after that,” Kendall Wilson says. “We all hustled. We all did everything. But a couple people were wilder. Travis was one of the wild, wild ones.” I asked Travis once how many deaths he’d witnessed. He said, “It’s like saying how many red cars did you see this week.”

pat r i c k s e m a n s k y / a p i m a g e s

The year after he came out of prison, Travis worked a few jobs. The last one, cleaning cooking equipment in restaurants at night, paid $40 a store, which was better than anything else he could find. He was caught stealing brisket from Boston Market and was fired. He put in a few more applications but never got a call back. That’s typical.

Nationwide, black men with prison records only get callbacks 5 percent of the time; for black men without prison records, the rate is 17 percent (the same as for white men with criminal backgrounds).

Travis didn’t want to deal anymore. Guys he knew were working jobs, had become husbands and fathers. “I wanted to be one of the people who get up and go to work every day without breaking the law and have a quality of life,” he says. “I wanted to be one of those people, and I felt like I couldn’t.” He remained unemployed after 2009, and it bothered him, not chipping in. “Your family will be supportive, saying, ‘Oh, yeah, take your time,’” he says. “But after a couple months with no money coming in, you just a bum.”

So he started dealing again. Only pot, no hard drugs, out of his house to trusted clients—straight-up people, he says, working people, older people. He limited himself to selling $100 worth a day and figured he was making between $30,000 and $40,000 a year just by being there to pick up his cell phone. Travis was an almost-daily pot smoker himself and didn’t see the harm, but he still wasn’t happy about it.

In the spring of 2013, Travis met a guy who’d gone to college in Canada, come back to the old neighborhood, and landed a construction job through his aunt, Catherine Pitchford, who worked at the Center for Urban Families. The center was just a mile down the road, and it provided job training and fatherhood classes for men in Baltimore’s poor neighborhoods. Travis needed certification for a construction gig, so he went to the center. Normally, every client must go through the center’s four-week job-training course, called Strive, before being placed in a job. But Pitchford, who’s completing a degree in social work, had a soft spot for Travis from the start. He wanted a job so badly, plus he seemed sharp and ready. She decided to let him take the certification test without the Strive class. He failed to qualify by two points.

He was leaving the center, upset, when he passed Wayne Cooper, an amiable 67-year-old counselor who works with ex-offenders. “I said to him, ‘You look like you’re angry,’” Cooper recalls. “It was a simple statement.” But

not to Travis. “I kind of lost it,” he says. “After being in that depressed state like I was, being down like that, and realizing that your dream could come true, making that kind of wage, a respectable living, and then missing it by two points.” He took off his coat and lunged at Cooper.

Another center employee came between them. Cooper, though, laughed and turned to Travis, saying, “I hope I’m not going to have to get your ass locked up in here today!” Travis got even more upset. “I was going to strike that man,” he says. “I wasn’t thinking about it.” Cooper had seen a lot of guys blow up, but not like this. “I don’t

know if Travis is on medication or not,” Cooper says, “but he acted like he was.” When Travis finally stalked out of the center, he figured he’d never go back.

In parts of Baltimore, residents talk about the 1980s as the good days, when crack and heroin pumped money into the streets.

THE CENTER FOR URBAN FAMILIES, finished in spar-

kling pink cinder block in 2009, is one of the newest buildings in its neighborhood. It’s surrounded by a church, a vacant former child-care center, a thrift store, and a freshly repaved, block-long parking lot with no business attached. Just down the road is the Mondawmin shopping center, which locals call the “hood mall.” Amid the boarded-up row houses, the occasional neatly kept home often bears a simple plaint on the front door—“No loitering, please!”—in an attempt to prohibit the stooping practiced by the neighborhood’s hoodie-wearing men. Corners

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 19

The Center for Urban Families opened its new building in 2009.

have no garbage bins, and crosswalks dissect few intersections, so trash and pedestrians make their own way across streets. Every few blocks there’s a blue flashing dome above the stoplight just to remind people that the cops are never far off, but it does nothing to deter the knife-wielding bar fighters from spilling out into the street, or to reduce the lines for the neighborhood library bathroom, where people shoot up, or to slow the quick-step vibrancy of a streetscape where everyone has to watch his back.

What sets the center apart from the rest of the block isn’t just its still-new gleam but the dozens of men (and a handful of women) filing in every day around 8:30 A.M., or out after 5 P.M., wearing suits and pressed dress shirts, hair pulled back or cropped close. Clients must adhere to a strict dress code; for most, the clothes are provided by donors like Men’s Wearhouse. The center, which started operating in 1999, provides a range of services in addition to workforce training: It collaborates with employers to place people in jobs; it provides fatherhood classes; it helps men navigate family-court problems; it counsels ex-prisoners as they transition back into life; and it offers a class for couples that operates a bit like a group therapy session.

The nonprofit center was among the first in the country

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designed to help low-income men with such a wide range of issues. Its founder and CEO, Joe Jones, calls himself a “recovering knucklehead,” who dealt and abused drugs when he was young. He grew up in Baltimore and had gone through an intense two-year recovery program in which Wayne Cooper was one of his counselors. Jones wanted to help men like himself, and West Baltimore has no shortage of them. More than half the prison population released in Maryland returns every year to the neighborhoods around the center. They come out burdened not only by their records but by family estrangement and debt. Childsupport arrearages are allowed to accumulate in prison, and about 3,000 men who live near the center owe more than $50 million in back child support.

The center has a tough-love ethos that’s based on the kinds of therapeutic programs that were instrumental in changing Jones’s life. Women are also welcome in the job-training courses, but in a city where “family” is code for “mothers and children,” the focus on men is unusual.

In the years since the Great Recession, more people with high-school diplomas and college degrees have come looking for help finding jobs, but the core population the center serves is the least educated, those with a high-school diploma or less.

One of the center’s most important functions is also its simplest: It gives men a safe spot to hang out in West Baltimore. Most of the workforce-training graduates who still visit the center—watching the classes, meeting with counselors, using the computers—told me they come because being there keeps them out of trouble. “There aren’t too many places in Baltimore where men can be positive together,” says one Strive graduate.

The men are what policymakers euphemistically call a challenging population: Lacking high-school education or formal work experience, they’re the most likely of any group in America to die young and to die from violence.

Most of their life experience, the skills that have helped them survive the streets or prison, works against them in the legal world. The biggest problem the center has spent 15 years trying to solve isn’t how to get these guys jobs, or how to encourage them to be more involved in their children’s lives, or how make the streets safer, though those are tough enough. The problem is more profound: How do you give these survivors of the drug wars, men who are criminalized and discarded by society, who are at the bottom of every statistic, hope?

After his confrontation with Cooper, Travis stayed in touch with Pitchford, his friend’s aunt. He still wanted a construction job, and it seemed like she could help. They’d have long conversations about his temper, and his goals.

“Travis,” she’d say, “I see your potential—you just got to work on your anger.” Finally, she convinced him to try Strive, an intensive four-week program that was developed by two ex-offenders in Harlem in the 1980s.

Every new class is assigned a number. Travis showed up for Cycle 179, which began last August. Wearing the new suit he’d been given, he filed into the biggest room at the center, full of white folding tables and green rolling chairs, for orientation. The instructors were Baltimore natives Sean Robinson and Tiffany Davis. Robinson, who’s 40, spent seven years in the military before getting a degree in sociology. Davis, who’s 31, is earning a degree in community service. Strive instructors in West Baltimore are always a male-female pair, in part so that the men can get used to taking orders from women. They instruct the class from 9 A.M. until 3 P.M.; the last two hours shift to remedial math instruction, which gets some ready for their GEDs and helps others prepare for construction jobs like plumbing and pipe-fitting, where they’ll need to add and subtract and understand fractions.

Strive is boot camp—one that turns soldiers back into civilians rather than the other way around. Robinson calls it “attitudinal training.” Students learn how to give a job interview, how to write a résumé, how to communicate in the workplace, how to save money, how to follow a budget, how to deal with depression and low self-esteem. A major

goal is to help them develop a professional attitude toward a job—being on time, wearing business attire, speaking appropriately for an office environment—the kinds of skills that middle-class people pick up throughout their lives like oxygen from air.

When Robinson and Davis take over at orientation, they bark at the new recruits to stand up, then issue their first command: “Smile.” Students will learn a lot of things in Strive, but the first lesson is how to smile. The first few days are devoted to it. The new class members are always confused, and then they start to smile—except for about 20 percent of the room, who stand stone-faced. Robinson calls out those who don’t smile, pulls them up to the front of the room, and says, “This is my smile crew.” He tells the rest of the room to cheer until they can get these men and women, mostly men, to finally crack a smile.

The claps and hoots and whistles rise in a crescendo heard throughout the building. Meanwhile, Davis and Robinson walk up and down the line, yelling, “Smile,” and pantomiming it, using their fingers to pull the corners of their own mouths back. The reluctant recruits roll their

MORE THAN HALF THE PRISON POPULATION RELEASED IN MARYLAND RETURNS TO THE NEIGHBORHOODS AROUND THE CENTER. eyes. Some get tense, their faces get stuck in passive displays of aggression, as Robinson goes up and down the line and mocks: “Is it painful? Is there a medical condition? Smile!” He and Davis continue their full-on assault of well-wishing and joking and silliness until one by one, the students fold. A smile is the Strive game face, they explain. “I’m not asking you to smile on North Monroe Street at two in the morning,” Davis says. “I’m asking you to smile in here.”

It’s usually the youngest men who bow out at this stage—the 19- and 20-year-olds who are too cool to tolerate the corniness, the guys who’ve been strongly encouraged to try Strive by some parole officer or social worker attempting to keep them from spending their twenties in prison. It’s the older guys who are eager to cooperate.

They’re hungry.

Travis wasn’t called out as part of the smile crew, but he could feel himself winding up. He didn’t like these mind games. After the first break, he went out to smoke a cigarette and returned chewing gum. Davis came toward him,

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 21

yelling at him to spit the gum out. Instead, he cursed at her and demanded to know why he had to do something she didn’t have to, since she was chewing gum, too. “If you don’t like it, you can get out!” Davis hollered. Travis turned to Robinson, the other trainer: “Why I gotta leave? She’s chewing gum, too!” Robinson said, “You’re not submitting to the process.” So Travis said, “Fuck you and this process,” and stomped out of the center for a second time.

“He fussed about that for weeks,” Joyce says. “He couldn’t get over it, and he couldn’t let it go.” A week or so later, Travis applied for a stockroom job. He wore the suit he’d gotten from the center, and on the way to the interview he could hear Davis’s voice in his head, telling him to smile.

“This woman I couldn’t stand at the time was the first person I thought of,” he says. “I took the advice she gave.”

He landed the job, and it paid $9.50 an hour, but he quit at the end of the first day for reasons even he didn’t entirely understand. The tape gun he was supposed to use to put boxes together didn’t work properly, and it annoyed him.

Mostly, though, he worried he wasn’t ready. But he did feel ready for Strive. “In an hour and a half, with the informa-

WHENEVER THEY BREAK A RULE, STRIVE STUDENTS HAVE TO PAY FINES: A HAND IN A POCKET COSTS $1, A RINGING CELL PHONE COSTS $5. tion I got here, got me further than I got since 2007 when I came out,” he says. “That’s what it took for me to realize that I can get where I want to be. I can. This is the avenue that I’ve been hoping and praying for, the opportunity and chance for something to go right.” He called his old friend Kendall Wilson, who, after six years of working at KFC, had become a manager. She hired Travis as a part-time cook at the suburban restaurant she managed. That allowed him to quit dealing weed. He worked nights so he could keep the job while he went back to the center.

ON THE FIRST FRIDAY MORNING of October, Travis wore

his suit—plain black and a little too long, so that it hung past his wrists, waist, and ankles—and took a seat in the back for the beginning of Cycle 181. (Outside the center, he still wore jeans and T-shirts and a canvas jacket with a brass-knuckle knife in the pocket, because you could never be too careful.) Eighty-seven people came to orientation.

Only 68 returned on Monday for the first class. Robinson and Davis passed out workbooks and assigned homework,

22 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAR /APR 2014

introducing them to the course’s strict rules and etiquette.

Students had to stand and say their full names before they spoke in class. No slang words were allowed—“yeah” and “nah” counted as slang. Every morning, the students would be inspected to see that they were following the dress code.

Homework would be checked first thing, every day.

Whenever they broke a rule, the students had to pay fines. The price schedule was listed in the workbook: A hand in a pocket cost $1, while a ringing cell phone cost $5.

“In what part of life do mistakes not cost you?” Robinson said by way of explanation. Payment was due immediately; loose change and dollar bills began to fill a giant empty water-cooler bottle that became almost too heavy to lift by the end of the four weeks. If students didn’t have money, they couldn’t wait until the lunch break or dart out of class.

They had to turn to the room and ask for a loan. “Does anybody in the community have a dollar I can borrow?” they would regularly ask, before picking quarters and dimes out of outstretched hands. There was a lesson in this, too: “Stop looking for someone outside of your community to come rescue you,” Robinson said. “Your help is here in this community.” Some students paid as much as $10 in the first few days. At the end of the first week, one woman was charged $1 and broke down crying before leaving the class for good. Travis got caught with his hands in his pockets a few times, and had to pay $3. But he was smiling on cue, working hard at cooperating.

Travis watched as the instructors called out others for refusing to crack even a grin, or for sighing, or sucking their teeth, or not wearing the right clothes, down to the socks. He watched as Robinson and Davis focused in on a group of three men—two were brothers—barely out of their teens, who still hadn’t smiled in the first three days and wouldn’t say their names loud enough for the class to hear. One by one they were called up, heads held back.

“You have permission here to be square,” Robinson said.

None of those guys would make it through the first week.

Only 50 students did.

The class was purposefully antagonistic. Sometimes, Wayne Cooper, the ex-offender counselor, would come in to poke fun at people, make them a little more uncomfortable. “They petty,” students would grumble outside the classroom. There was a good reason for that: The students’ jobs, after the training, would be petty, too. “It always seems like more is expected of you for the least amount of money,” Cooper says.

During the second week, it dawned on Travis that this was the most time he’d spent around other people since prison. He was starting to make friends, becoming part of a group of guys who were all slowly, gingerly, beginning to thrive in the class. They’d hang out during lunch and after class. The social leader of the group was a 27-year-old

father of two named Donte Harrison. Donte wrote poetry and performed hip-hop, and he liked to party. His path to the center had been different from Travis’s. Donte had graduated high school and spent half a semester in community college before dropping out. He occasionally dealt drugs and had gotten into a bit of trouble but had a stable home life with his mom and sisters that kept him from falling all the way down.

At 19, Donte was working at a Shoe City in the mall in Towson, a suburb, when Malikah Robertson, who went by the nickname Shawna, came in to buy shoes for her two kids. At the time, she was pregnant with her third. (Donte had just gotten out of a relationship with a woman who was a few weeks pregnant with his first son.) Donte struck up a conversation and invited her to come back the next day, when he could give her a friends and family discount. “I went back up there, that was pretty much what it is,” Shawna says. “We were together for six years. He was nice, polite. He was a very—well actually, I kind of taught him, I kind of groomed him into being a man.” Donte moved in, became the kids’ stepdad, and he and Shawna had a son together named Ja’len. They worked as security guards at an office building in Towson. Three years in, they were engaged.

Donte’s life seemed set.

In the summer of 2011, Donte’s 12-yearold cousin was playing on his front porch when he was caught in the crossfire of a gang hit and killed. Another cousin died a week later. Donte had seen a lot of violence, but there was something different about his cousin’s death, an innocent kid shot for no reason. “Life never hit me too hard until that,” he says. Donte took time off to be with his family and grieve. “He shut down,” Shawna says. “Our boss was like, ‘I can’t hold your spot, because I don’t know how long it’s going to take to get yourself back together.’”

Donte was fired.

“I think he hit rock bottom then,” Shawna says. “He just felt like it was the end of the world. I was scared to ask him to do anything, I felt I would be ignorant if I asked.

But it’s like there’s nothing you can do about it, you still have to live afterwards.” Donte and Shawna were barely talking anymore—they hadn’t been communicating well for a while, but the family problems forced them to see it—and they broke up last summer. Donte moved in with his grandfather, back in his old neighborhood, and started popping pills. Shawna applied for child-care vouchers to help with the $300 a week it would cost to put her kids

in day care after school. To get the vouchers, she had to provide the state with Donte’s information, and the state came after him for child support. He already owed child support on his first son.

When Donte emerged from his depression, he tried to find a new job but couldn’t. His child-support arrearages for Shawna reached $4,000. “I don’t really know what’s hindering me,” he told me. “I ain’t got no violent crimes.” One day, he was pulled over while driving, and the cop said he smelled marijuana. Donte found out that his license was suspended because of the child-support

debt. When he went to court, he asked the judge, “How am I supposed to get a job if I can’t drive?” The judge said, “You’ll figure something out.” Whenever he needed money, Donte would sell drugs like pot, Xanax, and Percocet, which could go for $300 a bottle. But he had never wanted to just deal—it was one of the things Shawna had liked about him—and he also needed a legal way to pay the child support, because the judge would ask. He had heard about the center because someone told him its fatherhood classes could help him settle his arrearages.

He told the judge he was going to Strive.

Donte Harrison and his younger son, Ja’len

FOR PEOPLE WITH CRIMINAL backgrounds, a job inter-

view is the best chance to overcome everything working against them: the stereotypes, the lack of education, the

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 23

prison record, the spotty work history. For the final three weeks of Cycle 181, almost every morning was devoted to mastering the interview.

Robinson and Davis began by tossing out questions to the class. They focused on five common ones. The first: “Tell me about yourself.” This became an exercise in what not to say. The first responses were the kind Robinson and Davis expected: “I’m a survivor!” “I’m a mother!”

Davis asked the room, “Is anyone else in here a mother?”

When most of the women raised their hands, she turned to the offender: “Does that make you unique? No? Then

A Strive graduate passes out fliers in the community about the center’s services.

sit down.” When students yelled out lame answers, Robinson would moan, “Clichés are terrible!” Sometimes he’d be softer and say, “I appreciate your heart, jumping up to volunteer, but no.”

Travis emerged early as someone who could answer the questions well. He was smart and genuine, casual and earnest. When asked who he was, he’d say he was a go-getter and give an example of a time he took extra initiative at KFC to help out a co-worker even though it wasn’t his job.

Where did he see himself in five years? He would be a college graduate and an asset to any company he worked for.

How did he handle workplace conflict? He told the story of the time he disagreed with a supervisor and asked if they could talk it over during his next break.

Travis had begun to vary his outfit, sporting a black-

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and-white silk paisley tie and a matching pocket square to complement the black suit. He wore it on his 45-minute walks to the center every morning, when he’d plan his day, visualizing how he wanted it to go. “It’s changed my life,” he said about Strive. “I wish I did this when I was 16, 15.

I love this place.”

The class had been divided into teams of roughly seven students, with each team electing a manager to lead their interview preparation. Travis wasn’t a manager, but when the class had a contest to see who had the best interview skills, his team nominated him. The competitors went up front, Robinson and Davis fired questions at them, and those who stumbled or made a mistake were sent back to their seats. When someone aced all five questions, Robinson would say, “Give him a black card!” The black-card holders were deputized to help others perfect their interviews. Travis was one of five. Robinson pointed at him and told the class, “Y’all don’t know who Travis was—he was the meltdown king. Now he’s a black-card holder.”

Travis talked about the black card as if it were real. “Now that I have that black card,” he’d say, “I feel like I can do anything.” He spent class time helping others improve. He’d pose the questions, and when they’d answer, he’d pace back and forth, head low, listening closely, furrowing his brow, shaking his head, giving tips. “When I started looking at him as a leader, he showed me a little bit,” Robinson says. “I started saying publicly, ‘Travis is one of the brightest guys here,’ and he started feeding off of that.”

Travis, though, was darting out some days at 3 P.M., after Robinson and Davis turned the class over to the math instructor, so that he could get to the KFC in time. Robinson found out, and the Friday of the second week he called out Travis in front of the class. Travis was upset, but he didn’t explode the way he might have in the past. “I think he started to doubt whether he could give the level of commitment we were looking for,” Robinson says. Travis remembers it differently. “They said something about, ‘What’s more important: the little petty job or what you get in here?’ That made me kind of mad, because I left a lucrative hustle behind to get that petty job to try to do this. The money is crap. But it’s my job. I went and got that. I do good there.

What I want to be is a working man, a normal American taxpaying citizen. So that kind of cut me the wrong way.”

He felt disrespected. But when he weighed working at KFC against the promise of something better, he decided

to stick with Strive. He asked his bosses to schedule him on weekend nights so he could concentrate on the class, even though working just two shifts a week at minimum wage left him broke. At the class’s midpoint, he was one of about 40 students still hanging in.

THE STUDENTS LEFT IN CYCLE 181 began to find that

the center was full of affirmation. Everyone in the building would ask, “How are you?” and refuse to let you go until the answer was “Good!” Donte wrote a poem about Strive that Robinson asked him to share in the beginning of the third week. “Walking pass this mirror, is it really who I see? Is it that same haunted past that held me back from so many dreams? Is it that same fuckup who learned from nothing?” he wrote. “Used to be so dark and cold with intentions to harm, but now, now I see light, a crack of hope and change has split this mirror.”

Every day at lunch, Donte walked to Mondawmin to Burger King, and other students would come along. (He’d often pay for them because he was the only one with cash.)

Travis would sometimes go, too, though he preferred the cheaper corner store on the other side of the empty parking lot. The Strive students made the four-block trip looking sharp, the women in their heels and the men in their suits, and along the way people on the street would clap and yell, “Get them jobs!” Travis was also receiving those kinds of cheers on his morning and afternoon walks— “That is just a perk,” he says. The guys had decided they enjoyed wearing a suit. These men had always wanted to work construction—the best-paying jobs they knew about—but now they saw the benefits of a job that required office attire. They liked looking good.

Students were still being kicked out or giving up every day. Increasingly, Robinson and Davis required Cycle 181 to act as a unit, making decisions together and holding slackers accountable. The instructors would pull someone up to the front of the class for an infraction and ask the students to vote on whether he or she should be allowed to stay. One man was kicked out because his cell phone rang and he lied about it to avoid paying the $5 fine. One quiet guy with a bit of an attitude who kept falling asleep on the table was asked to come up front; the class had no trouble voting him out. Others were booted for being late after every break, or for not doing their homework, or for not writing the essays that were doled out as punishment.

Those were the easy cases. As the class moved on, and the students grew closer, these decisions got tougher. Everyone held their breath when, on the Thursday of the third week, Robinson brought up Melvina Banks’s absences. Melvina had been one of the students to jump up and answer questions in the first few days. She’d been voted a team manager and was one of the people in the class others came to for

advice. Melvina, who is 33, was awaiting drug charges. (“I was involved with a friend,” she told me. “I wasn’t aware of the other things he was involved in.”) Her pretrial officer, who was monitoring her house arrest before her case went to a judge, had told Melvina about Strive. She had known about the center but assumed, because of its focus on fatherhood, that it was only for men. Now she was just a week from graduating, but she had missed three days—one to go on a job interview arranged by the center and two to take her GED exam.

Once Melvina stood up front, faced the classroom, and smiled, Robinson referred the students to the rulebook and told them to discuss her fate. At first, everyone was supportive of Melvina. She had missed class for good reasons, they chimed in. Then Robinson asked, “So, it’s OK for Melvina to break the rules because you like her?” Travis stood up to say something, but Robinson asked him to read the rule about absences first. “Three absences will require you to repeat the workshop, no matter what the reason,” Travis read from the workbook, which had the words in bold. Robinson repeated: “No matter the reason.” Travis

THESE MEN HAD ALWAYS WANTED TO WORK CONSTRUCTION, BUT NOW THEY SAW THE BENEFITS OF OFFICE ATTIRE. THEY LIKED LOOKING GOOD. said, “But she was bettering herself. Isn’t that why we came here?” Robinson pointed out that she could have taken the GED another time. In a business, he said, Melvina’s absences would have hurt the bottom line, no matter how noble her reason for missing.

Melvina kept standing in front of the room smiling, but the tide was starting to turn. Robinson reminded them of another rule: People who stick their necks out for rulebreakers become responsible for them. “If you save her, it’s going to be on you,” he said. The people who spoke up after that, always with a qualifying “I like Melvina,” started to make the case to vote her out. Rules were rules. The vote was close. Melvina left the room, quietly, with her books and bag. A classmate grew furious and stomped out of the room; he was voted out, too, after he returned.

Melvina stayed in the building and cried to anyone who would listen: “They said there would be consequences, and so everyone changed their minds!” One of the center’s newest employees, who had graduated from Strive in May, grabbed Melvina and took her back into the

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 25

classroom. It was lunchtime, and Davis and Robinson were gone. He called the class back and gave them a lecture about solidarity. “Y’all supposed to stick together!” he said. Another employee called Robinson and Davis and convinced them to let Melvina try again. But when she showed up late the following day, no one stood up for her, and she was voted out again.

After the Melvina episode, Robinson told the students it was OK if Melvina and others needed to come back for a second try. Failure is part of the process of growing, he said, and most Strive cycles had a repeater. After all, here was Travis, a black-card holder who hadn’t made it through the first hour of Cycle 179.

OF THE 87 WHO CAME TO orientation, 33 made it to

graduation on November 1. The day before, a Thursday, was devoted to fun. A few students stumbled in late, but rather than kick them out, Robinson and Davis asked them to devise and perform a lesson for the rest of the class on the importance of punctuality. The students came up with a skit in which they pretended to work in a

IT’S CRUCIAL FOR GRADUATES TO KEEP COMING AROUND, GETTING A REGULAR DOSE OF POSITIVITY. OTHERWISE, THE STREETS WILL TAKE THEM BACK. business, missed an important assignment because they were late, and were fired. At the end of the skit, Davis asked them to repeat a call-and-response chant they’d heard throughout the class: “To be early is to be on time, to be on time is to be late, to be late is to be fired.” But they stumbled over it, and when Davis prompted, “To be late …,” they said, in unison, “... is to be on time!” Davis stopped: “What! No!” Everyone started laughing, and Davis started singing, “To be late is to be on time! To be laaaaate is to be on time! Be on time, be on time, be on time!” They all joined in, clapping and pounding the tables to the rhythm.

That afternoon, the students had a chance to win back the money that had piled up in the giant water-cooler bottle. It totaled more than $400 and was split among the winners of four contests. For one, Robinson and Davis threw out questions in a round-robin to see who could give the best interview of the cycle. Only the black-card winners were asked to come up. Two were eliminated quickly, and it came down to Travis and his team man-

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ager, a woman named Erika White, who had a degree in business from the University of Baltimore but had been unemployed since March. They were tied when Robinson asked, “How do you handle conflict in the workplace?”

Erika stayed back on purpose and let Travis go forward.

He answered, as he often had, with the story about asking his supervisor at KFC to sit down with him over break and talk through their problems. He won an envelope containing $100.

While everyone tried on their blue graduation robes for the ceremony the next day, the class revived its new anthem “To be late is to be on time!” Some students grabbed Bic pens to use as microphones. A few who were already wearing their robes started deacon stomping, taking it to church. The giddiness continued as they filed out. Travis, though, hung his head low and walked slowly out of the building in his too-long suit. When he looked up for a brief moment, his eyes were red and his face was wet. “It’s kind of a big deal,” he said.

Travis’s mother and the friend who’d recommended the center came to his graduation. He sat near the front, nodding intently as the others gave thanks and shared what they’d learned from the class. Davis called him up last, and when he got his certificate, he turned to Robinson and Davis and said, “Thanks for never giving an inch.”

The center employees had come to love Travis, but they couldn’t help being a little scared for him. He was still holding on too tightly to his emotions, even if they were good ones. His self-esteem might be too fragile to withstand the setbacks that would inevitably come. While the center says that 85 percent of Strive graduates have a job after a year, for instance, some spend weeks trying to get that first job. There were many stories about guys who just stopped coming by, ceased to answer their phones, changed numbers, fell away. It was crucial, Robinson and Davis said, for Strive graduates to stay around, both to get a jump on new job opportunities and to get a regular dose of positivity. “You see when their confidence plays tricks on them,” Catherine Pitchford, the person who had convinced Travis to try Strive, told me after graduation.

“You see when the streets take them back.”

DONTE KEPT SHOWING UP. He took a fatherhood class.

He applied for jobs and trained for extra certifications: forklift-driving, learning how to wax and buff floors. He brought the mothers of both his children to the graduation for the fatherhood course and everyone was impressed to see the three of them together, getting along. But while Donte had interviews, he had no offers by December 17, the deadline by which he had to pay $400 toward his child support or risk a year in jail. He came up with the money, and when I asked him how, he laughed and said, “I had

to make some moves.” When the judge asked, Donte said it had come from his family. Shawna kicked $200 back to Donte so that they could each give Ja’len and the other kids a Christmas.

Because Donte was always around the center, he was chosen for a temporary construction cleanup job in January. The company went contract by contract and couldn’t promise Donte work for long, but it paid a minimum of $11 an hour. It was exhausting, satisfying work, and Donte was proud of it. He posted pictures of himself wearing hard hats and vests, Shop-Vac in hand, on Instagram, the social network of choice for most of Cycle 181. He had also interviewed for a job as a floor technician at Towson University, and he posted, a little prematurely, a happy emoticon with a caption proclaiming that he now had two jobs.

(He didn’t get the job but was later offered another one at Towson, buffing the floors on weekends.) He spent the first part of the new year thinking about how he would juggle daytime construction with nighttime floorcleaning. “I’m fixing to be really tired,” he told me. He bragged on Instagram: “I ain’t going to lie, I’m proud of myself!”

Travis would have liked those jobs, but he had stopped hanging around the center. He’d shown up for a week or so after graduation, wearing his suit, hoping to take a forklift-driving course, but it kept being delayed. Career counselors meet with graduates on weekday mornings, and Travis applied for jobs with their help, but no interviews resulted. Honestly, Travis was a little scared about what would happen if he was offered an interview; Donte had arranged a party after graduation, and Travis knew his urine was tainted from smoking weed as he celebrated. He didn’t want to embarrass the center if a job came up and he couldn’t pass a piss test.

As the holidays came and went, Travis took on more hours at KFC, five or six days a week. “I got a phony raise at my phony job,” he said. He now made $7.50 an hour.

Kendall Wilson, his manager and childhood friend, had noticed a new work ethic. “He really started doing his thing,” she said. “I’ve seen times when somebody here will say something and the old Travis would probably put them in the hot grease, but he has matured. He’s still a mean individual, though.” I asked Kendall if she thought Travis would stick with KFC. “Until he finds something better,” she said, “I know he’s going to stick with this, and I’m going to make sure he stick with this, because I don’t want to fire him. Coming from where we came from, something better

than nothing right now. Everybody we know either dead or in jail, and that’s all I’m saying.”

Travis started to hang out in his basement again. Some mornings he would call Donte to see if he was going to the center, but those calls came more rarely as time passed.

Travis applied for jobs on his own, online, rather than walk to the center. He knew that Kendall had worked for six years before she started making a decent salary at KFC, and he didn’t think he could take that wait. He was thinking about hustling again. “You take all your crappy $30, $40, $50, $60 days: It’s still more than what you make at

your best week working at KFC,” he said. But even the weed business was changing, he feared; Travis had heard about legalization in other states, and he figured weed would soon be legal everywhere—meaning guys like him wouldn’t even have that to fall back on. “It pisses me off. I want to run, but I’m forced to crawl,” he told me. “Everybody says, ‘Just be patient. It will all turn around for you.’”

In early February, Travis found a new job, on his own, with a company that cleans restaurants at night, paying $80 a day. It was the same type of job he’d had in 2008, the one he’d gotten fired from. It was a good job, and he told the center about it, but he was still dissatisfied. He had wanted to start GED classes, hoping that might be the first step to a real career. He registered, but his new job interfered with the class schedule. He never showed. 

When Travis Jones left prison in 2007, he returned to the same neighborhood where he grew up.

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 27

28 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAR /APR 2014

PLOWED UNDER Across the northern plains, native grassland is being turned into farmland at a rate not seen since the 1920s. The environmental consequences could be disastrous.

BY JOCELYN C. ZUCK ER MA N

Soybean harvest in Mount Vernon, South Dakota, October 2013 This article was developed in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, an independent, nonprofit news organization producing investigative reporting on food, agriculture, and environmental health.

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 29

O

The region’s game birds are in serious trouble. Driving across South Dakota the following afternoon with the radio on, I learned that Governor Dennis Daugaard had just announced an emergency pheasant-habitat summit. Last summer, the state’s Department of Game, Fish and Parks recorded a 64 percent decline in the number of pheasant broods from the already record low levels of 2012. Though a rainy nesting season and an early fall blizzard hadn’t helped matters, the region’s problems involve more than inclement weather—and extend far beyond the birds.

While few seem to be aware of it, a massive shift is under way in the northern plains, with ramifications for the quality of our water and food, and, more fundamentally, the longterm viability of our farms. A study published in February 2013 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that between 2006 and 2011, farmers in the Dakotas, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Iowa—the Western Corn Belt—had plowed up 1.3 million acres of native grassland in order to plant corn and soybeans. “People had been talking about the land conversion,” says Chris Wright, an assistant research professor at South Dakota State University and a co-author of the report, “but there weren’t any recent numbers.”

Relying on satellite data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Wright and his co-author, Michael Wimberly, found that the rates of land-use change in the region—up to 5.4 percent annually—parallel

30 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAR /APR 2014

the deforestations taking place in Brazil, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The shift represents the most rapid loss of grasslands since tractors began breaking sod on the Great Plains in the 1920s. Most of the conversion is happening on lands that are at risk from erosion or drought, and, in some cases, both.

While grasslands may not be the most charismatic of landscapes—“Anyone can love the mountains,” the local saying goes, “it takes soul to love the prairie”—they, and the wetlands that tend to go along with them, are among the most important ecosystems on the planet. For one thing, they contain disproportionately high numbers of plant and animal species. (More than a third of species on the U.S. endangered species list live only in wetlands.) They also provide a range of critical “ecosystems services,” soaking up rain and snowmelt and slowly releasing water in drier seasons, thereby reducing flooding and erosion and improving water quality by filtering out fertilizers and pesticides that run off of farmland. Fewer wetlands mean more chemicals making their way into local waterways and ultimately ending up in the area in the Gulf of Mexico known as the Dead Zone, where nutrient pollution has made it challenging for marine life to survive. Finally, and crucially, the deep-rooted grasses that constitute the world’s prairies hold massive amounts of carbon: nearly one-third of total stocks, almost as much as that stored by forests.

The Nature Conservancy has called grasslands the world’s most imperiled ecosystem,

and their demise has ramifications for climate change, as all of that carbon gets released into the atmosphere. (Row crops, which have much shorter roots, store carbon only briefly, and far less of it.) Unfortunately, once the prairies— composed of some 200 types of grasses, forbs, and sedges—have been destroyed, they are virtually impossible to bring back.

“It’s a major, creeping, ecological disaster,” Craig Cox, senior vice president for agriculture and natural resources at the Environmental Working Group (EWG), told me in the conference room of his office in Ames, Iowa. His research and advocacy organization, which is based in Washington, D.C., released its own study on this vast ecological re-engineering in July 2013, with conclusions similar to Wright’s. In just four years, the EWG found, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Minnesota lost an area of wetlands the size of Rhode Island. Whereas states like Iowa and Indiana were mostly lost to corn and soy decades ago (Iowa retains one-tenth of 1 percent of its original tall-grass prairie), less favorable climactic and agronomic conditions had, until recently, left the western reaches of the Corn Belt largely untouched. A confluence of forces is now changing that dynamic. “If we continue down this road,” Wright says, “we’re going to turn the Dakotas into another Iowa.”

NORTH AND SOUTH DAKOTA, particularly

the landscape known as the Prairie Pothole Region, a network of wetlands formed by glaciers 10,000 years ago, exude a moody, rugged

p h o t o p r e v i o u s pa g e : s e a n r ya n / t h e d a i ly r e p u b l i c / a p i m a g e s

n a rainy Monday in mid-October, six middle-aged men in denim and camouflage sat bent over coffee mugs at the Java River Café, in Montevideo, Minnesota. With its home-baked muffins and free Wi-Fi, the Main Street establishment serves as communal living room for the town of 5,000, but the mood on that gray morning wasn’t particularly convivial. The state’s pheasant season had opened two days earlier, and the hunters gathered at the café for what should have been a brag fest were mostly shaking their heads. “You didn’t see anybody out there who was over the limit, did you?” a guy in a baseball cap asked with obvious sarcasm, to sad chuckles all around.

a l a n n e w p o r t / fa r m p r o g r e s s - p e n t o n

Grasslands Evangelist: Fourth-generation rancher Lyle Perman (center) looks over the biodiverse pastures on his land near Lowry, South Dakota.

allure. Overgrown puddles pock the undulating fields and shift from gray to shimmering silver when the sun peeks through the clouds.

Known as “the nation’s duck factory,” the region is the breeding ground for more than half of North America’s migratory waterfowl.

Eric Lindstrom, a government affairs representative with Ducks Unlimited, who is based in Bismarck, North Dakota, took me driving west of the city, where he pointed out speckled sharp-tailed grouse skittering over the tawny grass, and tiny, dark coots flying low over the water. Angus cattle dotted distant hills, and a group of Canada geese flew south in a V formation. Lindstrom directed my attention to some of the changes that Wright and Cox had documented. Among the iconic sites of the prairie potholes are giant boulders, some of them the size of compact cars, left scattered across the grasslands by glacial activity.

Armed with modern excavation equipment, farmers are digging out the boulders—just as they are knocking down the lines of trees

known as shelterbelts—to make use of every corner. “We call those the headstones of the prairie,” Lindstrom said, pointing to a mound of enormous rocks sitting on the edge of a field.

I left Bismarck and drove south to the splendidly isolated home of Lyle Perman, a fourth-generation rancher near Lowry, South Dakota. So concerned is Perman about the changes around his Rock Hills Ranch—where it seems that every month another neighbor digs up native prairie to plant row crops—that the 59-year-old has become something of a grasslands evangelist. He brought me into his office, which shares a building with the horses and the tractors—one of which bears a bumper sticker that reads “Eat Beef. The West Wasn’t Won on Salad”—and pulled out the fat folder of newspaper clippings and academic reports he’s been compiling for the past few years. Clicking through a PowerPoint presentation that he put together in order to educate area farmers and ranchers on the matter, he talked about holistic land stewardship and paraphrased

the conservationist Aldo Leopold (“a man’s portrait is based on the kind of farm he has”).

Perman wasn’t always an outspoken environmentalist. “If you’d have come here ten years ago,” he told me, “you’d have gotten a different story.” Back in the 1970s, Perman and his dad would set off ammonium nitrate explosions to deepen the wetlands on their property, thereby shrinking their surface area and screwing up the habitat for wildlife. We climbed into his tractor and ranged over the rough prairie terrain, stopping at an outcrop with a panoramic view of his fields and cattle.

Perman, who wore Wrangler jeans and a South Dakota Grasslands baseball cap, pointed to a stream in the distance. Years ago, his ancestors had plowed right up to its edge, he said, fouling the water downstream for decades.

“There are some places,” he said, “that just aren’t supposed to be farmed.”

Perman moves his own cattle 100 times a year to mimic the pattern of the buffalo that once roamed the region, but he worries about

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 31

the long-term welfare of the state’s more than $6 billion livestock industry, which is steadily losing ground to crop farming. “Study the numbers,” he said. “It takes 500 cows to make a living. It’s pretty hard to run 500 cows by yourself. But to farm 500 acres? Forget it— that’s nothing. That’s a part-time job.” Indeed, many farmers abandon their fields right after harvest and don’t return until it’s time to plant in the spring. (“It’s funny,” Chris Wright says.

“You’ll be flying in the winter, and you’ll see all these folks—it’s like the Beverly Hillbillies— going to Arizona, going to Mexico.”) High land prices are also driving growers off for good; they sell out or rent to giant producers with deep enough pockets to outbid the locals for the land. So-called ground hogs, operators with tens of thousands of acres, often in different states, swoop in and buy up farms that they often never occupy, contributing further to the gutting of rural communities. “I don’t like the government telling me what to do,” Perman said, in true rancher style. “But if your

32 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAR /APR 2014

actions impact somebody else, then it becomes somebody else’s business, too. And that’s where I draw the line.” Perman had e-mailed Wright when the researcher’s findings were first published, and he’s determined that others learn the truth about what’s at stake in the region— and about who is, and who isn’t, likely to reap the benefits of the conversions.

TO A LARGE EXTENT, THE U.S. government

has been telling its farmers what to do since the 1930s, when a combination of severe drought and careless agricultural practices led to widespread soil erosion, dust storms that darkened skies as far away as New York City, and the devastation of the nation’s heartland. Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced a shelterbelt initiative on the plains that involved the planting of hundreds of millions of trees, and 1956 saw the implementation of the Soil Bank Program, under which farmers signed multiyear contracts obliging them to adopt measures aimed at improving soil and water quality. When,

in the 1980s, the policy of planting commodity crops “from fencerow to fencerow,” as had been advocated by longtime Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz, began to undermine those environmental gains, a Conservation Reserve Program, or CRP, was added to the 1985 farm bill. The initiative, which pays farmers to retire marginal croplands from production for 10 to 15 years, has been credited with helping to reduce erosion and damage caused by flooding and to increase wildlife habitat.

These days, though, in a trend that epitomizes the ongoing push-pull dynamic between the government’s desire for land stewardship and farmers’ inclination to increase their profits, CRP acreage is becoming harder and harder to find. Since 2008, some five million acres have been taken out of the program—more than all of Yellowstone, Everglades, and Yosemite national parks. In the Prairie Pothole Region alone, some 30 percent of CRP lands have expired in the past five years.

High commodity prices are an obvious

r o b i n loz n a k / g r e at fa l l s t r i b u n e / a p i m a g e s

For The Birds: Prairie Potholes, like this one in the Benton Lake National Wildlife Refuge, near Great Falls, Montana, are scattered across a region that’s known as “the nation’s duck factory.”

j o h n d av i s / a b e r d e e n a m e r i c a n n e w s / a p i m a g e s

Fencerow To Fencerow: Over the past six years, corn and soy prices have nearly doubled, which has given farmers a huge incentive to expand their farmland and optimize their yields.

catalyst for the shift. Between 2007 and 2012, corn and soy prices nearly doubled. At the same time, farmers have become more efficient at optimizing yields from the land.

Lindstrom and others pointed to advances in technology—to giant, $400,000 combines equipped with precision GPS but ill-qualified to maneuver around pesky rocks and prairie potholes—and to genetically modified crops, which, by requiring less labor, enable farmers to plant more ground.

More than anything, though, federal policies are to blame for the changing face of the Western Corn Belt. In 2007, the government expanded the Renewable Fuel Standard, requiring oil companies to blend ethanol— made by fermenting and distilling corn—into the gasoline supply. The mandate started at 9 billion gallons and has risen each year since; it is now close to 14 billion gallons. The landscape alterations documented by Wright and the Environmental Working Group closely track the timing of the program’s introduction,

although not everyone agrees the two are related. Commodity and ethanol groups like the South Dakota Corn Growers Association and the Renewable Fuels Association, for instance, dispute the connection. Geoff Cooper, senior vice president of research and analysis for the Renewable Fuels Association, criticized Wright’s study, writing that “the extremely high rate of error” related to the satellite imagery “renders the study’s conclusions highly questionable and irrelevant to the biofuels policy debate.”

The federal government’s crop-insurance scheme, which has undergone significant changes since 2000, has also played a role in the loss of prairie and wetlands. Launched

by Congress in 1938 and administered by the USDA’s Risk Management Agency, the program is semiprivate, with policies sold through 15 or so approved companies. The original intent of the insurance was to protect farmers from low yields resulting from weather-related disasters. But in 2000, “revenue insurance”

options were added, enabling farmers to insure themselves against not just low yields but also low prices. At the same time, Congress began increasing the amount of the premiums that the government would pay. Crop insurance, like traditional farm subsidies, for the past three decades had been linked to compliance on various conservation issues, but in 1996, that linkage was undone. The accumulated effect has been that ever-higher numbers of growers are signing up for policies that cover as much as 85 percent of their expected revenue. (If the crop fails or prices plunge, they get up to 85 cents on the dollar of what they projected they would earn.) In 2012, more than 80 percent of all eligible farmland was covered—some 282 million acres—without any requirement for farmers to keep their tractors off fragile lands. “It’s becoming clear that the high prices are the primary driver for this conversion,” the Environmental Working Group’s Cox says, “but crop insurance is the grease.”

Even those who are benefiting say that the

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 33

Minnesota did away with a cemetery dating to the 1890s (a potential felony under that state’s law), and over the past three years, golf courses in Illinois, Iowa, and Michigan have been destroyed to make way for corn and soy.

Richard Adee next to barrels of honey at his Bruce, South Dakota, plant

insurance program doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Darwyn Bach, a 50-year-old who grows corn and soy on 570 acres in western Minnesota, says that he’s seen how increased insurance subsidies have encouraged careless farming in his own county. People clear and plant in areas where they realize the soil and water conditions are poor, because they know they’ll get payouts anyway. Farmers breaking new land, he explains, often are allowed to base their insurance policies on the historic yields of their established plots. “I could rent a sand pile,” Bach says, “and plant it with corn, knowing full well that it won’t likely yield 100 bushels.” Because his insurance policy would be based on his established 190-bushel yield, and having purchased the standard 85 percent policy, he’d be guaranteed 85 percent of 190 bushels regardless. “I guess what people are doing is farming the insurance,” he says with a shrug.

In its July report, the Environmental Working Group described a correlation between counties where conversions are focused on fragile land and those receiving the highest crop-insurance payouts. Between 2008 and 2011, it reported, the 71 counties that lost more than 5,000 acres of wetlands and wetland buffers received an average payout of $10.1 million—more than four times the $2.3 million average across the 3,109 counties studied.

“I know it’s a big player,” Bach says, “because we base a lot of our cropping decisions on the insurance policies.” The more crops farmers

34 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAR /APR 2014

BEES REQUIRE A DIVERSE DIET, WHICH THE PRAIRIES HAVE ALWAYS PROVIDED. BUT WITH SO MANY FARMERS SPRAYING HERBICIDE, THE NATIVE PLANTS DON’T STAND A CHANCE. grow, he adds, the more premium support they receive, so the scheme favors big corporate farms over family ones. What’s more, taxpayers cover some 60 percent of the premiums. The private insurance companies, some of which are based overseas, receive as much as $1.3 billion annually from the government, which also pays their overhead and administration costs and backs them against losses. “Crop insurance is the thing now,” Bach says. “That’s really a mistake for many reasons. Without compliance, it’s a terrible deal for the taxpayer because it’s very expensive, and they’re getting no protection for land or water quality.”

So intense is the current drive to plant commodity crops that even golf courses and centuries-­old cemeteries have fallen prey to the plow. In November 2012, a farmer in western

ties in the land-use changes are the nation’s pollinators—those insects that make food production possible. Bruce, South Dakota, population 204, is a town built on the backs of bees. Aside from a tiny grocery store, a bank, and a bar, pretty much every building in the place is devoted to the rearing of the winged creatures or the processing of their honey. Richard Adee is the town’s patriarch.

A second-generation beekeeper with flushed cheeks and unruly white eyebrows, he oversees Adee Honey Farms—with 80,000 colonies, it’s one of the largest honey producers in the nation. About four years ago, Adee says, he began to notice worrying changes among his swarms. “When I first came here, 50 years ago, you could count on making 120 pounds of honey per hive,” he says. “That’s what we based our budgets on. It’s just been going down and down and down. Last year it was 55. This year it was 45.”

Bees require a diverse diet to crank out honey. With their outsize f loral diversity— big bluestem and green needle grass mingling with Canadian wild rye, milkweed, and scores of other species—the nation’s prairies have always provided it. But, Adee says, with so many farmers spraying with Roundup—the herbicide manufactured by the giant agricultural company Monsanto and designed for use with crops genetically modified to resist it—the native plants don’t have a chance.

“That’s just wiping out every plant in the field that might carry a little pollen or nectar,” he says. Although the Roundup technology was meant to cut down on the use of herbicides, the recent emergence of super-weeds resistant to glyphosate, its active ingredient, has resulted in more spraying. Bees are not the only collateral damage: National populations of monarch butterflies, which feed on milkweed, have declined precipitously—by as much as 81 percent between 1999 and 2010. (In addition to habitat loss in the U.S., the monarchs’ winter home in Mexico has shrunk.)

dirk l ammer s / ap images

AMONG THE MOST WORRYING casual-

Grasslands to Farmland

s w i t c h ya r d m e d i a

Commodity farmers in the Midwest are converting grasslands and wetlands to corn, soy, and wheat fields at the most rapid pace since tractors broke sod in the 1920s. One result: a falling population of game birds. Brown, Hand, and Stearns counties have seen the highest conversion rates since 2008.

Adee drove me over to what he calls the load-out, a clearing among some trees where white wooden beehives piled two high were lined up in rows awaiting transport to warmer climes. The company makes half of its money from its pollination services—mostly of California almonds and Washington apples—but that business, too, is suffering. “The almond growers are very concerned,” Adee said, as bees swarmed outside the vehicle. The combination of an increasingly sterile agricultural landscape, he said, and the disease known as colony collapse disorder, which may be associated with a pesticide used on corn, is posing a national threat. Almonds are California’s No. 1 export crop, a $4 billion business, but the nation’s blueberries, cantaloupes, cucumbers, onions, and much more also depend on bees.

Adee, too, had been looking forward to hunting season and to the arrival of friends from Mississippi, who fly in every October for the occasion. They could be counted among the 100,000 hunters who descend on the state

each year and spend $173 million in its lodges and outfitting shops. But just a few days earlier, Adee’s friends had canceled on account of the lack of birds. “Nobody’s coming,” he said.

“It’s just sad.”

A FEW PROVISIONS IN THE new farm bill—the

massive legislation that determines agricultural policy in this country and was signed into law in February after having been delayed repeatedly since mid-2012—will be key to determining the fate of the Western Corn Belt. The farm, ethanol, and insurance groups, for instance, are pleased the bill expands the crop-insurance program, while eliminating traditional directpayment subsidies. (Together, those interest groups spent some $52 million on lobbying in the 2012 election cycle, according to the Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit Sunlight Foundation.) The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the program will cost taxpayers $90 billion over the next ten years, nearly twice as much as the subsidy programs it replaces. The

insurance program was augmented despite the efforts of such unlikely bedfellows as the Environmental Working Group and libertarian-­ leaning outfits like Taxpayers for Common Sense and the Cato Institute, which has called the program a “long-standing rip off of American taxpayers.” (Just a month after passage of the bill, the Government Accountability Office released a report recommending that, given the increase in weather disasters expected to result from continued climate change, the USDA consider the financial impacts of its role as a reinsurer for the private crop-insurance companies.) The final bill also leaves out a provision, present in both the House and Senate versions, that capped payments to individual farms at $50,000, increasing the limit instead to $125,000. Upon the House passage of the bill, Taxpayers for Common Sense issued a statement lamenting that the legislation “increases spending on handouts for profitable agribusinesses during a time when the agriculture sector is experiencing record profits.”

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 35

Environmental groups welcomed the news that the bill would re-link conservation-­ compliance measures to federal crop insurance and that it includes a “sodsaver” provision, which limits insurance subsidies for the first few years in areas converted from native prairie to cropland. (The measure is limited to six states, however—Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota—leaving the the southern prairies unprotected.) But the bill also cuts $6 billion from conservation funding—the first decrease since such programs became a part of the farm bill in 1985—and lowers the cap on

36 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAR /APR 2014

CRP acreage from 32 million to 24 million by

2018. Lynn Tjeerdsma, senior policy adviser for John Thune, the Republican senator from South Dakota, suggested that the combination of re-linkage and the sodsaver provision “will really make farmers think twice before they break up their grass in the future.” But others are concerned that the net effect of the legislation will be less conservation. “We have fashioned a farm policy that incentivizes putting more under the plow,” says Adam Warthesen, federal policy organizer for the Land Stewardship Project, based in Minneapolis, “and this farm bill doubles down on that.”

Also potentially significant in the coming months would be an adjustment to the Renewable Fuel Standard. In November, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed cutting the required amount of ethanol in the nation’s fuel supply. Not surprisingly, the agricultural and commodities lobbies cried foul. That same month, the Associated Press published an article citing Chris Wright’s research and placing the blame for the destruction of the nation’s prairies on the ethanol mandate. “There is probably more truth in this week’s National Enquirer,” the Renewable Fuels Association’s Geoff Cooper told a group of reporters, “than

d e b o r a h k at e s / t h e n e w yo r k t i m e s / r e d u x

In Plain Sight: Between 2006 and 2011, farmers plowed up more than 1.3 million acres of grasslands to plant commodity crops like corn and soybeans.

George Naylor on his Churdan, Iowa, farm

erin jordan / republished with permission o f s o u r c e m e d i a g r o u p, c e d a r r a p i d s , i o wa

SO INTENSE IS THE DRIVE TO PLANT COMMODITY CROPS THAT GOLF COURSES HAVE FALLEN PREY. A FARMER IN WESTERN MINNESOTA DID AWAY WITH A CEMETERY DATING TO THE 1890S.

in AP’s story.” The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to announce its 2014 blending-­level requirements in the spring.

JUST BEFORE LEAVING THE Midwest, I drove

about 90 minutes northwest of Des Moines to visit with a corn and soy farmer named George Naylor. Bearded and dressed in denim overalls, he served me homemade pumpkin pie in the kitchen of his ramshackle farmhouse. A cantankerous 65-year-old, the native Iowan earned a degree from the University of California, Berkeley, before returning in 1976 to tend the farm his grandfather established in 1919.

Naylor still looks the part of the hippie, and he rails endlessly against the establishment, despite the fact that, as he puts it, he grows “protein, carbohydrates, and oil”—some of it for the likes of the grain giant Cargill.

We climbed into Naylor’s rickety pickup truck and drove around to survey his fields and grain silos. “Now we’ll get to the good part,” he said, steering the truck off the tarmac and onto a bumpy path that ran between tall rows of corn. About a half-mile in, we arrived at a clearing, what Naylor referred to as his “restored wetland.” He cut the motor and motioned for me to get out, explaining how he’d quit planting corn out there and instead replanted the area with native grasses and wildflowers. It looked like the terrain up in the Prairie Pothole Region. He directed my attention to the cattails

and swamp smartweed and searched for some purple prairie clover, which he was determined to have me smell. Had I noticed the way our shoes were sinking down into the healthy soil? he wanted to know. As we climbed back into the truck, Naylor told me that he and his friends sometimes come out here in the evening with a couple of beers to watch the sun go down.

He talked about a book a friend used to have, featuring aerial photos of the region taken several decades earlier. It had been dotted with seasonal lakes, just like up in the Dakotas.

He pointed out the windshield to the spot, indiscernible now amid the sea of corn, where his father would feed the ducks on his early-­ morning walk to school. Naylor recalled how he used to see groundhogs and jackrabbits around their home. Not anymore. “I haven’t heard a red-headed woodpecker in 20 years,” he said.

Over the past several months, corn and soybean prices have fallen from the record highs of 2012. But they are still steep enough to make a lot of people a lot of money. “The traditional way to get rich is to transfer your costs to someone else,” says one of the farmers I visited—whether to your neighbor, the taxpayer, or the generations that follow your own. While George Naylor’s little wetland is a sweet and peaceful place, to enjoy it requires a certain suspension of disbelief. One tiny oasis plunked down in a vast universe of corn can’t hope to achieve the diversity of our nation’s native prairie. Certainly not enough to draw back a redheaded woodpecker. 

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 37

Who

ATE THE AMERICAN ECONOMY? STEVEN PEARLSTEIN places the blame

for the rise in inequality on the shift from managerial to shareholder capitalism.

HAROLD MEYERSON presents eight proposals to jump-start the incomes of workers.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JASON SCHNEIDER

38 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAR /APR 2014

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 39

When Shareholder Capitalism Came to Town B Y ST EV EN PEAR LSTEIN

I

t was only 20 years ago that the world was in the thrall of American-style capitalism. Not only had it vanquished communism, but it was widening its lead over Japan Inc. and European-style socialism.

America’s companies were widely viewed as the most innovative and productive, its capital markets the most efficient, its labor markets the most flexible and meritocratic, its product markets the most open and competitive, its tax and regulatory regimes the most accommodating to economic growth.

Today, that sense of confidence and economic hegemony seems a distant memory. We have watched the bursting of two financial bubbles, struggled through two long recessions, and suffered a lost decade in terms of incomes of average American households.

We continue to rack up large trade deficits even as many of the country’s biggest corporations shift more of their activity and investment overseas. Economic growth has slowed, and the top 10 percent of households have captured whatever productivity gains there have been.

Economic mobility has declined to the point that, by international comparison, it is only middling. A series of accounting and financial scandals, coupled with ever-­escalating pay for chief executives and hedge-fund managers, has generated widespread cynicism about business. Other countries are beginning to turn to China, Germany, Sweden, and even Israel as models for their economies.

No wonder, then, that large numbers of Americans have begun to question the superiority of our brand of free-market capitalism.

This disillusionment is reflected in the rise of the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movements and the increasing polarization of our national politics. It is also reflected on

40 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAR /APR 2014

the shelves of bookstores and on the screens of movie theaters.

Embedded in these critiques is not simply a collective disappointment in the inability of American capitalism to deliver on its economic promise of wealth and employment opportunity. Running through them is also a nagging question about the larger purpose of the market economy and how it serves society.

In the current, cramped model of American capitalism, with its focus on maximizing output growth and shareholder value, there is ample recognition of the importance of financial capital, human capital, and physical capital but no consideration of social capital. Social capital is the trust we have in one another, and the sense of mutual responsibility for one another, that gives us the comfort to take risks, make longterm investments, and accept the inevitable dislocations caused by the economic gales of creative destruction. Social capital provides the necessary grease for the increasingly complex machinery of capitalism and for the increasingly contentious machinery of democracy. Without it, democratic capitalism cannot survive.

It is our social capital that is now badly depleted. This erosion manifests in the weakened norms of behavior that once restrained the most selfish impulses of economic actors and provided an ethical basis for modern capitalism. A capitalism in which Wall Street bankers and traders think peddling dangerous loans or worthless securities to unsuspecting customers is just “part of the game,” a capitalism in which top executives believe it is economically necessary that they earn 350 times what their front-line workers do, a capitalism that thinks of employees as expendable inputs, a capitalism in which corporations perceive it as both their fiduciary duty to evade taxes

and their constitutional right to use unlimited amounts of corporate funds to purchase control of the political system—that is a capitalism whose trust deficit is every bit as corrosive as budget and trade deficits.

As economist Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago concludes in his recent book, A Capitalism for the People, American capitalism has become a victim of its own success. In the years after the demise of communism, “the intellectual hegemony of capitalism, however, led to complacency and extremism: complacency through the degeneration of the system, extremism in the application of its ideological premises,” he writes. “‘Greed is good’ became the norm rather than the frowned-upon exception. Capitalism lost its moral higher ground.”

Pope Francis recently gave voice to this nagging sense that our free-market system had lost its moral bearings. “Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories, which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world,” wrote the new pope in an 84-page apostolic exhortation. “This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.”

Our challenge now is to restore both the economic and moral legitimacy of American capitalism. And there is no better place to start than with a reconsideration of the purpose of the corporation.

“MAXIMIZING SHAREHOLDER VALUE”

In the recent history of bad ideas, few have had a more pernicious effect than the one that corporations should be managed to maximize “shareholder value.”

Indeed, much of what we perceive to be wrong with the American economy these days— the slowing growth and rising inequality, the recurring scandals and wild swings from boom

to bust, the inadequate investment in research and development and worker training—has its roots in this misguided ideology.

It is an ideology, moreover, that has no basis in history, in law, or in logic. What began in the 1970s and 1980s as a useful corrective to selfsatisfied managerial mediocrity has become a corrupting self-interested dogma peddled by finance professors, Wall Street money managers, and overcompensated corporate executives.

Let’s start with the history. The earliest corporations, in fact, were generally chartered not for private but for public purposes, such as building canals or transit systems. Well into the 1960s, corporations were broadly viewed as owing something in return to the community that provided them with special legal protections and the economic ecosystem in which they could grow and thrive.

Legally, no statutes require that companies be run to maximize profits or share prices. In most states, corporations can be formed for any lawful purpose. Lynn Stout, a Cornell law professor, has been looking for years for a corporate charter that even mentions maximizing profits or share price. So far, she hasn’t found one. Companies that put shareholders at the top of their hierarchy do so by choice, Stout writes, not by law.

Nor does the law require, as many believe, that executives and directors owe a special fiduciary duty to the shareholders who own the corporation. The director’s fiduciary duty, in fact, is owed simply to the corporation, which is owned by no one, just as you and I are owned by no one—we are all “persons” in the eyes of the law. Corporations own themselves.

What shareholders possess is a contractual claim to the “residual value” of the corporation once all its other obligations have been satisfied—and even then the directors are given wide latitude to make whatever use of that residual value they choose, just as long as they’re not stealing it for themselves.

It is true, of course, that only shareholders

Well into the 1960s, corporations were widely viewed as owing something to the community that provided them with the economic ecosystem in which they could grow and thrive. have the power to elect the corporate directors. But given that directors are almost always nominated by the management and current board and run unopposed, it requires the peculiar imagination of corporate counsel to leap from the shareholders’ power to “elect” directors to a sweeping mandate that directors and

the executives must put the interests of shareholders above all others.

Given this lack of legal or historical support, it is curious how “maximizing shareholder value” has evolved into such a widely accepted norm of corporate behavior.

Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago free-market economist, is often credited with first articulating the idea in a 1970 New York Times Magazine essay in which he argued that “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.”

Anything else, he argues, is “unadulterated socialism.”

A decade later, Friedman’s was still a minority view among corporate leaders. In 1981, as Ralph Gomory and Richard Sylla recount in a recent article in Daedalus, the Business Roundtable, representing the nation’s largest firms, issued a statement recognizing a broader purpose of the corporation: “Corporations have a responsibility, first of all, to make available to the public quality goods and services at fair prices, thereby earning a profit that attracts investment to continue and enhance the enterprise, provide jobs and build the economy.” The statement went on to talk about a “symbiotic relationship” between business and society not unlike that voiced nearly 30 years earlier by General Motors chief executive Charlie Wilson, when he reportedly told a Senate committee that “what is good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice versa.”

By 1997, however, the Business Roundtable was striking a tone that sounded a whole lot more like Professor Friedman than CEO Wilson.

“The principal objective of a business enterprise is to generate economic returns to its owners,” it declared in its statement on corporate responsibility. “If the CEO and the directors are not focused on shareholder value, it may be less likely the corporation will realize that value.”

The most likely explanation for this transformation involves three broad structural

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changes that were going on in the U.S. economy—globalization, deregulation, and rapid technological change. Over a number of decades, these three forces have conspired to rob what were once the dominant American corporations of the competitive advantages they had during the “golden era” of the 1950s and 1960s in both U.S. and global markets.

Those advantages—and the operating profits they generated—were so great that they could spread the benefits around to all corporate stakeholders. The postwar prosperity was so widely shared that it rarely occurred to stockholders, consumers, or communities to wonder if they were being shortchanged.

It was only when competition from foreign suppliers or recently deregulated upstarts began to squeeze out those profits—often with the help of new technologies—that these oncemighty corporations were forced to make difficult choices. In the early going, their executives found that it was easier to disappoint shareholders than customers, workers, or even their communities. The result, during the 1970s, was a lost decade for investors.

Beginning in the mid-1980s, however, a number of companies with lagging stock prices found themselves targets for hostile takeovers launched by rival companies or corporate raiders employing newfangled “junk bonds” to finance unsolicited bids. Disappointed shareholders were only too willing to sell out to the raiders. So it developed that the mere threat of a hostile takeover was sufficient to force executives and directors across the corporate landscape to embrace a focus on profits and share prices. Almost overnight they tossed aside their more complacent and paternalistic management style, and with it a host of inhibitions against laying off workers, cutting wages and benefits, closing plants, spinning off divisions, taking on debt, moving production overseas. Some even joined in waging hostile takeovers themselves.

Spurred on by this new “market for corporate

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control,” companies traded in their old managerial capitalism for a new shareholder capitalism, which continues to dominate the business sector to this day. Those high-yield bonds, once labeled as “junk” and peddled by upstart and ethically challenged investment banks, are now a large and profitable part of the business of every Wall Street firm. The unsavory raiders have now morphed into respected private-equity and hedge-fund managers, some of whom proudly call themselves “activist investors.” And corporate executives who once arrogantly ignored the demands of Wall Street now profess they have no choice but to dance to its tune.

THE INSTITUTIONS SUPPORTING SHAREHOLDER VALUE

An elaborate institutional infrastructure has developed to reinforce shareholder capitalism and its generally accepted corporate mandate to maximize short-term profits and share price.

This infrastructure includes free-­m arketoriented think tanks and university faculties that continue to spin out elaborate theories about the efficiency of financial markets.

An earlier generation of economists had looked at the stock-market boom and bust that led to the Great Depression and concluded that share prices often reflected irrational herd behavior on the part of investors. But in the 1960s, a different theory began to take hold at intellectual strongholds such as the University of Chicago that quickly spread to other economics departments and business schools. The essence of the “efficient market” hypothesis, first articulated by Eugene Fama (a 2013 Nobel laureate) is that the current stock price reflects all the public and private information known about a company and therefore is a reliable gauge of the company’s true economic value. For a generation of finance professors, it was only a short logical leap from this hypothesis to a broader conclusion that the share price is therefore the best metric around which to organize

a company’s strategy and measure its success.

With the rise of behavioral economics, and the onset of two stock-market bubbles, the efficient-­market hypothesis has more recently come under serious criticism. Another of last year’s Nobel winners, Robert Shiller, demonstrated the various ways in which financial markets are predictably irrational. Curiously, however, the efficient-market hypothesis is still widely accepted by business schools—and, in particular, their finance departments— which continue to preach the shareholderfirst ideology.

Surveys by the Aspen Institute’s Center for Business Education, for example, find that most MBA students believe that maximizing value for shareholders is the most important responsibility of a company and that this conviction strengthens as they proceed toward their degree, in many schools taking courses that teach techniques for manipulating shortterm earnings and share prices. The assumption is so entrenched that even business-school deans who have publicly rejected the ideology acknowledge privately that they’ve given up trying to convince their faculties to take a more balanced approach.

Equally important in sustaining the shareholder focus are corporate lawyers, in-house as well as outside counsels, who now reflexively advise companies against actions that would predictably lower a company’s stock price.

For many years, much of the jurisprudence coming out of the Delaware courts—where most big corporations have their legal home— was based around the “business judgment” rule, which held that corporate directors have wide discretion in determining a firm’s goals and strategies, even if their decisions reduce profits or share prices. But in 1986, the Delaware Court of Chancery ruled that directors of the cosmetics company Revlon had to put the interests of shareholders first and accept the highest price offered for the company. As Lynn Stout has written, and the Delaware courts

subsequently confirmed, the decision was a narrowly drawn exception to the business-­ judgment rule that only applies once a company has decided to put itself up for sale. But it has been widely—and mistakenly—used ever since as a legal rationale for the primacy of shareholder interests and the legitimacy of share-price maximization.

Reinforcing this mistaken belief are the shareholder lawsuits now routinely filed against public companies by class-action lawyers any time the stock price takes a sudden dive. Most of these are frivolous and, particularly since passage of reform legislation in 1995, many are dismissed. But even those that are dismissed generate cost and hassle, while the few that go to trial risk exposing the company to significant embarrassment, damages, and legal fees.

The bigger damage from these lawsuits comes from the subtle way they affect corporate behavior. Corporate lawyers, like many of their clients, crave certainty when it comes to legal matters. So they’ve developed what might be described as a “safe harbor” mentality—an undue reliance on well-established bright lines in advising clients to shy away from actions that might cause the stock price to fall and open the company up to a shareholder lawsuit.

Such actions include making costly long-term investments, or admitting mistakes, or failing to follow the same ruthless strategies as their competitors. One effect of this safe-harbor mentality is to reinforce the focus on shortterm share price.

The most extensive infrastructure supporting the shareholder-value ideology is to be found on Wall Street, which remains thoroughly fixated on quarterly earnings and shortterm trading. Companies that refuse to give quarterly-earnings guidance are systematically shunned by some money managers, while those that miss their earnings targets by even small amounts see their stock prices hammered.

Recent investigations into insider trading

In a 1970 essay, Milton Friedman argued that “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits....”

have revealed the elaborate strategies and tactics used by some hedge funds to get advance information about a quarterly earnings report in order to turn enormous profits by trading on it. And corporate executives continue to spend enormous amounts of time and attention on industry analysts whose forecasts and ratings have tremendous impact on share prices.

In a now-infamous press interview in the summer of 2007, former Citigroup chairman

Charles Prince provided a window into the hold that Wall Street has over corporate behavior. At the time, Citi’s share price had lagged behind that of the other big banks, and there was speculation in the financial press that Prince would be fired if he didn’t quickly find a way to catch up. In the interview with the Financial Times, Prince seemed to confirm that speculation. When asked why he was continuing to make loans for high-priced corporate takeovers despite evidence that the takeover boom was losing steam, he basically said he had no choice—as long as other banks were making big profits from such loans, Wall Street would force him, or anyone else in his job, to make them as well. “As long as the music is playing,” Prince explained, “you’ve got to get up and dance.”

It isn’t simply the stick of losing their jobs, however, that causes corporate executives to focus on maximizing shareholder value. There are also plenty of carrots to be found in those generous—some would say gluttonous—pay packages, the value of which is closely tied to the short-term performance of company stock.

The idea of loading up executives with stock options also dates to the transition to shareholder capitalism. The academic critique of managerial capitalism was that the lagging performance of big corporations was a manifestation of what economists call a “principal-agent” problem. In this case, the “principals” were the shareholders and their directors, and the misbehaving “agents” were the executives who were spending too much of their time, and the shareholder’s money, worrying about employees, customers, and the community at large.

In what came to be one of the most widely cited academic papers of all time, businessschool professors Michael Jensen of Harvard and William Meckling of the University of Rochester wrote in 1976 that the best way to align the interests of managers to those of the shareholders was to tie a substantial amount of the managers’ compensation to the share

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price. In a subsequent paper in 1989 written with Kevin Murphy, Jensen went even further, arguing that the reason corporate executives acted more like “bureaucrats than valuemaximizing entrepreneurs” was because they didn’t get to keep enough of the extra value they created.

With that academic foundation, and the enthusiastic support of executive-­ compensation specialists, stock-based compensation took off. Given the tens and, in more than a few cases, the hundreds of millions of dollars lavished on individual executives, the focus on boosting share price is hardly surprising. The ultimate irony, of course, is that the result of this lavish campaign to more closely align incentives and interests is that the “agents” have done considerably better than the “principals.”

Roger Martin, the former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, calculates that from 1933 until 1976—roughly speaking, the era of “managerial capitalism” in which managers sought to balance the interest of shareholders with those of employees, customers, and society at large—the total real compound annual return on the stocks of the S&P 500 was 7.5 percent.

From 1976 until 2011—roughly the period of “shareholder capitalism”—the comparable return has been 6.5 percent. Meanwhile, according to Martin’s calculation, the ratio of chief-executive compensation to corporate profits increased eightfold between 1980 and 2000, almost all of it coming in the form of stock-based compensation.

HOW SHAREHOLDER PRIMACY HAS RESHAPED CORPORATE BEHAVIOR

All of this reinforcing infrastructure—the academic underpinning, the business-school indoctrination, the threat of shareholder lawsuits, the Wall Street quarterly earnings machine, the executive compensation—has now succeeded in hardwiring the shareholder-

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Beginning in the mid1980s, executives and directors tossed aside their old inhibitions against laying off workers, cutting wages, closing plants, taking on debt, moving production overseas. value ideology into the economy and business culture. It has also set in motion a dynamic in which corporate and investor time horizons have become shorter and shorter. The average holding periods for corporate stocks, which for decades was six years, is now down to less than six months. The average tenure of a Fortune 500 chief executive is now down to less than

six years. Given those realities, it should be no surprise that the willingness of corporate executives to sacrifice short-term profits to make long-term investments is rapidly disappearing.

A recent study by McKinsey & Company, the blue-chip consulting firm, and Canada’s public pension board found alarming levels of short-termism in the corporate executive suite.

According to the study, nearly 80 percent of top executives and directors reported feeling the most pressure to demonstrate a strong financial performance over a period of two years or less, with only 7 percent feeling considerable pressure to deliver strong performance over a period of five years or more. It also found that 55 percent of chief financial officers would forgo an attractive investment project today if it would cause the company to even marginally miss its quarterly-earnings target.

The shift on Wall Street from long-term investing to short-term trading presents a dilemma for those directing a company solely for shareholders: Which group of shareholders is it whose interests the corporation is supposed to optimize? Should it be the hedge funds that are buying and selling millions of shares in a matter of seconds to earn hedge fund–like returns? Or the “activist investors” who have just bought a third of the shares? Or should it be the retired teacher in Dubuque who has held the stock for decades as part of her retirement savings and wants a decent return with minimal downside risk?

One way to deal with this quandary would be for corporations to give shareholders a bigger voice in corporate decision-making. But it turns out that even as they proclaim their dedication to shareholder value, executives and directors have been doing everything possible to minimize shareholder involvement and influence in corporate governance. This curious hypocrisy is most recently revealed in the all-out effort by the business lobby to limit shareholder “say on pay” or the right to nominate a competing slate of directors.

For too many corporations, “maximizing shareholder value” has also provided justification for bamboozling customers, squeezing employees, avoiding taxes, and leaving communities in the lurch. For any one profit-­ maximizing company, such ruthless behavior may be perfectly rational. But when competition forces all companies to behave in this fashion, neither they, nor we, wind up better off.

Take the simple example of outsourcing production to lower-cost countries overseas.

Certainly it makes sense for any one company to aggressively pursue such a strategy. But if every company does it, these companies may eventually find that so many American consumers have suffered job loss and wage cuts that they no longer can buy the goods they are producing, even at the cheaper prices. The companies may also find that government no longer has sufficient revenue to educate its remaining American workers or dredge the ports through which its imported goods are delivered to market.

Economists have a name for such unintended spillover effects—negative externalities— and normally the most effective response is some form of government action, such as regulation, taxes, or income transfers. But one of the hallmarks of the current political environment is that every tax, every regulation, and every new safety-net program is bitterly opposed by the corporate lobby as an assault on profits and job creation. Not only must the corporation commit to putting shareholders first—as they see it, the society must as well. And with the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, corporations are now free to spend unlimited sums of money on political campaigns to elect politicians sympathetic to this view.

Perhaps the most ridiculous aspect of shareholder-­über-alles is how at odds it is with every modern theory about managing people.

David Langstaff, then–chief executive of TASC, a Virginia-­based government-contracting firm, put it this way in a recent speech at a conference

hosted by the Aspen Institute and the business school at Northwestern University: “If you are the sole proprietor of a business, do you think that you can motivate your employees for maximum performance by encouraging them simply to make more money for you?” Langstaff asked rhetorically. “That is effectively what an enterprise is saying when it states that its purpose is to maximize profit for its investors.”

Indeed, a number of economists have been trying to figure out the cause of the recent slowdown in both the pace of innovation and the growth in worker productivity. There are lots of possible culprits, but surely one candidate is that American workers have come to understand that whatever financial benefit may result from their ingenuity or increased efficiency is almost certain to be captured by shareholders and top executives.

The new focus on shareholders also hasn’t been a big winner with the public. Gallup polls show that people’s trust in and respect for big corporations have been on a long, slow decline in recent decades—at the moment, only Congress and health-maintenance organizations rank lower. When was the last time you saw a corporate chief executive lionized on the cover of a newsweekly? Odds are it was probably the late Steve Jobs of Apple, who wound up creating more wealth for more shareholders than anyone on the planet by putting shareholders near the bottom of his priority list.

RISING DOUBTS ABOUT SHAREHOLDER PRIMACY

The usual defense you hear of “maximizing shareholder value” from corporate chief executives is that at many firms—not theirs!—it has been poorly understood and badly executed.

These executives make clear they don’t confuse today’s stock price or this quarter’s earnings with shareholder value, which they understand to be profitability and stock appreciation over the long term. They are also quick to acknowledge that no enterprise can maximize

long-term value for its shareholders without attracting great employees, providing great products and services to customers, and helping to support efficient governments and healthy communities.

Even Michael Jensen has felt the need to reformulate his thinking. In a 2001 paper, he wrote, “A firm cannot maximize value if it ignores the interest of its stakeholders.”

He offered a proposal he called “enlightened stakeholder theory,” one that “accepts maximization of the long run value of the firm as the criterion for making the requisite tradeoffs among its stakeholders.”

But if optimizing shareholder value implicitly requires firms to take good care of customers, employees, and communities, then by the same logic you could argue that optimizing customer satisfaction would require firms to take good care of employees, communities, and shareholders. More broadly, optimizing any function inevitably requires the same tradeoffs or messy balancing of interests that executives of an earlier era claimed to have done.

The late, great management guru Peter Drucker long argued that if one stakeholder group should be first among equals, surely it should be the customer. “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer,” he famously wrote.

Roger Martin picked up on Drucker’s theme in “Fixing the Game,” his book-length critique of shareholder value. Martin cites the experience of companies such as Apple, Johnson & Johnson, and Proctor & Gamble, companies that put customers first, and whose long-term shareholders have consistently done better than those of companies that claim to put shareholders first. The reason, Martin says, is that customer focus minimizes undue risk taking, maximizes reinvestment, and creates, over the long run, a larger pie.

Having spoken with more than a few top executives over the years, I can tell you that many would be thrilled if they could focus

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on customers rather than shareholders. In private, they chafe under the quarterly earnings regime forced on them by asset managers and the financial press. They fear and loathe “activist” investors. They are disheartened by their low public esteem. Few, however, have dared to challenge the shareholder-first ideology in public.

But recently, some cracks have appeared.

In 2006, Ian Davis, then–managing director of McKinsey, gave a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in which he declared, “Maximization of shareholder value is in danger of becoming irrelevant.”

Davis’s point was that global corporations have to operate not just in the United States but in the rest of the world where people either don’t understand the concept of putting shareholders first or explicitly reject it—and companies that trumpet it will almost surely draw the attention of hostile regulators and politicians.

“Big businesses have to be forthright in saying what their role is in society, and they will never do it by saying, ‘We maximize shareholder value.’”

A few years later, Jack Welch, the former chief executive of General Electric, made headlines when he told the Financial Times, “On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world.” What he meant, he scrambled to explain a few days later, is that shareholder value is an outcome, not a strategy. But coming from the corporate executive (“Neutron Jack”) who had embodied ruthlessness in the pursuit of competitive dominance, his comment was viewed as a recognition that the single-minded pursuit of shareholder value had gone too far. “That’s not a strategy that helps you know what to do when you come to work every day,” Welch told Bloomberg Businessweek. “It doesn’t energize or motivate anyone. So basically my point is, increasing the value of your company in both the short and long term is an outcome of the implementation of successful strategies.”

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Tom Rollins, the founder of the Teaching Company, offers as an alternative what he calls the “CEO” strategy, standing for customers, employees, and owners. Rollins starts by noting that at the foundation of all microeconomics are voluntary trades or exchanges that create “surplus” for both buyer and seller that in most cases exceed their minimum expectations. The same logic, he argues, ought to apply to the transactions between a company and its employees, customers, and owners/ shareholders.

The problem with a shareholder-first strategy, Rollins argues, is that it ignores this basic tenet of economics. It views any surplus earned by employees and customers as both unnecessary and costly. After all, if the market would allow the firm to hire employees for 10 percent less, or charge customers 10 percent more, then by not driving the hardest possible bargain with employees and customers, shareholder profit is not maximized.

But behavioral research into the importance of “reciprocity” in social relationships strongly suggests that if employees and customers believe they are not getting any surplus from a transaction, they are unlikely to want to continue to engage in additional transactions with the firm. Other studies show that having highly satisfied customers and highly engaged employees leads directly to higher profits. As Rollins sees it, if firms provide above-market returns—surplus—to customers and employees, then customers and employees are likely to reciprocate and provide surplus value to firms and their owners.

Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter and Kennedy School senior fellow Mark Kramer have also rejected the false choice between a company’s social and value-­ maximizing responsibilities that is implicit in the shareholder-value model. “The solution lies in the principle of shared value, which involves creating economic value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing its needs and

challenges,” they wrote in the Harvard Business Review in 2011. In the past, economists have theorized that for profit-maximizing companies to provide societal benefits, they had to sacrifice economic success by adding to their costs or forgoing revenue. What they overlooked, Porter and Kramer wrote, was that by ignoring social goals—safe workplaces, clean environments, effective school systems, adequate infrastructure—companies wound up adding to their overall costs while failing to exploit profitable business opportunities. “Businesses must reconnect company success with social progress,” Porter and Kramer wrote. “Shared value is not social responsibility, philanthropy or even sustainability, but a new way to achieve economic success. It is not on the margin of what companies do, but at the center.”

SMALL STEPS TOWARD A MORE BALANCED CAPITALISM

If it were simply the law that was responsible for the undue focus on shareholder value, it would be relatively easy to alter it. Changing a behavioral norm, however—particularly one so accepted and reinforced by so much supporting infrastructure—is a tougher challenge. The process will, of necessity, be gradual, requiring carrots as well as sticks. The goal should not be to impose a different focus for corporate decision-making as inflexible as maximizing shareholder value has become but rather to make it acceptable for executives and directors to experiment with and adopt a variety of goals and purposes.

Companies would surely be responsive if investors and money managers would make clear that they have a longer time horizon or are looking for more than purely bottom-line results. There has long been a small universe of “socially responsible” investing made up of mutual funds, public and union pension funds, and research organizations that monitor corporate behavior and publish scorecards based on an assessment of how companies

treat customers, workers, the environment, and their communities. While some socially responsible funds and asset managers and investors have consistently achieved returns comparable or even slightly superior to those of competitors focused strictly on financial returns, there is no evidence of any systematic advantage. Nor has there been a large hedge fund or private-equity fund that made it to the top with a socially responsible investment strategy. You can do well by doing good, but it’s no sure thing that you’ll do better.

Nineteen states—the latest is Delaware, where a million businesses are legally registered—have recently established a new kind of corporate charter, the “benefit corporation,” that explicitly commits companies to be managed for the benefit of all stakeholders. About 550 companies, including Patagonia and Seventh Generation, now have B charters, while 960 have been certified as meeting the standards set out by the nonprofit B Lab. Although almost all of today’s B corps are privately held, supporters of the concept hope that a number of sizable firms will become B corps and that their stocks will then be traded on a separate exchange.

One big challenge facing B corps and the socially responsible investment community is that the criteria they use to assess corporate behavior exhibit an unmistakable liberal bias that makes it easy for many investors, money managers, and executives to dismiss them as ideological and naïve. Even a company run for the benefit of multiple stakeholders will at various points be forced to make tough choices, such as reducing payroll, trimming costs, closing facilities, switching suppliers, or doing business in places where corruption is rampant or environmental regulations are weak. As chief executives are quick to remind, companies that ignore short-term profitability run the risk of never making it to the long term.

Among the growing chorus of critics of “shareholder value,” a consensus is emerging around a number of relatively modest changes

In the late 1990s, the Business Roundtable changed its statement of corporations’ mission from “making goods available at fair prices” to “generat[ing] economic returns to its owners.”

in tax and corporate governance laws that, at a minimum, could help lengthen time horizons of corporate decision-making. A group of business leaders assembled by the Aspen Institute to address the problem of “short-termism” recommended a recalibration of the capital-gains tax to provide investors with lower tax rates for

longer-term investments. A small transaction tax, such as the one proposed by the European Union, could also be used to dampen the volume and importance of short-term trading.

The financial-services industry and some academics have argued that such measures, by reducing market liquidity, will inevitably increase the cost of capital and result in markets that are more volatile, not less. A lower tax rate for long-term investing has also been shown to have a “lock-in” effect that discourages investors from moving capital to companies offering the prospect of the highest return. But such conclusions are implicitly based on the questionable assumption that markets without such tax incentives are otherwise rational and operate with perfect efficiency. They also beg fundamental questions about the role played by financial markets in the broader economy.

Once you assume, as they do, that the sole purpose of financial markets is to channel capital into investments that earn the highest financial return to private investors, then maximizing shareholder value becomes the only logical corporate strategy.

There is also a lively debate on the question of whether companies should offer earnings guidance to investors and analysts—estimates of what earnings per share will be for the coming quarter. The argument against such guidance is that it reinforces the undue focus of both executives and investors on shortterm earnings results, discouraging longterm investment and incentivizing earnings manipulation. The counterargument is that even in the absence of company guidance, investors and executives inevitably play the same game by fixating on the “consensus” earnings estimates of Wall Street analysts.

Given that reality, they argue, isn’t it better that those analyst estimates are informed as much as possible by information provided by the companies themselves?

In weighing these conflicting arguments, the Aspen group concluded that investors and

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analysts would be better served if companies provided information on a wider range of metrics with which to assess and predict business performance over a longer time horizon than the next quarter. While it might take Wall Street and its analysts some time to adjust to this richer and more nuanced form of communication, it would give the markets a better understanding of what drives each business while taking some of the focus off the quarterly numbers game.

In addressing the question of which shareholders should have the most say over company strategies and objectives, there have been suggestions for giving long-term investors greater power in selecting directors, approving mergers and asset sales, and setting executive compensation. The idea has been championed by McKinsey & Company managing director Dominic Barton and John Bogle, the former chief executive of the Vanguard Group, and is under active consideration by European securities regulators. Such enhanced voting rights, however, would have to be carefully structured so that they encourage a sense of stewardship on the part of long-term investors without giving company insiders or a few large shareholders the opportunity to run roughshod over other shareholders.

The short-term focus of corporate executives and directors is heavily reinforced by the demands of asset managers at mutual funds, pension funds, hedge funds, and endowments, who are evaluated and compensated on the basis of the returns they generated over the last year and the last quarter. Even while most big companies have now taken steps to stretch out over several years the incentive pay plans of top corporate executives to encourage those executives to take a longer-term perspective, the outsize quarterly and annual bonuses on Wall Street keep the economy’s time horizons fixated on the short term. At a minimum, federal regulators could require asset managers to disclose how their compensation is determined.

They might also require funds to justify, on the

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This year, a McKinsey survey found that a majority of corporate chief investment officers would forgo an attractive investment project if it meant missing their quarterly earnings target. basis of actual performance, the use of shortterm metrics when managing long-term money such as pensions and college endowments.

The Securities and Exchange Commission also could nudge companies to put greater emphasis on long-term strategy and performance in their communications with shareholders. For starters, companies could be

required to state explicitly in their annual reports whether their priority is to maximize shareholder value or to balance shareholder interests with other interests in some fashion— certainly shareholders deserve to know that in advance. The commission might require companies to annually disclose the size of their workforce in each country and information on the pay and working conditions of the company’s employees and those of its major contractors. Disclosure of any major shifts in where work is done could also be required, along with the rationale. There could be a requirement for companies to perform and disclose regular environmental audits and to acknowledge other potential threats to their reputation and brand equity. In proxy statements, public companies could be required to explain the ways in which executive compensation is aligned with long-term strategy and performance.

If I had to guess, however, my hunch would be that employees, not outside investors and regulators, will finally free the corporate sector from the straitjacket of shareholder value.

Today, young people—particularly those with high-demand skills—are drawn to work that doesn’t simply pay well but also has meaning and social value. You can already see that reflected in what students are choosing to study and where highly sought graduates are choosing to work. As the economy improves and the baby-boom generation retires, companies that have reputations as ruthless maximizers of short-term profits will find themselves on the losing end of the global competition for talent.

In an era of plentiful capital, it will be skills, knowledge, and creativity that will be in short supply, with those who have them calling the corporate tune. Who knows? In the future, there might even be conferences at which hedge-fund managers and chief executives get together to gripe about the tyranny of “maximizing employee satisfaction” and vow to do something about it. 

How to Raise Americans’ Wages B Y HAR OLD MEYERSON

O

nce upon a time in a faraway land—the United States following World War II—workers reaped what they sowed. From 1947 through 1973, their income rose in lockstep with increases in productivity. Their median compensation (wages plus benefits) increased by 95 percent as their productivity increased by 97 percent. Then, abruptly, the rewards for greater productivity started going elsewhere—to shareholders, financiers, and top corporate executives. Today, for the vast majority of American workers, the link between their productivity and their compensation no longer exists.

As economists Robert Gordon and Ian DewBecker have established, the gains in workers’ productivity for the past three decades have gone entirely to the wealthiest 10 percent. The portion of the nation’s economy that went to workers’ pay and benefits—which had held remarkably steady from 1947 through 1973 at 66 percent or 67 percent—last year fell to a record low of 58 percent, while profits reached a postwar high.

Today, the drive to restore workers’ share has been narrowed down to the campaign to raise the minimum wage. That raise is long overdue. The real value of the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is less than twothirds of its level in 1968, which, in current dollars, would be $10.71. But even raising that wage wouldn’t do much for most workers; they make well more than the minimum, but their own wages have been stagnating or shrinking for decades as well.

What, then, do we do for American workers more generally? How do we raise their wages?

How do we re-create a growing and vibrant middle class?

For many business leaders, politicians, and commentators, workers’ declining share is the inevitable result of globalization and technological change—forces of nature that nations, much less individuals, are powerless to stop.

They also tend to blame the victim: According to conventional wisdom, workers lack the education and training to fill the new high-tech jobs the economy now demands.

Globalization and technological change have indeed played key roles in weakening workers’ bargaining power, and a more educated workforce surely commands better pay than workers without the requisite skills. Nonetheless, the business leaders and their apologists are fundamentally wrong in both their diagnoses and prescriptions.

To begin, at least one major nation every bit as subject to globalization and technological change as ours hasn’t seen the evisceration of its middle class and the redistribution of income from labor to capital that we’ve endured. Germany has a greater level of foreign trade than the U.S. and a comparable level of technological change, but it has managed to retain its best manufacturing jobs, because of the greater power that its workers exercise and the diminished role its shareholders play. In Germany, law and custom have enabled labor and required management to collaborate on making sure that the most highly skilled and compensated jobs remain at home.

The claim that American workers lack the skills they need is belied by workers in lowskilled jobs (those that pay two-thirds or less of the median wage) having much more education than equivalent workers four decades ago: 46 percent of low-skilled workers today have attended college; in the 1960s, just 17

percent had. Moreover, the incomes of many professionals, including lawyers and college teachers, have declined in recent years as well.

What corporate apologists won’t acknowledge is that workers’ incomes have been reduced by design. American business has adamantly opposed workers’ efforts to organize unions. Millions of jobs have been outsourced, offshored, franchised out, reclassified as temporary or part-time, or had their wages slashed, in a successful, decades-long campaign to increase the return to capital. Indeed, the only way to explain the soaring profit margins and stock values of recent years despite anemic increases in corporate revenues is that profits have come at the expense of labor. In forecasting the continued rise of profits in 2014, the chief economist for Goldman Sachs, Jan Hatzius, wrote: “The key reason is the continued slack in the U.S. labor market and the resulting weakness of nominal wage growth ….

The subdued growth of unit labor costs has supported profit margins even in an environment of low price inflation.”

The transfer of income from labor to capital, then, is chiefly the consequence of capitalists’ design. But precisely because that transfer has been so thorough, reversing it will be exquisitely difficult. Traditionally, American workers were able to raise their wages by collective bargaining or through the clout they could wield in a full-employment economy.

But the ability of private-sector workers to bargain collectively has been destroyed by the evisceration of unions, which now represent just 6.7 percent of private-sector workers.

The labor movement has tried during each of the past four Democratic presidencies—those of Johnson, Carter, Clinton, and Obama— to strengthen protections for workers in organizing campaigns. Each time, however, the unions failed to surmount the Senate’s supermajority threshold. Until they can, the most direct way to raise workers’ wages will remain a dead letter.

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 49

Re-creating the other avenue for bolstering workers’ leverage—a full-employment economy—looks just as remote. Historically, workers won some of their biggest wage gains when the unemployment rate dipped beneath 4 percent, as it did during World War II, the late 1960s, and the 1990s dot-com boom.

But low consumer demand (itself largely the result of the diminished spending power of underpaid workers) and the continuing rise of machines that can do people’s jobs have combined to diminish the workforce. The future may even be bleaker: Google’s selfdriving car doesn’t augur well for the millions of Americans employed in transporting goods and people.

During the New Deal, the federal government embarked on massive public-works and employment programs. Now, confronted with a growing share of working-age Americans who have given up on finding employment, government needs to take up that task again.

Such a project should combine a program to rebuild the nation’s sagging infrastructure with increased public investment in home care, child care, and preschool. But such a project also requires far greater public belief in the necessity and efficacy of governmental endeavors and the election of a president and a sufficient number of legislators who share that belief. However devoutly progressives may wish it, this is not likely to happen any time soon.

In a nation where workers have lost the power they once had to raise their incomes, what can be done to make those incomes rise?

Here are eight proposals, beginning with some that have already been enacted in regions where labor-liberal coalitions hold sway, moving on to some that require legislative changes that are not possible today but could be tomorrow, and concluding with those that involve a fundamental reorganization of our economic system. Rebuilding America’s middle-class majority will likely require them all.

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❶

Legislate Wage Hikes in States and Cities In poll after poll, raising the federal minimum wage emerges as one of the most popular policy options on the political landscape, supported by an overwhelming majority of Democrats, a sizable majority of independents, about 50 percent of Republicans, and an increasing number of major retailers. Nonetheless, such is the influence of small business (of restaurants, especially) and the Tea Party that prospects for getting a raise through Congress remain dim.

In the 14 of the 50 states where Democrats control the governor’s office and both houses of the legislature, however, the odds on increasing the minimum are brighter. In a number of these states, the wage already substantially exceeds the federal minimum, and some have raised their standard even more in the past year (in California, to $10).

Cities and counties in certain states have the right to set their own minimum wage higher than that of their state. In Maryland, the two counties bordering the District of Columbia recently increased the wage, in tandem with the District, to $11.50. In Washington state, which has a minimum wage of $9.32, Seattle’s mayor has called on the city council to boost the wage within the city to $15.

Governments, though, can also legislate raises for workers who make more than the minimum wage or who work in a place where a broad minimum-wage hike isn’t likely.

Since the late 1990s, local progressive governments have been able to lift wage levels for private-sector workers in government-owned facilities (such as airports or museums) and projects that receive government assistance (such as property-tax abatements or infrastructure improvements) or require special governmental approvals (such as sports

arenas). Advocates of these “living wage” ordinances argue that governments should not be using taxpayer dollars to subsidize poverty-wage jobs.

The Los A ngeles A lliance for a New Economy (LAANE), an advocacy group that helped form the movement for the living wage, also pioneered community-benefit agreements, convincing municipal governments to condition their approval of major projects on the developer’s commitment to meet local-hiring and living-wage standards not just for construction workers but also for the service workers to be employed within the development. L A ANE also persuaded voters in Long Beach, California, to enact by initiative a $13 hourly wage for hotel employees in the city’s downtown development zone and is currently lobbying the Los Angeles City Council to approve a $15 minimum wage for workers in all L.A. hotels with 100 or more guest rooms.

LA ANE ’s initiatives have been widely copied. Currently, at least 150 cities have established liv ing-wage ordinances or community-­b enefit agreements. In 2007, San Francisco created a municipal healthinsurance program for the city’s uninsured, funded in part from assessments on employers who didn’t provide their own workers with insurance. Unlike the Affordable Care Act, the city’s program covers undocumented immigrants.

The demographic changes that have transformed America’s big cities have turned them into a Brandeisian laboratory for progressive economic initiatives. Their populations having been swelled by waves of immigrants and young people, 26 of the nation’s 30 largest cities today have Democratic mayors—the most lopsided partisan alignment since the 19th century. That makes cities the most propitious terrain for legislation that would raise not just minimum wages but also wages for workers higher up the economic ladder.

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Link Corporate Tax Rates to Worker Productivity Increases Later this year, the Securities and Exchange Commission, complying with a mandate in the Dodd-Frank financial-reform act, will require corporations to publish the ratio between the pay of their CEOs and the median pay of their employees. Since this process will make public the information on a company’s median wage, Congress could create a lower tax rate for those corporations that increased their median wage in line with the annual national productivity increase. So far, the discussions of rising inequality and corporate tax reform have progressed as though they’re on separate planets. The Senate Finance Committee, under its new chair, Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden, should combine them. Lowering corporate tax rates for those companies that institute annual employee productivity increases would probably be the most effective way, short of labor-law reform, to boost workers’ incomes.

Absent elections that give Democrats control of both the legislative and executive branches of the federal government, this proposal won’t be enacted anytime soon. (There’s no guarantee it will be enacted even with wall-to-wall Democratic control.) Until it is, though, states could pass laws that link their own corporate tax rates to workers’ receiving productivity increases. At the state level, it would probably be prudent to exempt those businesses that could move out of state, while applying the tax rate to service, retail, construction, and transportation businesses that can’t relocate.

Constructing a tax code that gives corporations an incentive to pass on productivity increases to their employees is admittedly a complex task. The tax break would have to

The transfer of income from labor to capital is chiefly the consequence of capitalists’ design.

Because that transfer has been so thorough, reversing it will be exquisitely difficult.

be big enough to be attractive to the companies’ directors and managers. The break would also have to be withheld from corporations that game the system by initially cutting their workers’ pay to reduce the median wage, then restore it through a productivity increase. Devising a process for monitoring

and assessing corporate conduct would not be easy. But with unionization—the straightforward means of linking employee pay to productivity gains—off the table, complexity is the price we’d have to pay to create a more prosperous economy.

❸

Link Corporate Tax Rates to CEO-Employee Pay Ratios If congressional liberals want to diminish economic inequality, they should also promote legislation that would link corporate tax rates to the ratio between CEO pay and the firm’s median pay: the lower the ratio, the lower the tax. This is sure to elicit a backlash from corporate elites and the financial sector, but it should gain popular support. A poll conducted this February showed that 66 percent of the public believed that “executive pay is generally too high”—an assessment shared by 79 percent of Democrats, 61 percent of independents, and 58 percent of Republicans.

The rise in the ratio of CEO to medianworker pay began about the time that workers’ compensation was detached from increases in productivity. In 1978, CEOs made 28 times the pay of their median-paid employee; by 2012, CEOs made 273 times the median.

Were this proposal to become law, CEO s and their boards would face a fundamental choice: They could persist in excessive executive compensation at the expense of forcing their company to shell out considerably more in corporate taxes. Or they could reduce executive pay to levels the American people see as a more legitimate reflection of executive worth.

They would also have a self-interest in raising their workers’ wages. Indeed, if enacted in conjunction with the proposal linking the median worker’s pay to productivity increases,

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 51

this proposal would limit corporations’ incentive to game that system by reducing workers’ pay before the median is calculated.

What kind of ratio should progressives set as an appropriate valuation of a CEO’s worth? In 1977, the celebrated management guru Peter Drucker wrote in The Wall Street Journal that a ratio of 15 to 1 seemed right for a small or midsize business, and 25 to 1 for a large business. By that standard, a CEO at a sizable firm where the average employee makes $60,000 a year would make $1.5 million.

❹

Make Corporations Responsible for All Their Workers Many of the problems American workers encounter in making a decent wage stem from a confusion about who employs them. In recent decades, companies have routinely shifted the production and delivery of their goods and services and other tasks needed to run their businesses from their own employees to workers employed by contractors, subcontractors, franchisees, or temporary job agencies or to workers who are labeled independent contractors. In many cases, these workers are the same workers the parent company once employed.

In most cases, they could be employed directly by the parent company, but they’re not, chiefly because having the labor done by nonemployees saves the parent company money.

Inevitably, all this reduces the workers’ wages and benefits. By outsourcing work, Boston University economist David Weil explains in an important new book, The Fissured Workplace, an employer trades a wage-setting problem for a pricing problem. Rather than pay his own employees a low wage, he can choose from a range of contractors, who compete with one another on price—a process that advantages the

52 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAR /APR 2014

In the past, workers were able to raise their wages through widespread collective bargaining or a full-employment economy. Neither option is available today or likely to be anytime soon. contractor with the lowest labor costs. In 2009, the five most profitable electronics firms, among them Apple, had profit margins of 35 percent, while their five biggest contract manufacturers (led by Foxconn, the giant industrial contractor, which employs more than 1 million Chinese workers) had profit margins of 3.8 percent.

This dynamic explains why security guards employed by the company they’re guarding make 17 percent more than those employed by contractors. It explains why truckers who move imports from harbors to warehouses and who are employed directly by trucking companies make on average $35,000 a year, while the median earnings of the truckers whom the same companies classify as independent contractors are $28,800.

These varied forms of outsourcing have become the norm in a wide range of industries.

Where once auto companies directly employed the men and women who made their cars, Nissan now has thousands of workers employed by temporary employment agencies making cars in its Tennessee and Mississippi factories. Where once major retail chains staffed their warehouses with their own employees, Wal-Mart has thousands of warehouse workers unloading the containers brought in by the port truckers, repacking and loading them onto Wal-Mart trucks for delivery to Wal-Mart stores across the nation. Yet these workers are not Wal-Mart employees; they, too, are employed by temp agencies.

Nissan’s temp workers do the same jobs as the Nissan employees next to them on the line, only for a good deal less. Wal-Mart, master of the logistics universe, specifies which products are to be moved through its warehouses and sent to which destinations, at which times, and at what cost. Most of the “independent contractors” who move goods from the port rent their trucks from one company, drive exclusively for that company, with orders and routes set by that company.

But neither Nissan, Wal-Mart, nor the trucking companies directly pay these workers, who, of course, are not eligible for any of the parent companies’ benefits. If these workers put in uncompensated overtime to complete their work, or are paid less than the minimum wage, or are injured on the job, their parent company is held harmless, though the parent

company dictates the conditions of their work and the amount they are paid.

In some states, this has begun to change.

In California, Labor Commissioner Julie Su has ruled that a number of port truckers who have lodged complaints with her office have been misclassified as independent contractors.

In the 19 cases in which the Labor Department has rendered judgments, it has ordered the trucking companies to compensate their workers with a settlement averaging $4,266 for every month they’ve been underpaid. In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed legislation in January banning the misclassification of commercial truckers.

As for employees working for contractors, Weil cites West Virginia’s Wage Payment and Collection Act as a model for making parent companies assume responsibility for any violations of employment laws. The act was passed in response to public outrage at the repeated violations of wage and safety laws at mines that the Massey Energy Company had subcontracted out to small companies.

Those contractors, most of them barely solvent, frequently failed to pay their workers.

The act made anyone who’d benefited from a mining operation responsible for compliance with wage and safety laws and subject to litigation for any violations of those laws.

Such a law, applicable to all companies, should be enacted on the federal level, but until then, states with progressive governments should enact their own versions of parentcompany responsibility statutes. Wal-Mart should be held liable for the workers who labor off the clock in the company’s warehouses. As for the private-equity firms that own multiple companies—Blackstone, for instance, owns companies that employ 600,000 workers and delegate work to thousands more under contractual arrangements—they, too, should be regarded as the employers of record for employees-at-six-removes.

A radical amendment to the radical reforms

I proposed in the preceding section: Count the parent company’s contract workers as employees in calculating corporate tax rates.

❺

Help Create Benefit Corporations, and Don’t Tax Them Much Boosting workers’ interests and incomes within the corporate framework ultimately requires changes to the framework itself. A new model that shifts the balance of power within the corporation away from shareholders and—probably but not definitely—more toward workers is something called a “benefit corporation.” Under its charter, the directors and management are legally required to weigh the social and environmental impact of their decisions.

Nineteen states offer corporations the option of chartering themselves as benefit corporations rather than conventional corporations; Delaware, where most American corporations are chartered, joined the list of states with this option last year. Roughly 550 corporations have chosen this route, among them such workerand enviro-friendly firms as Patagonia.

None of these corporations, however, offers shares that are publicly traded, and it’s hard to imagine any publicly listed corporation choosing to go this route. Delaware requires corporations to win the approval of shareholders holding 90 percent of the company’s stock to change their charters, and the probability of that happening—of the mutual, retirement, and hedge funds opting to diminish shareholders’ primacy—starts at zero and goes down from there. But socially conscious entrepreneurs forming new companies should be encouraged to go the benefit-corporation route, and one way to do that would be to set the federal and state tax rates on such corporations significantly lower than the rates on conventional ones.

❻

Help Workers Claim Their Share of Capital Income While—and because—labor income has lagged, capital income has soared. Last year, the share value of the Standard & Poor’s 500 companies rose by 30 percent. Americans’ real disposable income grew by 0.7 percent. Since Americans’ real disposable income includes income derived from those soaring stocks, that 0.7 percent conveys how few Americans derive significant income from investments.

Why, then, can’t more American workers take their payment at least partly in the form of profit sharing or stock? In fact, 11 million workers are currently employed by the roughly 12,000 U.S. companies with employee stock option plans, and one survey has concluded that 47 percent of American workers have access to some form of profit sharing. Yet these plans have had little appreciable effect in boosting workers’ incomes, for the reason that the existing plans don’t share a lot of the profits or vest a lot of the stock with their employees.

Last year, Rutgers management professors Joseph Blasi and Douglas Kruse and Harvard economics professor Richard Freeman wrote The Citizen’s Share: Putting Ownership Back into Democracy. They argued that worker ownership had a long history in the American economy and a long history of bipartisan and cross-ideological support, with advocates ranging from Ronald Reagan to liberal Democratic senators Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan. Companies with profit sharing benefit from greater levels of worker involvement and innovation, while workers benefit from their profit sharing—but only modestly. To boost productivity and re-establish its link to workers’ incomes, the authors call for revising those plans so that workers can receive a larger share of their employer’s profits.

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 53

It’s particularly poignant that Freeman is making this case. More than any other of the nation’s leading economists, Freeman has devoted his career to demonstrating the need for and utility of unions. Having concluded, however, that unions have become too weak to champion employees’ interests, his new plan for helping workers comes down to “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” One proposal to implement his strategy would be to have state and federal governments link corporate tax rates to the extent of the companies’ profit sharing: The more that’s shared, the lower the rate.

❼

Raise Taxes on Capital Income and Redistribute It to Labor Income Another solution to the rise of investment income and the decline of income from work would be to use the tax code to explicitly redistribute capital income to labor. The current tax code comes close to doing the reverse. Capital income—income from qualified dividends and capital gains—can be taxed at a rate no higher than 20 percent, while income from wages and salaries is subjected to a progressive tax that tops out at 39.6 percent. As Warren Buffett frequently notes, upper-middleclass and middle-class Americans sometimes pay more taxes on their wages and salaries than billionaires pay on their investments.

The justification for the low rate on capital— that it boosts the American economy by promoting domestic investment—has been rendered absurd by the globalization of American businesses. The disparity between capital and labor tax rates also means that the government has diminished its take from that part of the national income that is growing, while maintaining a higher rate on that part of the nation’s income that is shrinking.

For all those reasons, the tax rates on capital

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should be raised to the level of the rates on labor; indeed, given that taxable labor must be domestic while taxable capital can be derived from anywhere, the rate on capital should be higher than that on labor. But what to do with this new revenue? As shareholder capital comes more and more at labor’s expense, it should be taxed for the purpose of boosting labor income. One option would be to devote some of it to increase labor income through a major expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, a tax rebate that supplements the income of the working poor.

❽

Change the Governance of Corporations Now, the most fundamental change of all.

Boosting workers’ power within the corporate framework requires more than expanding profit sharing or altering the company’s charter. It requires altering the corporate structure—in particular, the structure of its governing body. A myriad of reasons explain why German workers have fared better than their American counterparts in an era of offshoring and technological change, but the most decisive is the law mandating that the supervisory board of any German company with at least 1,000 employees be divided between management and worker representatives. Germans call this arrangement “co-determination.” (The CEO is selected by management and has the authority to break tie votes.) This sharing of power explains why Germany retains a manufacturing sector proportionately almost twice as large as its American counterpart, why Germany’s exports-over-imports trade balance is greater than any nation’s but China’s (and sometimes greater than China’s), and why German industrial workers’ compensation is one-third higher than Americans’ without diminishing the sale of German goods.

Co-determination is both a cause and consequence of the diminished role that equity markets and shareholders play in the German economy. German firms tend to receive their funding from bank loans and retained earnings; shareholders and bondholders play a small part, if any, in financing most businesses. That’s one reason the composition of corporate boards encounters little opposition within Germany. The other reason is that it has helped create an economy in which prosperity is broadly shared.

Here, then, is another proposal for those who favor raising workers’ incomes: Compel corporations through legislative mandate or encourage them through corporate tax reform to adopt co-determination. Putting worker or public representatives—not selected by shareholder voting—on corporate boards is not without precedent in the United States, but it has only occurred in response to extraordinary situations and never resulted in the seating of more than one or two non-shareholder-­selected members. (United Auto Workers President Douglas Fraser served on the Chrysler board in the late 1970s and early 1980s as part of a wage-concession deal the union made with the company and the federal government to keep Chrysler from going into bankruptcy.)

This proposal would surely trigger an avalanche of business and establishment criticism prophesying the end of civilization, but the advantages of co-determination to most Americans would be real. A serious campaign on its behalf, contrasting its merits with those of the shareholder-dominated version of capitalism, would at minimum expose the price we pay for maintaining our current economic arrangements and could lead to less sweeping reforms. At maximum—and that would likely require the kind of political upheaval we haven’t experienced since the 1930s—it could change the form of American capitalism into one that once again rewards workers’ endeavors. 

JANUARY JONES IS SCARED OF GREAT WHITE SHARKS And you should be scared for great white sharks, too. Healthy oceans need sharks, but there may only be a few hundred adult Pacific great whites left.

Join January and Oceana in the fight to save them.

www.oceana.org/scaredforgreatwhites

© Tim Calver

56 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAR /APR 2014

The Quality of Mercy An evangelical Christian and former prosecutor, Mark Osler has become one of the country’s most effective advocates for criminal-justice reform.

BY ABBY RAP O P O RT ART BY JOHN RITTER

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 57

O

n a Sunday in September, a few minutes before the 10 A.M. worship service, Mark Osler stands in the lobby of the First Covenant Church in downtown Minneapolis. He’s just been fitted with a pencil-thin, fleshcolored microphone, the kind that pop stars wear so they can dance while belting out lyrics. Fifty-one years old and of average build, Osler is the opposite of imposing. As usual, his wiry hair is a mess. A strand flops over his forehead, giving him a slightly boyish air. With his mouth set in a straight line and his thick eyebrows knitted together, his expression tends to be serious or, if he’s lost in thought, dour. “I look like Britney Spears,” he says, a bit doubtful about the microphone.

First Covenant is one of the largest churches in Minneapolis. Built in 1887, it was originally known as the Swedish Tabernacle, named after the evangelical immigrants who constructed the three-story redbrick sanctuary.

Ref lecting the city’s demographic change, First Covenant has moved away from its roots.

There’s Bible study in Spanish, “holy yoga” on Sunday, and an 11:30 A.M. Ethiopian service. The church works with other congregations, including a synagogue and a mosque, to address Minneapolis’s homeless problem.

The worshippers this Sunday are white, black, Latino, Hmong, young and old. As they sing the first praise songs of the service, some hold out their palms. A giant screen displays the lyrics, most of which can’t be found in an oldfashioned hymnal. Even the version of “Amazing Grace” has additional verses sung to a different melody.

Dan Collison, First Covenant’s pastor, has invited Osler to speak about Christianity and justice. A professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law, a Catholic institution located a mile away, Osler is one of the country’s leading advocates for reforming the criminal-justice system. Over the past ten years, he’s fought to dismantle the mandatory drug sentences that have left tens of thousands of black men in prison for decades. More recently, he’s called for pardons and commuted sentences. He’s won in the Supreme Court and lobbied on Capitol Hill and in the White House.

A former U.S. attorney, who prosecuted

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some of those black men, Osler can claim credibility on these issues. But what has made him particularly effective is that his efforts are rooted in his identity as a Christian. Although not well known in progressive Christian circles, Osler has emerged as one of the most eloquent spokespeople for what in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was commonly referred to as the “social gospel”—merging the precepts of Protestantism with the principles of social justice.

“I would rank him up there with the quiet heroes of the civil-rights movement of the ’60s, as a person who’s taken his values of faith and applied them to progressive ideals,” says Chet Edwards, a former Democratic congressman from Texas, whom Osler lobbied but didn’t always win over.

Osler prefers speaking at conservative or evangelical churches like Covenant. It offers a chance, he says, to engage people who view the world differently than he does. He’s delivering two more sermons in the next four weeks—at the Church of the Holy Comforter in Richmond, Virginia, and at St. Mary’s Episcopal in Anchorage, Alaska.

At the conclusion of the first set of music, Collison welcomes the congregants. He reminds people about upcoming meetings, introduces a skit, and conducts a brief Q&A with Osler. By the time Osler gets up to talk, an hour has passed, and the congregation is restless. He begins, as he invariably does, with the week’s reading from the lectionary. This week, it’s Luke 6.

“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh,” Osler reads before getting to the less frequently cited sentences. “But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn. Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.”

Osler pauses. “Sometimes,” he says with a grin, “the Bible is not very reassuring for a fairly affluent straight white guy from Edina,” referring to the Minneapolis suburb where he and his family live. “But that is me, and this is one of those times. In this passage, Jesus is talking about turning everything— everything—upside down. The poor will have the kingdom, while the rich will face woe. The hungry will be filled, while those who are full will be hungry. Those who are reviled will be blessed, and it’s bad when all speak well of you.

This teaching, this idea of turning everything upside down, is dangerous.”

No theatrics inform the sermon. Osler doesn’t pace and only occasionally gesticulates.

He speaks methodically and conversationally, as if the congregation were a jury he has to persuade. “At the very least,” he continues, “when Jesus tells us the world should be upside down from where it is today—‘woe to you who are rich’—at the very least it means we have to ally ourselves with the poor, with the hungry, with the reviled. That’s our team. That’s the side that, as Christians, we’re on, we’re assigned to.”

In five minutes, Osler has done what he likes best—reveal the radical, challenging side of Christianity. He has identified himself as “someone from the pews.” But Covenant isn’t his church, and he doesn’t fully fit in here. He also doesn’t quite fit in at St. Stephen’s Episcopal church, where he currently worships, nor did he quite fit in at the Baptist church he attended when he taught law at Baylor University and lived in Waco, Texas. It’s unlikely he was a perfect match for the Congregational church he was raised in or the Quaker meetings he sometimes joined when he was in his twenties. A progressive among evangelical Christians and an evangelical Christian among progressives, Osler has spent much of his life subverting expectations.

joe griffin

Osler has become an eloquent spokesman for what in an earlier time was commonly referred to as the “social gospel,” merging the precepts of Christianity with the goals of social justice.

Osler pulls out a copy of Ernest J. Gaines’s 1993 novel A Lesson before Dying. He outlines the basic plot, which centers on a schoolteacher in a small black town in 1940s Louisiana, who counsels a man on death row. During this time, the boxer Joe Louis was a hero to black Americans. Osler reads a passage: “As vividly as if I were there, I had seen that cell, heard that boy crying while being dragged to that chair, ‘Please, Joe Louis, help me. Please help me. Help me.’”

Putting the book down, Osler says, “I get letters that cry out like that. Every week.

They’re from people who want my students and me to seek clemency for them—desperate men and women serving life terms very often.

And they come with carefully handwritten return addresses from those places we

warehouse men and women in this country.

“Inside each one, painstakingly written, is a story. And it’s always a tragic story. They think I’ll know a way to get them out of prison after 25 or 30 or 37 years for a narcotics case that almost no one remembers. In the end, probably writing to me is as hopeless as writing to Joe Louis. But I can’t throw the letters away. I have to try to do something. And so I do. I try to get the law to change. I try to get the president of the United States to try to take seriously his constitutional duty of showing mercy with the pardon power. I try sometimes to work with my students to save just one of them.”

The squirming and occasional cough that could be heard early in the sermon have ceased.

Some members have their eyes closed. Others look around with concern.

“Because the people who write those letters,” Osler goes on, “are Jesus. Because he said, ‘When you visit those in prison, you visit me.’ He didn’t say, ‘When you visit the innocent person in prison,’ or ‘When you visit the political prisoner.’ ‘When you visit those in prison,’ and these are the people in prison.

They are Jesus. And their mothers who write to me and beg that we help their child so that she can see him again before he dies—they are Mary. Dutiful. Heartbroken. Watching their child die.”

There it is: the message Osler has spent years delivering—that mercy has been stripped from Christianity and society and must be restored.

“So we do have to seek social justice, as hard as it is—and it is hard,” he says. “To ally ourselves with the hungry, with the reviled, we

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 59

have to make ourselves vulnerable. And that’s a hard thing to do. We have to open ourselves up to do things we don’t usually do. That’s part of the deal: that it won’t be safe or painless.”

UNTIL HE WAS SIX YEARS OLD, Osler grew up

in a middle-class neighborhood on the east side of Detroit. His mother, trained as a bacteriologist, stayed at home to raise Osler and his two younger siblings. His father worked in sales at a commercial photography studio. Osler’s first memory is of running into the street after being kept in for days, smelling gasoline, and seeing a National Guardsman near his home, before his mother scooped him up. The 1967 Detroit riots, he says, “are why I take criminal law so seriously.”

Within two years, the Oslers moved to Grosse Pointe. It was a chance to buy a house by a lake in a suburb with a highly touted school system. The family wasn’t religious. So

and gained a reputation as smart and independent. He moved back to Detroit after he graduated, finding work as a florist’s delivery boy. Looking to supplement his income, he answered a newspaper ad for “a young, resourceful person.” Osler had landed his first job in law—as a processor. Sometimes he’d bring a bouquet to fool people into thinking he was delivering flowers instead of serving them with legal documents.

In 1987, he entered Yale Law School. “Suddenly I’m around the smartest people in the world, it felt like,” he says. “It was like an intellectual vacation.” One of his mentors was Daniel Freed, perhaps the country’s leading authority on sentencing. Osler thrived at Yale, and in his third year, he was named a senior editor at the law review. He also started regularly attending Quaker meetings.

“I just really loved the practice of silence,” he says. “I liked the idea of faith being as much

Osler’s interest in clemency heightened after the 2008 election. As many did, he thought Obama’s election would signal a shift in sentencing law and the war against drugs.

Osler’s parents were taken aback when his kindergarten teacher suggested they might want to consider some sort of church for their son.

“He’s always talking about God,” she explained.

His parents eventually chose Grosse Pointe United Church (it has since changed its name), which was affiliated with Congregationalists, a Protestant denomination with a long history in New England. According to Osler, the church was moderate for Grosse Pointe but conservative for the country. After his confirmation at 16, Osler told his minister he wanted a fullimmersion baptism. “No one in my church had ever done that,” he says. “It was not something Congregationalists do.” The minister complied, conducting the ceremony in a Baptist church. “It was,” Osler says, “something I was proud of at the time.”

Osler attended the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he majored in history with a government minor

60 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAR /APR 2014

about questions as it was about answers.”

The year after graduation, he clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Jan DuBois in Philadelphia, where he continued going to meetings.

When he married three years later, he did so in a Quaker service.

By then Osler had returned to Detroit, where he was a junior associate at Dykema Gossett, the city’s biggest law firm. His goal was to become a federal prosecutor, and in 1995, the Clinton administration named him an assistant U.S. attorney for Eastern Michigan. The job revolved around putting away crack dealers.

Osler had seen crack ravage Detroit, a city he loves. “It’s being in love with someone who breaks your heart the same way over and over,” he says. “You think it can’t get worse, and then it does.” Bleeding jobs, its population shrinking, Detroit experienced a dramatic rise in violent crime in the 1980s. “I was really a

believer,” he says. “Crack’s a serious problem— you’ve got to do something about it, and this seemed like something.”

Crack didn’t exist until the mid-1970s, when a street chemist, now lost to history, discovered that mixing cocaine with baking soda and cooking it yielded small rocks that could be melted and smoked. Drug dealers had been trying to find a way to offer smokable cocaine, which would provide a higher high for a shorter duration. From an entrepreneur’s point of view, the “baking-soda method” was a brilliant stroke: It required no skill and made the drug cheaper. A glut of cocaine from South America and the Caribbean in the early 1980s further drove down prices. By the end of 1985, you could find crack in most major cities.

The stereotype came quickly: This was a black drug. Racial anxieties added to the specter of crack addicts being especially dangerous. A study of 23 infants spawned extensive coverage of “crack babies,” who, it was claimed, would be permanently disabled and require a slew of services for life. The message was “this was the most horrific drug ever,” says Nkechi Taifa, a senior policy analyst on civil and criminal-justice reform at the Open Society Foundations. “It was a bad drug, don’t get me wrong. But all of that was hyper blown out of proportion.”

The hysteria peaked in 1986 with the death of University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias, who overdosed two days after being drafted by the Boston Celtics. Although he likely died from snorting cocaine, many presumed that, because he was black, crack was the cause. Within a few months, Congress had passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which created mandatory minimum sentences for crack and treated one gram of crack as the equivalent of 100 grams of powder cocaine.

The new law was part of a wave of “tough on crime” legislation. Daniel Freed, Osler’s mentor at Yale, had spent years calling attention to the radical and unjust disparities in federal sentencing. In 1984, drawing on Freed’s work, Congress passed a set of mandatory minimum sentences for certain crimes, making them statute, and established a commission to institute sentencing guidelines. Intended to prevent extreme variations in punishments for the same crime, the new system offered judges a

dan epstein / defender s projec t

massive grid that incorporated multiple variables to consider when sentencing. A person could be found guilty of drug dealing, for instance, but the presence of a gun would bump up the mandatory sentence; the presence of a gun and a prior conviction would bump it up even more.

In 1988, Congress singled out crack as the only drug with a five-year minimum jail sentence for possession. For the next ten years, Congress continually made mandatory sentences harsher. Democrats were as hard-line on crack as Republicans. When, in 1995, the U.S. Sentencing Commission proposed guidelines stipulating that crimes involving crack and powder cocaine be treated equally, Congress passed a law overruling the recommendation, which President Bill Clinton signed.

Freed came to oppose the new structure.

“Discretionary actors, including judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and probation officers, find themselves torn between allegiance to rigid rules and an urge to do justice in individual cases,” he wrote in 1992, warning that the new guidelines might soon “lose all credibility.”

One of the consequences of mandatory crack sentencing was that it gave prosecutors an enormous amount of power. Once a prosecutor determined the charges, defendants, the vast majority of whom were black and poor, had few options. The choice they faced was often between a lengthy prison term from a plea bargain or the prospect of an even lengthier prison term from a trial. Because sentences were mandatory, judges had little discretion once a verdict came in.

“Being a prosecutor in Detroit in the late ’90s was about bullying drug defendants to try to get to their bosses,” says Douglas Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University, who would later become one of Osler’s closest allies in reforming drug-sentencing laws.

“That doesn’t seem like much fun if you’re virtuous. It’s only fun if you like being a bully.”

Andrew Densemo, a federal defender who worked in Detroit courts at the same time as Osler, remembers a client who was tried for intent to distribute marijuana and cocaine.

The prosecution offered ten years in federal prison. “I told the prosecutor, ‘You can kiss my ass. I don’t plea for ten years,’” Densemo says.

“We went to trial and the client got 15. Looking back, I would have taken those ten years.”

Prosecutors wanted to scare defendants into giving up information about major dealers in exchange for a lighter sentence. But few lowlevel dealers had much information, and those who did rarely snitched for fear of repercussions. Instead, defendants often named other low-level dealers, and they usually exaggerated, making the crimes sound as bad as possible so that they could have a shot at a better deal.

Prosecuting, Osler says, took its toll. “Levels of tragedy piled one on top of another,” he says. “I’d hear one of those stories and think,

Federal defender Andrew Densemo’s speech in court against mandatory sentences pushed Osler to rethink his views.

how can there be a creator who would let this happen to his creations? Where’s the god that gives a damn?”

At 32 years old, Osler was living in Grosse Pointe, not far from his childhood home. He and his wife had started a family and attended the same Congregational church where he’d been baptized 16 years earlier. For five years, he drove nine miles to his office in Detroit’s federal courthouse, where every day he tried crack cases—in the end, hundreds of crack cases. “He was a nice guy, who did what he was supposed to do,” Densemo says. “He was told to lock people up, and he locked people up. He did it very well.”

Sometimes, Osler would arrive at a sentencing hearing without any preparation.

The defendant’s fate had been sealed when Osler had decided which crime to charge him with. The cases bled together so much that for years afterward, he misidentified the case that changed his life.

He likely walked up the seven steps of the imposing, block-long courthouse carrying the minimum amount of paperwork. The defendant was likely a young, poor black man who had spent his life in Detroit and was likely guilty of using or dealing crack. Osler would have risen from his chair and told the judge he wanted the mandatory minimum. Then Andrew Densemo would have given his speech.

Osler has referred to the case on numerous occasions. He calls it the “futile speech” story.

The heart of the story he tells is the trial of Anthony “Bull” Sheppard, a teenager arrested with a little more than four grams of crack and for possession of a gun, with Judge Anna Diggs Taylor presiding. As it turns out, Densemo never defended Sheppard. Perhaps this doesn’t matter, because during this time Densemo nearly always gave the same speech, and Osler’s memory of what he said is accurate, even if the specifics of the case are not.

Densemo, Osler remembers, made “a passionate 20-minute argument against the imposition of the mandatory minimums. He described the way it affected the black community, the failure of the law to stop crack trafficking, the unfairness of locking up this teenager for a longer period than the bank robber Judge Taylor had just sentenced, and the absurdity that crack was punished so much more harshly than powder cocaine, from which crack was made.”

The speech had no immediate effect. The defendant—whoever he was—went to prison, and Osler went back to his office. But he recalled the speech as he tried more cases, and he remembered it after he left the U.S. attorney’s office in 2000 to teach at Baylor Law School.

Densemo would continue to give the speech at sentencing hearings for another decade. He, too, no longer recalls which case was which or in which of his cases he went up against Osler.

“They were all the same,” he says. “The numbers were the same. The defendants were the

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 61

A year after joining Seventh and James, he proposed that he stage the trial of Christ, with himself as prosecutor and members of the congregation as the jury. Osler had arrived at the idea one Sunday when he read about a death-row inmate’s last meal. While taking the communion wafer, Osler says, he realized that the Last Supper represented the last meal of a condemned man.

“I was a prosecutor for five years, attending church the entire time, and I never contemplated that my vocation and faith had a strange and strong narrative link,” Osler writes in Jesus on

WACO, TEXAS, A CITY OF 125,000, contains

more than 200 Baptist churches. Families say grace when their meals arrive at Cheddar’s, and “God bless” substitutes for “goodbye.”

Located a few blocks from downtown, Baylor University is the largest Baptist school in the country with more than 15,000 students.

Alcohol is forbidden at events, dormitories are single-sex, and almost all professors are practicing Christians.

In 1999, when Osler decided to leave the U.S. attorney’s office and teach law, Baylor was one of two schools interested in hiring him. During the second-round interview, the president and provost discussed his religious leanings with him. In retrospect, he says, the conversation gave a “pretty foundational impression of what Baylor is like. People are going to ask you, ‘How is what you’re doing influenced by your faith?’” Baylor was Southern and conservative and offered an ideal community for Osler to explore the connections between his Christian beliefs and his love for the law.

Soon after arriving, Osler joined Seventh and James Baptist Church. By Waco standards, the church was moderate. The congregation included a number of Baylor professors, and members were encouraged to give classes on a wide range of subjects in a Chautauqualike setting. With adult Sunday school, prayer breakfasts, and services on Wednesday nights as well as on Sunday, the church was more fervent than Grosse Pointe United. The Mark Osler who at 16 had insisted on an immersion baptism had found what locals call a new church home.

62 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAR /APR 2014

As director of the ACLU’s Drug Law Reform Project, Graham Boyd helped lead the movement to change the crack-tococaine sentencing disparity.

Death Row, a book he later wrote about restaging the trial. “The fact that God’s son came to earth as a man subjected to capital punishment seems to reveal God’s intent that we care about not only that man but also that process.”

Osler designed the trial and discussion, which stretched out over four Sundays, to show how the legal issues that drove Jesus’s trial still had bearing. But his purpose was more provocative. Texas conducted more executions than any other state, and he wanted to ask his congregation why Christians, especially Christian Texans, supported capital punishment.

From the first, Osler was a popular teacher.

He created a course with two ministers on the similarities between advocating in court and giving sermons. His classes were packed and, according to his research assistant, Dustin Benham, “he was beloved. You wanted Mark to be satisfied, and you wanted to be like Mark.”

In 2003, Osler received a call out of the blue from Graham Boyd, who was then director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Drug Law Reform Project. Boyd had been brought into a case in nearby Hearne, Texas, where 28 residents, all but one of whom was black, had been arrested in a drug sweep. An informant, who later recanted, had given the names of supposed drug dealers. Rather than investigate the allegations, the county prosecutor charged everyone, threatening them with decades-long prison sentences unless they accepted plea deals. When the cases went to trial, all were dismissed but the seven whose defendants had agreed to the pleas.

Boyd had called Osler for help on a civil suit on behalf of the defendants against county officials, because he needed local counsel— someone who looked and sounded like a Texan and wouldn’t alienate the Waco court. “I was as much of a Yankee as Graham Boyd,” Osler says. But he knew whom to call: David Moore.

Although born in Louisiana, Moore is about as Texan as they come. “I don’t own a pair of shoes,” Moore likes to say. “All I’ve ever worn are cowboy boots.” Moore, Boyd, and Osler made a formidable team, and the county eventually settled (the terms were not disclosed).

For Osler, the Hearne case was the first time he worked closely with people accused of dealing drugs. “It was huge,” he says, “to see someone who’d been arrested in what was basically a racially motivated jam-up.” Almost from the moment he had arrived at Baylor, Osler had begun to examine the doubts that had been brewing since hearing Densemo’s speech. He did this mostly by writing and lecturing about the war on drugs and mandatory sentencing, arguing initially that the guidelines needed to be revamped. Like most everyone else, he didn’t think it was possible to eliminate mandatory sentencing. “I should have had a broader imagination,” he says.

Filing briefs on behalf of the ACLU and others, Osler joined the effort to reform

m a r y a n n c h a s ta i n / a p i m a g e s

same. I had argued against that law so many damn times. It all merges.”

And the intention, Densemo says, was always the same. “The goal was to get those in power to realize that these sentences were wrong—that they were hurting citizens, they were hurting the society. That was my main goal. To just add my voice to all those saying change the law. The hope was that someone on the Court of Appeals would see it. Some prosecutor, some judge—somebody. That it would strike a chord with somebody and somebody, who had more power than I, would say, ‘Hey, maybe we do need to change that law.’ Eventually it did happen, thank God.”

the sentencing guidelines at a critical juncture. Around the time he was helping on the Hearne case, the U.S. Supreme Court started to weigh in. In 2004, the Court took up Blakely v. Washington. The case concerned a man named Ralph Howard Blakely accused of kidnapping his wife. Blakely negotiated a plea deal for second-degree kidnapping, which, according to Washington state’s guidelines, required a prison term of between 49 and 53 months unless there was a “substantial and compelling” reason to increase the term. The judge concluded that Blakely had acted with “deliberate cruelty” and sentenced him to 90 months. Blakely’s lawyers appealed the decision, arguing that because the judge had found their client guilty of “deliberate cruelty,” he had violated the defendant’s right to a jury trial under the Sixth Amendment. The Supreme Court concurred.

“It really rocked the world,” Osler says. “My little world anyway.” Though the case pertained only to state law, the federal sentencing guidelines worked in a similar fashion. “Everyone knew,” Osler says, “the shit was going to hit the fan.”

“Blakely….. WOW!!” Osler’s colleague, Ohio State law professor Douglas Berman, titled his blog post. Berman oversaw a mini media empire for sentencing nerds. He edited the highly respected Federal Sentencing Reporter journal, and six weeks before the Blakely decision came down, he’d started a blog called Sentencing Law and Policy. Both Osler and Berman felt that with the Blakely decision, reformers needed to be, in Berman’s words, “all hands on deck.”

According to Graham Boyd, “Mark and Doug were the most important among the academics working on this.” At first glance, they were an unusual pair. Berman, a secular Jew, had been a law professor the bulk of his career, while Osler had been teaching for only a few years and was trying to bind his Christian faith with his profession. They both believed that the Supreme Court was now open to more reform. Justice Antonin Scalia, considered the most conservative voice on the Court, authored the majority opinion in Blakely, which was supported by liberals like Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens. The split in the Court over sentencing was not liberal

versus conservative but was between pragmatists who wanted incremental change and formalists who wanted to throw out the system of mandatory sentencing.

Six months after Blakely, the Court delivered a landmark decision on sentencing guidelines in United States v. Booker. In a rare instance, the court offered two majority opinions of different aspects of the case. One, written by Stevens and supported by Scalia, addressed the merits of the case and argued the guidelines violated the Sixth Amendment.

The other, written by Justice Stephen Breyer, addressed the legal solution and argued the guidelines could be treated as advisory, rather than eliminated altogether. Dissenting from Breyer, Stevens quoted one of Osler’s articles for the Federal Sentencing Reporter.

Breyer’s opinion allowed judges to diverge from the guidelines, but they would continue to be held to a standard of “reasonableness.” “The

took his students to Washington, D.C., to hear Kimbrough v. United States argued before the Supreme Court. In another victory for the reformers, the Court ruled that judges, applying the sentencing guidelines, could indeed conclude that 100-to-1 wasn’t a reasonable standard.

After the decision was handed down, Boyd and Berman were all over the media—Boyd as the ACLU’s lead advocate for drug-policy reform and Berman as the most prolific sentencing expert. On his own blog, Osler reflected on his role: “There is a part of me that would love to be in the Times and on NPR as a part of this, but then I remember what I teach my own students.

I show them … Degas’ ‘At The Milliner.’ There are two women; one is buying a hat while the other is placing it on her head. The woman in the foreground is fully formed and in the light; she will wear the hat and be complimented on its beauty. In the background, the milliner is in the shadows. She made the hat, chose it for

One consequence of mandatory sentencing was that it gave prosecutors a huge amount of power. Once a prosecutor determined the charges, defendants had few options. guidelines still had a significant gravitational force,” Berman says. “Prosecutors were saying, ‘You don’t have to follow them, but it’s a really good idea to keep following them.’” When it came to crack, federal prosecutors went further: They argued that because Congress had specifically sought to preserve the 100-to-1 ratio, it was not reasonable for judges to throw out a congressional mandate.

Osler, Boyd, and Berman began searching for the right case to challenge the sentencing guidelines for crack. Osler filed an amicus brief in a slew of federal courts, arguing that the 100-to-1 ratio was unconstitutional, in the hope that the Supreme Court would eventually take up a case: Perry in the First Circuit, Castillo in the Second, Ricks in the Third, Kimbrough in the Fourth, Spears in the Eighth, and Starks in the Ninth. Each argument was posted on Berman’s blog.

In 2007, three years after Booker, Osler

this customer, brought it out, but will not be there when it goes out into society to hear the compliments. I tell the students that the lawyer is not the customer, but the milliner.”

As it turned out, Kimbrough wasn’t the victory many thought it was. The Department of Justice continued to resist, arguing that judges couldn’t categorically replace 100-to-1 with a ratio they thought was more just. “Kimbrough was our shot,” says Benham, now a law professor at Texas Tech, and it seemed like prosecutors were “finding a way to wiggle out of it. It was like we won, and it wasn’t complete.”

Many sentencing reformers, including Berman, started to focus on other issues. Osler was no longer filing on behalf of the ACLU. However, he decided to continue working on Spears v. United States. In the case, a judge had sentenced a crack dealer based on a 20-to-1 ratio. The prosecutor appealed, arguing that the Court ruling in Booker barred the judge

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 63

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from establishing his own sentencing ratio and that he should have sentenced based on 100-to-1. The case had already gone up to the Supreme Court once, and the Court had sent it back down in light of the Kimbrough ruling.

When Spears arrived at the Court a second time, it ruled, without oral argument, that judges could now ignore 100-to-1 altogether.

Because the decision was delivered the same day as Barack Obama’s first inauguration, Spears did not make the waves Booker and Kimbrough had. Still, congratulations poured in from friends and colleagues. Amid the messages, Osler received a call from Berman. His friend did not begin with the usual compliments. “No celebration, nothing,” Osler recalls.

Instead, Berman asked, “What do we do next?”

“Well, if he’s a kingpin,” Osler asks, “how much money does he have?” He flips to the sentencing portion of the file. Before determining the punishment, judges look at the convict’s life and possessions. Osler reads from Blount’s testimony: “I hang at a store begging for nickels and quarters and dimes. I stayed at the front porch of my mama’s house. I don’t, I don’t sell dope. I didn’t even have one change of clothes.

I had to do my wash every day, judge.”

Osler looks up and asks, “This impoverished ninth-grade graduate is your drug kingpin?”

He shakes his head. “I get these every day.” He gestures to a bookcase. Dozens of unopened yellow-brown envelopes are piled on top of one another. Many arrived when he was on sum-

constantly talking about ‘What does it mean to be a Baptist university?’ And it usually came down to, ‘Well, we make people go to chapel, and we don’t have gay professors, and no one writes in favor of abortion.’ Which is really a bizarre way to define it.”

Two months after starting at St. Thomas, Osler wrote a piece for The Huffington Post titled “Repentance of an Anti-Gay Bigot.” “I was a bigot,” he wrote. “My bigotry was consistent with what the culture, the church and my friends thought and said, and it was not countered by those who knew better.” He credited gay men and women, who had showed him “undeserved grace,” for gradually changing his view. In 2012, he lent his voice to the campaign

o h i o s tat e u n i v e r s i t y m o r i t z c o l l e g e o f l aw

OSLER’S OFFICE IS ON THE fourth floor of

St. Thomas’s new law school building in downtown Minneapolis. A painting by his father hangs by the door. One of a series, it depicts a man sitting in the back of a church. Above a couch, Osler’s Yale Law School diploma fits awkwardly in a too-large, fake wood frame. “I got that at the Dollar General store in Waco,” he says. “I had it taped to my wall originally.”

Displayed on the coffee table is Christ and the Gallows, Or, Reasons for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, a book first published in 1870.

It’s early in the fall semester, and Osler is holding a yellow-brown packing envelope that just arrived. Without opening it, he knows what’s inside: documents pertaining to a trial that concluded with the defendant spending years or, more often, decades in prison. He points to the six stamps, in two neat rows of three. Four have either “liberty” or “justice” written beneath an image of the American flag; two feature the Statue of Liberty. Osler pays attention to the stamps, because he knows they represent a lot of labor. Inmates make only 45 cents an hour.

The envelope is from Roy Blount, a prisoner in the federal penitentiary outside Beaumont, Texas. “Sentenced to life, conspiracy, selling crack,” Osler says. “I know who this guy is.”

Blount’s public defender had already reached out to Osler. He reads from the transcript.

Blount wasn’t even the one selling; he was a lookout, pointing people to where they could purchase the drugs.

Ohio State law professor Douglas Berman oversees a journal and blog at the heart of the criminal-justice reform effort.

mer vacation, and he hasn’t gotten to them yet.

On the surface, Osler’s decision to leave Baylor in 2010 for St. Thomas doesn’t seem like a natural step. Unlike Baylor Law, which has been around for more than 150 years, St. Thomas’s law school is only 15 years old; it ranks 124th, according to U.S. News and World Report, 70 spots below Baylor. Part of the appeal of St. Thomas was that it offered a lighter teaching load and more time to focus on public policy. Osler still has close ties to Baylor, but he was ready to go to a school that offered more flexibility integrating faith with scholarship. “There’s no institution I’ve ever been close to that worries more about orthodoxy than Baylor,” he says. “People there were

that prevented an anti-gay-marriage amendment from becoming law in Minnesota.

At Baylor, Osler had been discreet about his work with the ACLU. By contrast, St. Thomas encouraged him to start the first federal commutations clinic in the country. Over the past three years, the clinic has prepared petitions for seven prisoners, which ask President Obama, in Osler’s words, “to grant mercy.”

The students in the yearlong class choose among the yellow-brown envelopes that sit on Osler’s bookshelf.

Osler’s interest in clemency heightened after the 2008 election. Along with many others, he thought Obama’s election would signal a shift in sentencing law and the war against

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 65

drugs. “We think the tide in Washington and elsewhere is beginning to turn in our favor,” wrote the pro-reform group Families Against Mandatory Minimums in a post-election statement. Even the ever-skeptical Berman wrote a post titled “Are We on the Verge of a New Changed Era concerning Federal Sentencing Law and Policy?”

The Spears decision only amped up the excitement. Osler blogged that the decision “should encourage the Obama administration to pro-actively use its power of commutation to lessen the sentences of those who are serving unduly harsh crack sentences.”

Osler hoped the administration would embrace the president’s clemency power.

Under the Constitution, the president can forgive a crime (a full pardon) or let a prisoner out early (commutation). Under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, pardons and commutations had often been awkward and messy.

Sentencing Act. Osler and other reformers hoped the crack–powder cocaine disparity would finally disappear. The bill did eliminate the five-year minimum for crack possession, but rather than erasing the disparity, it introduced an 18-to-1 ratio. Crack, it seemed, still bore the stigma it had 15 years earlier. The law wasn’t fully retroactive, so many of those who had been sentenced under 100-to-1 still faced decades in prison.

“My first reaction was ‘This is abominable,’” Berman says, “and everyone shouted me down and said be grateful we got something. To call it half a loaf is to insult bread. It’s more like a slice.”

Osler was more measured about the bill’s failings. “That whole negotiation was so fragile,” he says. “Is it what it should have been?

No. But it’s what seemed possible.”

Nkechi Taifa, the Open Society Foundations’ senior analyst on civil and criminal-­

Osler makes a point of staging the trial of Jesus for conservative audiences. He rarely engages progressive Christians because “they’re not the people I have to convince.”

Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, a tax evader who was the husband of a major Democratic donor.

Bush commuted the sentence of former vice-­ presidential adviser I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who was convicted for his role in exposing a CIA operative. What was supposed to be a tool for curbing congressional excesses had become a tool for granting political favors.

Initially, from Osler’s perspective, the policy debate under Obama seemed to be moving in the right direction. Transition documents discussed the need for drastic sentencing reform, especially when it came to the crack-cocaine disparity. Although the Supreme Court had weakened the sentencing guidelines, only Congress could undo the mandatory minimums, many of which were tied to the disparity, like the five-year minimum for possession of crack.

In 2010, the Democratic-controlled House and Senate began to consider the Fair

66 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAR /APR 2014

justice reform, immediately began looking for the next step. Taifa had been active in the civil-rights movement of the 1960s and the black-power movement of the 1970s. By the 1990s, she saw sentencing reform as “the civilrights issue of our time” and became an early advocate, organizing conferences and lobbying Capitol Hill. Osler calls her a legend in the field of sentencing. She suggested to groups that they push for some sort of “blanket pardon” from the president for those still in prison.

“That didn’t even get much traction in my progressive circles,” she says. “People said that’s not going to happen.”

In 2011, while she was poking around databases, she happened on an article by Osler called “The Ford Approach and Real Fairness for Crack Convicts.” Published in the Federal Sentencing Reporter, the piece proposed creating a system of commutation panels for crack defendants similar to those President

Gerald Ford had established for Vietnam War draft evaders. “Mark was my dream come true,” she says.” She got in touch with him and invited speakers to discuss his proposal on Capitol Hill.

Osler soon entered the world of Washington lobbying. As a reformer, he had a perfect résumé. He uses words familiar to Christian conservatives and sympathizes with the needs of prosecutors. “Mark is a very credible advocate in the sense that he’s not one of the usual suspects,” Boyd says. “He’s not being a softon-crime person. When you’re coming from the ACLU, it’s a lot easier to be pigeonholed.”

Osler’s articles and op-eds became more frequent, and he began appearing on outlets like MSNBC and CNN. After his commutations clinic was up and running, he traveled to other universities, including Stanford and Harvard, urging them to start their own. When former Governor Robert Ehrlich of Maryland, a Republican, began a clinic for pardons at Catholic University, he modeled it on Osler’s program. In 2012, Taifa and Osler, along with others, met several times with White House and Department of Justice officials.

Until late last year, the lobbying seemed to have no effect. Obama has granted the fewest pardons and commutations of any president in history. Over Thanksgiving, Osler, Berman, and others wrote about the irony in the president pardoning a turkey while leaving thousands of people in prison sentenced under laws many Republicans as well as Democrats now agree were far too harsh. Berman was particularly cynical, writing that he no longer believed the White House’s claims to be interested in clemency reform.

Then things began to change. Right before Christmas, Obama commuted the sentences of eight people convicted of crack crimes. At a New York State Bar event at the end of January, Deputy Attorney General James Cole announced that the administration was seeking other drug cases to consider for clemency. Cole said the Justice Department would work with the Bureau of Prisons to encourage inmates to seek commutations, with the hope that state bar associations would help in preparing the petitions.

Osler was quick to point out the flaws in the administration’s proposal. In a post for

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“only halfway there,” explaining that the president already has 3,500 petitions sitting on his desk. What was needed, Osler asserted, was a system for processing all the requests. Once again, he called for a version of the Ford plan, in which clemency boards considered 21,000 petitions in one year.

If Obama pursued such a course, the political risk might not be as great as many suppose.

Conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation have joined liberal organizations like the ACLU, the Open Society Foundations, and Families Against Mandatory Minimums in pressing for reform. Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois have co-sponsored the Smarter Sentencing Act. Introduced last summer, it would reduce mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders and allow the nearly 9,000 in prison for crack crimes under the old 100-to-1 regime to return to court for a new hearing. In late January, the bill passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee with support from Tea Party Republicans Ted Cruz of Texas and Jeff Flake of Arizona.

to the “jury” to determine whether he should receive the death penalty. Over the past two years, Osler has performed the trial 16 times at institutions like Regent University, the school Pat Robertson founded in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and Fuller Theological in Pasadena, California, considered by many the country’s leading evangelical seminary.

His opposing counsel in the trial is a Chicago public defender named Jeanne Bishop.

When Bishop was 30, her sister, who was pregnant, and brother-in-law were murdered

“WHAT THE DEFENDANT DOES is threaten

the things that our society rests upon: our economy, our family, our ability to defend ourselves, and our cultural heritage. What if we listen to him? What if we did what he said?”

On an early afternoon in November, Osler addresses an audience of about 50 students, professors, and priests at Loyola Law School in New Orleans. No one stirs as he makes his closing argument that Jesus Christ should receive the death penalty. “Everything that makes our economy go forward would be gone. That’s what he teaches. That’s what he taught consistently. Is he dangerous? Yes, he’s dangerous!”

Less than a year after he arrived at St. Thomas, Osler set about reviving the trial of Christ he had put together ten years earlier in Waco. This time, however, he wanted to take the show on the road, traveling to churches, seminaries, and schools to highlight the special relationship he believes Christians should have with criminal justice. Rather than spend hours enacting the entire trial, the new format focuses on the sentencing portion. Jesus would be presumed guilty of blasphemy, but it was up

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Osler argues that Jesus should receive the death penalty.

in their home. The 16-year-old killer offered no motive and was sentenced to life in prison. A member of the Fourth Presbyterian Church, who sometimes quotes Bible verses to friends having a bad day, Bishop has recently attempted to reconcile with the killer. Tall and thin, with an intimidating gaze, she presents a striking figure in the courtroom, even a mock one. She’s used to defending poor black kids who don’t garner nearly as much sympathy as Jesus.

Osler makes a worthy opponent. He never

raises his voice or descends into staginess; instead, he maintains an earnest concern.

During the first part of his close, he highlights the stickier parts of the New Testament: when Jesus said he had come “to set a man against his father, a daughter against her own mother,” or when Jesus was being arrested and allowed an apostle to lop off a slave’s ear (which he later healed). “These are the parts no one ever preaches about,” Osler told me beforehand.

The Bible he carries is marked up like a law document and has so many tabs he sometimes has trouble finding the passage he’s looking for.

The trial isn’t scripted. Not only do Bishop and Osler not know what the other will say, but they don’t know how witnesses, like the apostle Simon Peter, who are played by people in the community, will respond to their questions. The performers must abide by the Bible, but everyone approaches the roles differently.

During Osler’s lengthy questioning of Simon Peter, whom he treats as a hostile witness, he zeroes in on Jesus’s power. “You’ve seen other things that demonstrate certain powers—a form of magic, really—displayed by the defendant. For instance, his ability to walk on water,” he says to the young man playing Peter.

“I wouldn’t consider it magic, really,” the man replies.

“Have you met anyone else who has that ability?” Osler shoots back.

Bishop’s job is less transgressive, as she makes a plea for the life of Jesus in front of audiences, most of whom believe in his divinity. She points to his good works, his attempts to get away from crowds, and his focus on nonviolence. “No one is beyond the forgiveness of God,” she says.

This is the most explicitly religious project Osler has tackled. He makes a point of performing the trial in front of skeptical audiences. In general, Osler does little to engage with progressive Christians because, as he puts it, “they’re not the people I have to convince.” During a question-and-answer session at Loyola, Osler reiterates that his purpose is to challenge Christians on the death penalty.

“The death penalty would not exist in the United States without Christian support,” he says. So far, only one jury has sentenced Jesus to death.

When Osler discusses his faith, he comes

t h i s pa g e a n d o p p o s i t e : t h o m a s w h i s e n a n d / u n i v e r s i t y o f s t. t h o m a s

MSNBC, he argued that the White House was

across as someone who is comfortable in his own skin, capable of making bad jokes and trenchant observations in the same breath. His earnest questions and his willingness to grapple publicly are rooted in a deep certainty—in God, in faith, and in his place in the world.

In his view, everything he does connects to a central belief that he is a Christian and should therefore try to cultivate mercy where it’s lacking and justice where it’s needed.

In the tradition of Anabaptists, Osler is noncreedal and never joins in when his church begins prewritten prayers. His prayers are his own. “A creed is written by someone else,” he says, “and because of that, it’s someone else’s statement of a relationship with God.”

evangelism. I talk about faith all the time. I don’t always do it in a way that’s conscious. It makes some people uncomfortable.” Osler says he wants to reclaim the word “evangelical,” in the same way that the radical gay-rights group Queer Nation uses a slur as a term of empowerment. “Embracing the word and defining it for yourself is a powerful thing,” he says. “I want ‘evangelical’ to mean someone who is deeply broken and seeks community.”

The idea of being broken and seeking community—whether you’re a drug dealer serving a prison term or a former prosecutor seeking reform—is fundamental to Osler. It was why he ended his sermon at First Covenant Church not with a passionate plea for social justice

Jeanne Bishop, opposing counsel, makes the case that Jesus’s life should be spared: “No one is beyond the forgiveness of God.”

As some of his admirers note, Osler doesn’t conform to the standard expectations of an evangelical. He doesn’t abstain from alcohol, he doesn’t regularly say grace before meals, and he’s not eager to convert nonbelievers.

Even the way he talks about abortion is not hard-line. “If a baby is capable of being born alive, I really struggle with justifying the practice,” he says, explaining that he believes the state should offer to assume the costs of delivery and early care for any woman considering abortion at the point the fetus is viable.

But Osler’s identification with evangelism is strong. “An evangelical means you’re unashamed of your faith, you’re willing to let other people see it,” he says. “That’s a form of

but with an account of his own vulnerability. He described spending the previous July teaching in Rome. Many days, he felt lonely and grumpy, wandering the city and taking a strange solace in the toys sold in piazzas by immigrant men—little rockets that shot up and then helicoptered down with a glowing blue light, “like angels.”

One morning, he received a phone call from his parents back in Michigan. “My nephew, who’s eight years old, had died. I traveled to Detroit to see my brother and his wife. Those of us who were left. To try to get over the loss of this vibrant child, the loudest of the gaggle of loud cousins who’d been so full of life. Heartbroken, all of us.”

Women in the audience started to sniffle. People began to realize the sermon had taken an unexpected turn, that it was going somewhere far more personal than they anticipated.

After the funeral, Osler returned to Rome and found himself in the piazza where the immigrant vendors sold the rockets. He approached a vendor who spoke little English or Italian and asked if he could buy one. “He looks behind me, and he says, ‘Where is the child?’ And there was something about that question that just broke me.”

The pauses between Osler’s sentences became more frequent, the words more halting.

“I told him in English, ‘There is no child.’

Then something changed in him. Because he may well have been from a country where children who are eight years old die. They die of diseases that are curable. They die because they don’t have enough food. They die because the roads are bad and they get hit by a car.

They die from drinking the water.

“There’s something that just softened in him in that moment. He looked at me and said something that I understood to be, ‘What happened?’ And I told him, ‘My brother was canoeing with his son, and the boat capsized, and rescue didn’t come soon enough. My brother survived, and his son did not.’

“And I cried. He didn’t say anything. He reached out and touched me on the shoulder and he gave me this.” Osler pulled out a toy that in any other context would look like schlock but at the moment had all the weight of a holy object. “The man put his hands out that he wouldn’t take payment—because he was from a place where children die.

“That was grace. And it’s grace that seeps into the cracks of ourselves, if we let them be seen, let ourselves be vulnerable, let ourselves get to that place where we can both show mercy and receive it. Because it is the same place.

Grace can come, our unclean spirits cleansed, if we acknowledge in our hearts the essence of humility that there is a god and that is not me. The god that is—the god that is—turns the world upside down.

“Lord, you are greater than our imagination.

Let that humility be a force in our lives. In our chasteness, drive us to what is good. Amen.”

Osler smiled and sat down. 

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 69

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Glorious, Ghastly News The media’s journey from mass to niche to our own personal information snowflake BY PAUL WALDMAN B

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john cuneo

“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.… We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.” —henry david thoreau, walden (1854)

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f there’s one complaint about politics we’ve heard more than any other in the past few years, it is the pernicious development known as “polarization.”

Not only has politics been taken

over by partisans, but Americans have begun choosing where to live based on where they’ll find a community of the like-minded.

Our news media are the cause and result of this sorting, encouraging

us to narrow our view and delivering us the news they’re sure we want to hear.

It’s a familiar tale, told by both popular commentators and academics. In a major study of the

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way information sources affect people’s views, a group of researchers found that voters gravitated to media they knew wouldn’t challenge their opinion, “but—and this is important—the more strongly partisan the person, the more likely he is to insulate himself from contrary points of view,” wrote the study’s authors. Voters didn’t just prefer news outlets with an ideology similar to theirs; they found them more credible. “The partisans ascribed ‘impartiality’ and ‘veracity’ to the media which presented views similar to their own. … A transfer was effected from partisan value to truth value.”

A statement of the obvious, you might say. But this study, by

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 71

Paul Lazarsfeld and his colleagues at Columbia University, was conducted nearly three-quarters of a century ago. The scholars interviewed voters in advance of the 1940 presidential contest between Franklin Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie, then described the results in their 1944 book The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign.

Long before Fox decided to tweak liberals by branding itself “fair and balanced,” Americans were convinced that objectivity lay wherever they found agreement with what they believed.

We think of our current era as a time of constant upheaval. The new is displacing the old; the Internet is swallowing “legacy media.” Every year or two, a next-generation Web platform comes along, and sages of the information age tell us This Changes Everything. But most of the media challenges we confront today aren’t so new, and they didn’t begin with the World Wide Web; the difference is the speed with which each subsequent development moves us along the path we were already on.

At their respective inceptions, both radio and television were touted as wonders of societal advancement, in no small part because they could bring us closer together. Television’s early proponents believed it could become not only a provider of universal education—where working stiffs would watch lectures on philosophy and take in Hamlet after dinner—but a force for cultural coalescence. In some ways it was—a schoolteacher in Boise and a stevedore in Boston would not only watch the same entertainment; they’d see the same news and learn the same (few) things about what had happened that day. By the 1950s, television news had become a kind of common national text.

But in the middle of the 20th century, critics argued that as we became the “mass” in “mass media,” we, made ever more passive by television’s compelling pictures, would lose our ability to think for ourselves. They devised theories with names like “narcotizing dysfunction” and “mean world syndrome,” positing that media were turning us into easily manipulated, semiconscious blobs, mainlining

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soporific entertainment into brains losing their ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality. We were watching life, not living it.

“The making of the illusions which flood our experience has become the business of America,” wrote Daniel Boorstin in The Image: Or What Happened to the American Dream (1961).

The problem was in both form and content—trivial yet enticing, simultaneously enthralling and mindnumbing. We were, as the title of Neil Postman’s 1985 book had it, amusing ourselves to death.

As the 20th century approached its end, the mass media of the previous period took on a favorable glow.

When media choices multiplied, the citizenry began to balkanize, and “fragmentation” became the media scholar’s new lament. What started it? Cable television. Not cable news, which was a later development, and not ideological cable news, which didn’t begin until Fox News went on the air in 1996. scientist Markus Prior has shown that the spread of cable-television penetration in an area heightens political polarization. The effect was visible as far back as the 1970s. After cable arrived in a region, you’d see a decrease in split-ticket voting. This happened not because of news but because other offerings, like sports and entertainment, lured people who had only a marginal interest away from the news.

Once viewers had choices, they tuned out and started voting at lower rates, leaving a news audience and an electorate more dominated by partisans.

This was not just an American phenomenon. Between the 1970s and 1990s, one country after another went from a small number of statesponsored television channels (or in many places just one) to a multitude of choices. As media scholar Elihu Katz wrote in 1996, “From the point of view of participatory democracy, television is dead, almost everywhere. It no longer serves as the central civic space; one can no longer be certain that one is viewing together with everybody else or even anybody else, and the here-and-now of current affairs is

PRINCETON POLITICAL

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being minimized and ghettoized and overwhelmed by entertainment.”

The decline of current-affairs media has only gotten worse. A few decades ago, half the households in America with televisions tuned to the network nightly news. Last year, the combined rating for these shows averaged less than one in six households. An endless string of Lipitor and Viagra ads attests to the advancing age of those shows’ viewers. In fact, every one of the legacy media— newspapers, television news, and radio—has an audience more weighted to the old than the young.

The medium whose death is warned about most often is the newspaper. Again, the story we’ve heard isn’t quite complete. That story has it that these journalistic dinosaurs were laid low when a guy named Craig Newmark created a bare-bones website for people to find a roommate or sell that treadmill they never got around to using, and in short order robbed newspapers of the classifiedad revenue that had made up a significant portion of their income. As more people migrated to the Web, ad revenues plummeted and the medium entered its death throes. Those things did happen. But the decline of newspapers goes back further. Newspaper circulation has been on a downward arc since at least the 1940s.

DAILY NEWSPAPER CIRCULATION per 100 americans, 1950–2011 35 30 25 20 15 1950

2011

The cost-cutting that led to the evisceration of local news coverage also predates the Internet. In the 1980s, large, publicly traded corporations like Gannett bought dozens of small and midsize papers, often slashing local coverage and time-consuming investigations in favor of cheaper wire stories. Not long ago, the idea that a city the size of New Orleans wouldn’t have

a daily newspaper would have been unthinkable. But last year, the city’s sole remaining daily, The Times-­Picayune, cut back to three days a week.

When Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post last year, he got it for a song—only $250 million (compare that to the $315 million AOL paid for The Huffington Post three years earlier). Bezos’s lack of a background in journalism, not to mention much of an apparent political agenda, may make him a prototypical media owner for our age. One of the most critical features of “Web 2.0” giants like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube is that the owners are essentially agnostic about content. Most of it is created by users; the owners manage the platform and count their money. While you may not think of those companies as “the media,” they most certainly are. According to Google, which owns YouTube, 100 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute, and more than 6 billion hours are watched every month.

Bezos won’t be firing all the Post’s reporters and replacing them with Amazon commenters; if anything, he’ll put more money into content created by professionals, though perhaps a more diverse group than ink-stained, shoe-leather reporters. (This obviously has limits; when star Post blogger Ezra Klein proposed an expanded news and policy blog reportedly costing eight figures, the paper declined and Klein moved his venture to Vox Media, a company that runs a series of successful, high-traffic sites covering topics like sports and technology.) Nor is Bezos the only tech billionaire trying his hand at journalism. EBay founder Pierre Omidyar recently hired Glenn Greenwald, famous for his role in documenting the Edward Snowden revelations in The Guardian, to lead a new project called First Look Media, which will “publish a family of digital magazines.” The first of these, The Intercept, launched in February with a report on how the NSA uses electronic surveillance to locate targets for assassination.

Though First Look Media is a forprofit company, with its initial focus on lengthy investigative pieces over breaking news, it resembles not so much a traditional newspaper or

MURDOCH’S WORLD: THE LAST OF THE OLD MEDIA EMPIRES

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magazine, but something more like ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative journalism enterprise. Last year, ProPublica released a massive report on accidental deaths from overdoses of acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol; the investigation took two years and cost more than $750,000. Neil Barsky, a journalist turned hedge-fund manager, recently recruited former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller to lead the Marshall Project, a kind of singleissue ProPublica focused on the criminal justice system. We could use many more undertakings like it, but there are only so many billionaires with an interest in journalism willing to fund projects that nourish our democracy but might not make money.

The relative scarcity of civic-­ minded but costly investigations is more worrisome when the major news outlets are spending so much of their time trying to react to the rise of social media and their ever-more individualized audiences. Desperate to keep up with what the kids are into, Brian Williams tells his superannuated viewers about this week’s hottest viral video, and Wolf Blitzer reads tweets on the air, just like Edward R. Murrow would have done. Television news operations want to plug in to the new social web lest they get left behind, even as they still use gross demographic distinctions like people between 18 and 49 (known in the industry as “the demo”), giving them only the vaguest picture of their audience as a whole and nothing in particular about you personally. Political campaigns, on the other hand, have grown so sophisticated at gathering and parsing multiple data sources that they practically know what every voter will eat for breakfast on Election Day. As tools old and new have enabled us each to become our own target audience, we’ve gotten a clearer view of ourselves and one another. Media used to tame our politics and calm our intemperate fevers; the rhetoric we heard from our betters manning the airwaves was measured and formal.

There were exceptions, like Father Coughlin, whose anti-Semitic diatribes reached millions of radio listeners in the 1930s. But the prevailing

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 73

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norms required a more polite politics so that as many of us as possible could partake of the same news meal.

In recent years, media moguls raking in millions (healthy profits can still be had in a declining industry) realized there was gold in channeling, and heightening, base emotions. When you aren’t worried about attracting everyone, you can offend large swaths of the potential audience without fear.

Offending can even become your business model, so long as you’re aiming at the people your target audience hates.

Rage can be a ratings winner, and no one nurtures it with more glee, or more profitably, than Fox News and Roger Ailes, who has run the network since its inception in 1996. The enemies are clearly defined: liberal politicians, pointy-headed professors, and above all the allegedly liberal media. Fox never stops telling its viewers, these are the people you should be angry with.

As David Folkenflik writes in Murdoch’s World: The Last of the Old Media Empires, “Ailes knew that Fox’s defining feature would require a highly cultivated resentment toward other news organizations.” Sustaining a steady stream of ire is no easy task, which is why talents like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, who can bristle with anger for hours on end, deserve their lofty perches in the media pantheon.

There are limits to what that anger can accomplish, however. Though Ailes’s genius always lay in creating compelling, profitable television while serving the political interests of the Republican Party, the changing demographics of the Obama era threatened the second part of that equation. When Democrats characterize the GOP as a bunch of angry white guys who don’t respect women and minorities, their point is made clear by the fact that the network at the center of the conservative media universe features a bunch of angry white guys and a bevy of beautiful blondes. By 2012, more and more people were asking whether Fox was helping or hurting the Republican cause. As Gabriel Sherman notes in The Loudest Voice in the Room, his recent biography of Ailes, a broadbased political appeal for Republicans isn’t served by “the vivid political comedy Fox often programmed. … In

pursuit of ratings, Fox had sharpened national divisions—and the division had favored the Democrats.” According to Nielsen data, the median Fox viewer is 65-plus, and only 1 percent of the network’s audience is black. It wouldn’t be surprising if, after being told for months that the liberal media’s polls were wrong and Mitt Romney was headed for a smashing victory, those viewers were as shocked by the election’s actual results as some of Fox’s on-air personalities were.

THAT ISN’T TO SAY that Fox and the

rest of the conservative media don’t still pull in healthy audiences and make plenty of money. In their new book, The Outrage Industry, Tufts University professors Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj estimate the combined audience for “outrage media” on radio, television, and the Internet at 47 million per day. Combining media analysis with fan interviews, they found that angry presentations serve an important psychological purpose.

As one interview subject said admiringly about O’Reilly, “There’s some appeal in watching somebody who’s obnoxious in a way generally you can’t be.” When interacting with actual humans, the fans of these programs are constrained by the fear that relations will grow awkward, but they find their true selves in watching a guy on TV luxuriate in his contempt.

So while political campaigns craft their granular voter-by-voter appeals, they also enact a kabuki of outrage pitched for the national news media.

Some “gaffe” gets uttered and then taken out of context, the deep offense is proclaimed, pundits mull over what profound character defect has been revealed, and a few days later the cycle begins again. Outrage keeps the campaign momentum moving and certain audiences coming back. You too can be Bill O’Reilly, albeit with a smaller audience; all it takes is a visit to a website and a click of the “add comment” button to tell those jerks what you think of them. Hit that button, and you’re not lost in a mass audience anymore. You’re an individual again.

Whether you’re spewing out your anger or bestowing a smiley-faced blessing on an article or video that

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Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly, April 2012

brightened your day, the media industry wants and needs to know. Every editor tracks how many likes and tweets each piece of journalism produces, hoping all those atomized individuals will signal their approval or their displeasure and pass it along. As the price for our re-individualization, we’ve laid ourselves bare. The National Security Administration knows whom you’ve called, and maybe what websites you’ve visited. Google knows what you’ve searched for and tailors the ads you see to products it knows you’re interested in. Facebook holds on to every photo you’ve posted and thought you’ve shared; the company can now track where your cursor hovers when you lazily peruse that exgirlfriend’s page. You can express your consternation about the latest revelation of domestic spying, right after you show the world a picture of your children. We’ve built our own personal panopticons from the inside out, clicking “I accept” again and again, and we didn’t need a tyrannical government’s help to do it.

That isn’t to minimize all the wondrous ways the Internet has enriched the lives of hundreds of millions. Today, we have reached what is undoubtedly the golden age of information, and the Internet is full of writers and analysts who rose to some measure of prominence not because they put in time on the metro desk but because they displayed talent and creativity. A thousand Web magazines

have been launched with a tiny fraction of what it would cost to put the same content into print. Whether your interest is a big topic like technology or a small one like hamster breeding, you can more easily find thoughtful writing about it today than you ever could before. Multiple newspapers have gone out of business, but The New York Times and The Guardian produce some of the most extraordinarily well-crafted visual data presentations to be found anywhere. The websites of groups like the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Responsive Politics have made information about politicians, funders, and government easier to obtain and understand. A project like Retro Report, which revisits stories from recent history like the “crack baby” epidemic of the 1980s (sometimes with surprising results) would never have come about before the Internet. Between its print and online versions, even this modest liberal magazine publishes far more journalism and analysis than it did 10 or 15 years ago. An accounting of the Internet’s wonders could go on almost forever.

An open system without barriers to entry also produces a nearly endless supply of ugliness, as people are liberated to pour their ids into their keyboards. Ask any woman who has blogged about a controversial topic, and she’ll tell you about the torrent of hatred and rape threats that come her way. Behind every vicious tweet is one human being gaining pleasure from

By 2012, more and more people were asking whether Fox was

HELPING OR HURTING the Republican cause.

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spewing bile at another. These are not psychopaths posting between murders; they’re regular folk who would say they’re good people. Some media outlets have chosen to turn off the spigot; this past September, Popular Science announced that it would no longer allow comments on its website.

“Because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them,” the online content director wrote, “the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.”

It might be easier to say, as some doomsayers have at the turn of every new media era, that our current age is a disaster and everything we value has been lost or, at least, is about to be lost.

But that’s no truer today than it was in 1960 or 1980 or 2000 (to say nothing of the time a couple of millennia ago when Socrates fretted that the dangerous habit of writing would destroy people’s ability to trust their own memories). Or, like the techno-boosters who find the full flowering of human potential in every banal tweet, one could proclaim the reporters and newspapers that have gone to pasture nothing more than this century’s buggy-whip producers, the inevitable and vaguely pathetic casualties of progress’s march.

The truth is, as ever, more complex.

The move from mass to niche, from media meant to appeal to everyone to media tailored for your particular idiosyncrasies, has brought with it the glorious and the ghastly. Eventually, another communication revolution will make Web 2.0 look like old news. That revolution may reorient society’s power relationships in ways that expand human freedom and dignity, or it may bring frightening new societal consequences. It may even do both. We were a single mass, then a fragmented collection of groups.

The best bet is that we are now on our way toward a new radical individuality, and the day when we each inhabit an information snowflake like no one else’s. Even if we won’t ever inhabit a unique information snowflake, we will likely watch—and be watched— with a specificity that even today we can scarcely imagine. 

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Piketty’s Triumph Three takes on the French economist’s data-driven magnum opus on inequality B

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In the 1990s, two young French economists then affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, began the first rigorous effort to gather facts on income inequality in developed countries going back decades. In the wake of the 2007 financial crash, fundamental questions about the economy that had long been ignored again garnered attention. Piketty and Saez’s research stood ready with data showing that elites in developed countries had, in recent years, grown far wealthier relative to the general population than most economists had suspected. By the past decade, according to Piketty and Saez, inequality had returned to levels nearing those of the early 20th century.

Last fall, Piketty published his magnum opus, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, in France. The book seeks to model the history, recent trends, and backto-the-19th-century future of capitalism. The American Prospect asked experts and scholars in the field of inequality to weigh in on Piketty’s argument and potential impact for policymaking on our shores.

JACOB S. HACKER , director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies and Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science at Yale, and PAUL PIERSON , the John Gross Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley, are the co-authors most recently of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class.

HEATHER BOUSHEY is the executive director and chief economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. BRANKO MILANOVIC is a visiting presidential professor at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, a visiting senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center, and the author of The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality.

A Tocqueville for Today

BY JACOB S. HACKER AND PAUL PIERSON

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hen Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the early 1830s, the aspect of the new republic that most stimulated him was its remarkable social equality.

“America, then, exhibits in her social state an extraordinary phenomenon,” Tocqueville marveled. “Men are there seen on a greater equality in point of fortune and intellect … than in any other country of the world, or in any age of which history has preserved the remembrance.”

To Tocqueville, who largely ignored the grim exception of the South, America’s progress toward greater equality was inevitable, the expansion

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of its democratic spirit unstoppable.

Europe, he believed, would soon follow America’s lead. He was right—sort of. Democracy was on the rise, but so too was inequality. Only with the 20th century’s Great Depression, two terrible wars, and the creation of the modern welfare state did concentrations of economic advantage in rich democracies start to dissipate and the fruits of rapid growth begin to accrue generously to ordinary workers.

Now another Frenchman with a panoramic vista—and far more precise evidence—wants us to think anew about the progress of equality and democracy. Though an heir to Tocqueville’s tradition of analytic history, Thomas Piketty has a message that could not be more different: Unless we act, inequality will grow much worse, eventually making a mockery of our democratic institutions.

With wealth more and more concentrated, countries racing to cut taxes on capital, and inheritance coming

CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

BY THOMAS PIKETTY TRANSLATED BY ARTHUR GOLDHAMMER

Harvard University Press

to rival entrepreneurship as a source of riches, a new patrimonial elite may prove as inevitable as Tocqueville once believed democratic equality was.

This forecast is based not on speculation but on facts assembled through prodigious research. Piketty’s startling numbers show that the share of national income coming from capital—once comfortingly believed to be stable—is on the rise. Private wealth has reached new highs relative to national income and is approaching levels of concentration not seen since before 1929.

Piketty’s powerful intellectual move is to place the subject of American income inequality in a broader historical and cross-national context. The forces most responsible for our egalitarian past, Piketty reminds us, were rapid growth—both of the population and of the economy overall. France never had the former, which is why it had a true “rentier” class of propertied aristocrats in the early 20th century when the United States was still a land of small-scale owners and the newly rich. Yet economic growth remains the biggest factor: When the economy expands modestly from year to year, returns on capital generally exceed the advance of labor income, and fortunes of the already rich grow while the rest of society falls behind.

Since the resurgence of income inequality, concerned observers have comforted themselves with the notion that holdings of wealth—while far more unequally distributed than income—are not amassing at the top as quickly as incomes are. If we look forward, however, that reassuring notion appears suspect. Some of the great fortunes made in the new gilded age will fund philanthropy or frivolity.

Most, however, will be funneled back into capital investment or passed on to heirs. Piketty notes that the returns of such investments are invariably largest for those with the greatest wealth— the Matthew effect is another force for increasing concentration. Meanwhile, inheritances are returning as a major source of advantage for the already advantaged. As rising income inequality passes down through a narrowing demographic pyramid, we can expect wealth bequests to become

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j e r o m e c h at i n / e x pa n s i o n - r e a / r e d u x

Thomas Piketty

an increasingly important source of inherited privilege.

Piketty is rightly pessimistic about an immediate response. The influence of the wealthy on democratic politics and on how we think about merit and reward presents formidable obstacles.

Fierce international competition for the rich and their dollars leads Piketty to believe that without a serious countermovement, capital taxation will trend toward zero. Inequality is becoming a “wicked” problem like climate change— one in which a solution must not only overcome powerful entrenched interests in individual countries but must be global in scope to be effective.

Nonetheless, it is capital taxation, and ultimately global capital taxation, that Piketty sees as the eventual solution. Taxing only consumption

and labor income violates the notion that citizens should finance the commonwealth on the basis of their ability to pay. A global capital tax—modest, progressive, based on transparency— could reinforce the fraying link between economic standing and individual contributions toward vital collective activities. Moreover, halting progress in this direction has already taken place, as rich countries seek—without great success so far— to crack down on the tax havens and corporate financial engineering that increasingly make taxes voluntary for the superrich. Because wealth is still so concentrated in advanced industrial nations, agreements that covered citizens of and transactions within Europe and North America would go a long way toward bringing

Inequality is becoming a

“WICKED” PROBLEM

like climate change.

these activities into the open. A modest tax on the largest fortunes might also encourage more productive uses of capital, gradually taxing away big estates with small returns.

Piketty suggests that the pressures for change will eventually prove overwhelming. Either ever-richer capitalists will tear one another apart in the race for diminishing returns, or the rest of society will rise up and impose a fairer framework. For a book that insists on the primacy of politics, however, Piketty has relatively little to say about how—with organized labor weakened, moneyed interests strengthened, and anti-government forces emboldened— the kind of political movement necessary for a fairer future will emerge. (It was war, after all, not universal suffrage, that ultimately tamed inequality

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in the 20th century.) Yet perhaps with this magisterial book, the troubling realities Piketty unearths will become more visible and the rationalizations of the privileged that sustain them less dominant. Like Tocqueville, Piketty has given us a new image of ourselves.

This time, it’s one we should resist, not welcome.

Against U.S. Economic Clichés

BY HEATHER BOUSHEY

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apital in the Twenty-First Century is written in the tradition of great economic texts.

Where John Maynard Keynes wrote The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in reaction to the “classical economists” and Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital in reaction to the “bourgeois economists,” Thomas Piketty writes in reaction to the “U.S. economists.” Like his predecessors, he does not mince words. After taking a professorship at MIT at 22, he moved back to Paris at 25, in 1995, because “I did not find the work of U.S. economists very convincing.”

Piketty’s method is an explicit critique of academics “too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems of interest only to themselves.” While mathematical tools are critical to the modern economics profession, Piketty is right to call on all social scientists, including economists, to “start with fundamental questions and try to answer them.”

Piketty asks two fundamental questions in his new book: “What do we really know about how wealth and income have evolved since the eighteenth century, what lessons can we derive from that knowledge for the century now under way?” Piketty and his colleagues have spent recent years putting together a World Top Incomes Database, their detailed investigation into income in countries around the globe, spanning several decades. In some cases—France and the United Kingdom—he also relies on facts about the accumulation of wealth

Thomas Piketty calls on all social scientists, including economists, to “start with

FUNDAMENTAL

QUESTIONS

and try to answer them.”

going back centuries. As he puts it, “It is by patiently establishing facts and patterns and then comparing different countries that we can hope to identify the mechanisms at work and gain a clearer idea of the future.”

Informed by this historical, crosscountry data, Piketty evaluates—and rejects—a number of generally accepted conclusions in economic thought, while being careful to note the limitations of inevitably “imperfect and incomplete” sources. The main finding of his investigation is that capital still matters. The data show a recent resurgence in developed countries of the importance of capital income relative to national income, back to levels last seen before World War I. In Piketty’s analysis, without rapid economic growth—which he argues is highly unlikely now that population growth is slowing—returns from investment will continue to grow faster than output. Inheritances and income inequality will keep rising, possibly to levels higher than ever seen.

Among other conclusions, the data lead Piketty to describe the popular argument that we live in an era where our talents and capabilities matter most as “mindless optimism.” The data also lead him to reject the idea that wage inequality has grown as technological change increased the demand for higher-skilled, collegeeducated workers.

Instead, Piketty’s evidence suggests it is the rise of what he calls the “supermanager” among the top 1 percent since 1980 that is driving the rise in earnings inequality. It is here that Piketty takes his sharpest swipe at economists. In his discussion of the thriving top decile, he points out that “among the members of these upper income groups are U.S. academic economists, many of whom believe that the economy of the United States is working fairly well and, in particular, that it rewards talent and merit accurately and precisely. This is a very comprehensible human reaction.” Piketty agrees that in the long run, investments in education are an important component of any plan to reduce labor-market inequalities and improve productivity. But on their own they’re not sufficient.

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This book is significant for its findings, as well as for how Piketty arrives at them. It’s easy—and fun—to argue about ideas. It is much more difficult to argue about facts. Facts are what Piketty gives us, while pressing the reader to engage in the journey of sorting through their implications.

Must We Return to “Pre-tamed” Capitalism?

BY BRANKO MILANOVIC

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homas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a monumental book that will influence economic analysis (and perhaps policymaking) in the years to come. In the way it is written and the importance of the questions it asks, it is a book the classic authors of economics could have written if they lived today and had access to the vast empirical material Piketty and his colleagues collected.

Piketty’s key message is both simple and, once understood, almost selfevident. Under capitalism, if the rate of return on private wealth (defined to include physical and financial capital, land, and housing) exceeds the rate of growth of the economy, the share of capital income in the net product will increase. If most of that increase in capital income is reinvested, the capital-to-income ratio will rise. This will further increase the share of capital income in the net output. The percentage of people who do not need to work in order to earn their living (the rentiers) will go up. The distribution of personal income will become even more unequal.

The story elegantly combines theories of growth, functional distribution of income (between capital and labor), and income inequality between individuals. It aims to provide nothing less than the description of a capitalist economy.

Two questions can be asked: Why didn’t this model hold during the period of “the golden age” of capitalism

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(between approximately 1945 and 1975), when functional income distribution was stable and income inequality declined? Why does it matter for the 21st century? The answer to the first question is that the “short 20th century” was special. The physical destruction associated with two world wars led to a significant destruction of the advanced world’s capital stock.

In addition, the advent of the welfare state, motivated by the Great Depression and strong socialist movements, imposed a need to heavily tax capital.

The 20th century was thus different from the 19th. Through the action of wars and social movements, capitalism appeared to most social scientists to have been “tamed.” Piketty argues that this view turns out to have been wrong. The fundamental nature of capitalism was not altered—the external circumstances were different.

Why does Piketty’s model herald the return of “patrimonial capitalism” (the term he introduces to mean that an important part of the upper class receives income from property) in the 21st century? The reasons are the reverse of the ones that drove developments during the short 20th century.

The period of prosperity after the end of World War II saw the rebuilding of large fortunes (owned, of course, by different people today); the capitalto-output ratio in advanced countries gradually rose back to the higher levels of prewar years. The ReaganThatcher revolutions of the 1980s reduced the taxation of capital, and of high incomes in general, and further increased the share of capital in net output. If this process continues, the return to features of 19th-­century capitalism is inevitable.

The return is all the more likely since the rate of growth—at the technological frontier where most rich countries operate today, that rate is equal to the sum of “pure” technological progress and population growth— is decreasing. Once the convergence of Europe and Asia to U.S.-like levels of income is achieved, the rate of growth cannot exceed more than, say, 2.5 percent per annum (a combination of about 1.5 percent in technological progress and 1 percent in population growth). Piketty writes: “Decreased

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growth—especially demographic growth—is thus responsible for capital’s comeback.” If the rate of return on private wealth is higher than 2.5 percent, then the 19th-century-like effects of “pre-tamed” capitalism will reappear.

OR WILL THEY? There are significant

A GLOBAL TAX ON CAPITAL

is, in Piketty’s view, the only way to make both capitalism and democracy sustainable.

differences between the 19th century and ours that Piketty does not fully acknowledge, although he mentions them. First, it is not obvious that the rate of return on private wealth will remain high enough to sustain Piketty’s prediction. Even if we look at the admittedly transitory situation of today, the rate of return is stuck barely above zero percent, less than the rate of growth of the rich world’s economies.

The tendency toward a decreasing rate of return, possibly lower than the rate of growth, cannot be ruled out.

Second, the role of labor incomes has changed since the 19th century.

As Piketty acknowledges (he writes about it in both this and earlier works), extraordinarily high labor incomes play a larger role in society today than in the past, even if they concern mostly the richest 1 percent through 5 percent of income recipients—not the top 0.1 percent, where “capital is still king.” A dose of “meritocracy” has been introduced into the distribution. The overlap between being rich and owning capital so evident in the 19th century will be less prominent in the 21st.

Third—the convergence of China, and even more that of India, and even more that of Africa—may take a century or longer to complete. As long as the convergence is still ongoing, global growth will be higher than the steadystate rate of 2.5 percent due to the faster growth rate of “infra technological frontier” countries such as China, India, Nigeria, and Indonesia. This is an aspect of the problem that Piketty neglects. The former Third World might end up playing the same role in the 21st century that Europe, Japan, South Korea, and others played in the past 50 years—maintaining upward global growth as they were catching up with the United States.

So these are possible problems with Piketty’s analysis. But if we take

it at its face value, what are the remedies he suggests? A global tax on capital—needed to curb the tendency of advanced capitalism to generate a skewed distribution of income in favor of property holders. The high taxation of capital, and of inheritance in particular, is not something new, as Piketty amply demonstrates. It is technically feasible since information on the ownership of most assets, from housing to stock shares, is available.

(Piketty, by the way, provides lots of specific information on how the tax could be implemented. He also gives some notional rates: no tax on capital below almost 1.4 million dollars, 1 percent on capital between 1.4 million and 6.8 million dollars, and 2 percent on capital above 6.8 million dollars.)

For such a global tax to be effective, however, a huge amount of coordination would be required among the leading countries—a task to whose challenges Piketty is not oblivious. Implementation by one or two countries, even the most important economies, could lead to capital flight.

The main offshore tax havens would also have to cooperate, although they would lose hugely lucrative business.

But an agreement across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on the uniform taxation of wealth, however farfetched it might seem today, should be put on the table. This is, in Piketty’s view, the only way to “regulate capitalism” and make both capitalism and democracy sustainable in the long run.

In a short review, it is impossible to do even partial justice to the wealth of information, data, analysis, and discussion contained in this book of almost 700 pages. Piketty has returned economics to the classical roots where it seeks to understand the “laws of motion” of capitalism. He has re-emphasized the distinction between “unearned” and “earned” income that had been tucked away for so long under misleading terminologies of “human capital,” “economic agents,” and “factors of production.”

Labor and capital—those who have to work for a living and those who live from property—people in flesh—are squarely back in economics via this great book. 

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Loving the Opera in HD Once controversial, Metropolitan Opera broadcasts for movie-theater audiences have become a gateway for new (and returning) fans. BY DEBORAH WEISGALL M U

upper: julie jacobson / ap images lo w e r : k e n h o wa r d / m e t r o p o l i ta n o p e r a

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n a Saturday afternoon last December, I picked up my ticket for the Metropolitan Opera’s Falstaff and hurried down the backstage corridors to a trailer behind Lincoln Center. The crew of Live in HD, the Met’s popular series of broadcasts to movie theaters, was crowded into the truck before an array of monitors. On the main monitor, the soprano Renée Fleming, in a bronzy, shimmering dress, stood in the wings rehearsing her intro.

“On this snowy day in New York,” Fleming began and recited information: Falstaff, which premiered in 1893, was the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi’s last, sublime work, a comedy based on Shakespeare’s The Merry

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Wives of Windsor. This was the Met’s first new production of the opera in five decades, and James Levine, the Met’s music director, was back in the orchestra pit after an absence of more than two years.

When Fleming finished, you could hear broadcast director Gary Halvorson asking for a lighting adjustment; he brought the camera forward. Fleming sang a little run and smiled. “I feel a top note coming on,” she said.

A few moments later, Halvorson bounded up metal stairs into the truck.

The crew took their seats in front of the control panels. Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager, had told me earlier that Halvorson— a Juilliard-­trained pianist who in

In “the truck,” a mobile broadcast studio outside the Metropolitan Opera, during a rehearsal taping of Verdi’s Macbeth Deborah Voigt as Brünnhilde in Wagner’s Die Walküre

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addition to directing music, dance, and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade for television directed 55 episodes of Friends—possesses “the instincts of a jet-fighter pilot.” That makes Gelb, who sits just behind him, the co-pilot. These broadcasts have defined Gelb’s tenure at the Met; he introduced them within months of taking over in 2006.

It was time for me to take my seat in the theater.

Meanwhile, at movie houses in 12 time zones, audiences had staked out seats, too, and munched on breakfast or dinner while waiting for the show to go live with shots of the red and gold theater and sounds of the orchestra warming up.

The Met broadcasts have brought opera to larger audiences, and they have made the company a superpower of opera, or an 800pound gorilla—savior or scourge, depending on your point of view. Many musicians and opera lovers won’t think of going. They reject a mediated experience—a camera dictating what they will see, music piped in through a sound system. For several years, I would not go, either.

I love opera. It’s the family sport. My father, Hugo Weisgall, composed them; opera filled his life. We entered through the stage doors, at the City Center on 56th Street and at the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, where the New York City Opera performed my father’s work. I attended my first performance—Verdi’s La Traviata, in Prague—in utero. There was no adventurous opera company in Baltimore, where we lived when I was small, so my father started one, with simple sets and young singers, nothing like the grand opera in Vienna he’d seen as a boy.

I sat blissfully under the piano while singers rehearsed in our living room. Music vibrated through my bones, and my ears hurt; I was terrified and enchanted by those same singers unrecognizable on

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stage in makeup and costume. I went to operas by Mozart, Britten, Menotti, Gilbert and Sullivan, Verdi, even Wagner that Anti-Semitic-Son-of-a-Bitch, which is what my father called the über-romantic composer whose music drowned you with tsunamis of sound and who, along with his more humane rival Verdi, defined opera in the 19th century, when it was the Western world’s most popular art form.

Every city had its opera house; tenors were heartthrobs. Operas marked important occasions—Aida was commissioned for the new Cairo opera house, which was built in anticipation of the Suez Canal. Verdi closed rehearsals of Rigoletto so that people wouldn’t start whistling “La donna è mobile” on the streets before the premiere.

But by the time the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center opened in 1966, people whistled tunes from musical comedies, and girls fainted over the Beatles. The company’s narrow repertory included few works written after World War I. Its size—it holds close to 4,000, nearly twice as many as Paris or Vienna—discouraged experiments, while smaller companies, including the City Opera across the plaza, worked the edges and programmed Baroque and contemporary operas. The Met was made for show: opulent productions that could bridge the daunting distance between seats and stage. There in that theater with its heavy curves and fixtures like headlights blazing from the balconies, I rarely found the emotional urgency I had loved since I was a child.

A few years ago, I attended a Met production of Verdi’s Macbeth.

Despite superb singing, the production felt disjointed, as if it could not contain both a medieval thane with tragic ambition and a 19th-century composer sounding an impassioned call for a united Italy. Lady Macbeth went mad and danced on chairs, but I was more aware of her bravura than her metastasizing guilt.

It happened that my brother took my mother to the Met that afternoon, too, at a movie theater in Northern Virginia. They paid $24 apiece for their tickets; my seats had cost a couple of hundred dollars each. Afterward, I called my brother. “It was one of the

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The multiplex has become part of the charm.

I didn’t care that gunfire from Zero Dark Thirty punctuated Aida’s tender aria of longing.

greatest operas I’ve ever seen!” he exclaimed. “Did you see Macduff, when he read the letter telling him that his family has been murdered? He had tears in his eyes!” Well, no. I couldn’t see any tears. I was in the first ring, far from the stage. My brother was talking as if he had been to a different opera.

At Das Rheingold, the first opera of a recent production of Wagner’s fouropera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, I felt a similar frustrating distance. My father’s daughter, I loved the music but had resisted its length, implied anti-Semitism, and bizarre libretto.

But this Ring was a big deal, conceived

by Robert Lepage of Cirque du Soleil.

Its set was a $16 million machine, a temperamental array of steel seesaws.

Rheingold is all backstory: gold, gods, giants. The machine shimmered with projected waves as the Rhinemaidens dived and paddled nervously; it cranked open into the workshop of the evil dwarf Alberich.

Then, as Wotan and Fricka got ready to move into Valhalla, the machine creaked and froze. In the audience, we did not guess that it had failed, though it seemed odd that instead of climbing a rainbow to the music’s unfolding triads, the gods trundled offstage. I was unmoved.

So I went to Die Walküre, the cycle’s second opera, at the movies. Live in HD required a fraction of the financial commitment. If I hated it, I could get up and leave. On screen, the set worked. The machine became a supernaturally green forest. It morphed into horses, and the Valkyries laughed and whooped to galloping horns and slid down their seesaws to dismount. Siegmund and Sieglinde, Wotan’s twins who had been separated at birth, met, sang, and made love: I rooted for incest. Six hours later, I had succumbed to the story, engulfed by the music, as if I’d been onstage myself.

Close-ups registered the singers’ shifting expressions and tracked their concentration, the animal, muscular effort of producing sound.

I have missed few operas at the movies since. The multiplex, its popcorn and video games, has become part of their populist charm. I didn’t care that gunfire from Zero Dark Thirty next door punctuated Aida’s tender aria of

longing for her homeland—or that the camera could only glimpse dancers and horses, the triumphal troops of the stage spectacle. For the most part, though, the broadcasts cut out distractions. They reset the balance between production and performance; at the movies I saw a different, intimate Met. Live in HD erases the distance between audience and stage. Because it tracks a performance in real time, there’s an element of improvisation.

Immersed in the moment, I suspend my critical instincts. Watching opera like this is like sitting under the piano.

THE WEEK BEFORE a transmission,

Halvorson works with his assistant director and a score reader to develop a list of shots. “I map out everything,” he says. “Then on Tuesday or Wednesday we tape a performance. The next morning we have a conference, and if the stage director is in town, he’ll come. After that, the cameramen and I spend the next three days in a room going through the whole opera. We change all the shots, and it will look nothing like it did at first. By then I really know the opera. Often I can script it tightly, but some directors are very loose.” His own style has evolved since he began working on these operas, he says. “I’ve learned that I can trust the wider shots.”

Halvorson laughed when I compared Aida’s arias and “Ride of the Valkyries” to Beyoncé at Super Bowl halftime. “I got my start in television shooting rock and roll,” he said. “For arias, I don’t have any shots, I have a zone. I follow the performance—I get out of my storytelling shoes and into my rock-and-roll shoes. Once the camera goes in on a woman, I think: ‘Is the light right? How does she look?

She moved differently this time; I have to shoot from the other side.’”

Classical music these days could use an infusion of rock and roll. Opera companies are struggling—the New York City Opera declared bankruptcy last fall, thanks to the board’s financial mismanagement, even though its revivals of 20th-century operas and new works were playing to enthusiastic houses and reviews. Audiences today do want the excitement of new work, and there is a generation of young composers

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who are writing it. Even at the Met last fall, the new opera Two Boys by Nico Muhly had a promising premiere, and in 2012, Thomas Adès’s The Tempest was shown in HD. The productions combine spectacle (Lepage staged The Tempest) with music that has grown less strange, whose language and textures—repetitions and shimmers of sound—are intriguing, not daunting.

When Gelb came to the Met, the audience was old and was aging at the rate of one year per year; he credits the broadcasts with reversing that trend. While he did not invent the idea of transmitting live performances to movie theaters, he was among the first to understand its marketing potential.

The Met’s Saturday afternoon live radio

broadcasts have aired since 1931, and it broadcast its first live television performance in 1948. Live in HD amped up the sports-influenced formula— close-ups of the action, locker-room interviews—with more cameras, hosts who are famous singers, backstage views of crews turning the set from a temple into the banks of the Nile.

The first opera broadcast in 2006 went to 98 theaters in four countries; by the end of the first season, 480 theaters in eight countries were onboard. This season’s series is being shown in 1,950 movie theaters. The Met projects that close to three million people will attend.

Event broadcasting is hot: The National Theatre of London began its series in 2009, broadcasting several

“A temperamental array of steel seesaws.”

The much-debated $16 million set for the Met’s 2012 Ring cycle

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plays a season to movie houses in 26 countries. Last December a live broadcast of The Sound of Music won huge ratings for NBC. In January, a production of Chekhov’s Platonov, or The Disinherited, mounted in New York’s The Kitchen, was simultaneously shown in three movie theaters. With Met Opera on Demand, for $4.99 per HD movie, or $149.99 for a year’s subscription, you can have unlimited access to 450 Live in HD and TV broadcasts at home. (You can watch that amazing Valkyrie ride for free on YouTube—150,000 views and counting.)

Despite—or perhaps because of­— their success, the operas have their detractors. The Australian Barrie Kosky, artistic director of the Komische

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 83

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Oper in Berlin, who staged a raucous Magic Flute in Los Angeles, dismissed the Met’s broadcasts as “spectacle, schmecktacle” and “repulsive and fake” in an interview in December’s Opera magazine. Alex Ross, reviewing Götterdämmerung unfavorably in The New Yorker two years ago, wrote: “I wonder whether it is almost unfair to review new Met stagings from the point of view of one sitting in the house, since they now seem designed more for the camera operators.” In May 2012, after traveling the country watching HD performances, Zachary Woolfe wrote in The New York Times: “What the audience in a movie theater experiences is not just the opposite of opera. It is the undoing of opera, an art form in which a present, active audience is fundamental.”

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HD IS DISRUPTIVE, and it’s here to stay.

In my experience, it’s not supplanting live opera. That’s why I was at Lincoln Center last December. I wanted to see Falstaff onstage before watching it in HD. The movies have turned me into a diehard Met fan; I recognize the faces of members of the chorus and orchestra. Stephanie Blythe, Mistress Quickly, had sung Fricka in Rheingold; baritone Ambrogio Maestri had stolen the show as the quack physician in L’Elisir d’Amore. He is the reigning interpreter of Falstaff.

The audience cheered James Levine, conducting in his wheelchair.

Acknowledging the cheers, Levine, who with single-minded concentration for the past 40 years made the company, its orchestra and singers, into one of the best in the world, pressed his hands against his heart. Falstaff is a musical party, with ten leads who mostly sing in ensembles—quartets, quintets—with crossing conversations and motifs that flicker like fireflies. It is Verdi’s musical summation, dense with ideas and melody, sight gags and puns, and midnight magic.

Falstaff is a magnificent buffoon, short of cash and long on self-­ deception. Though old and fat, he decides to seduce two of the good, and wealthy, wives of Windsor. He needs their money—and craves their love.

The ladies teach him, and other foolish men, a lesson. Robert Carsen, the

Maestri as Falstaff, tricked by antler-wearing townsfolk

At halftime, baritone Ambrogio Maestri invited host Renée Fleming to taste a risotto.

production’s stage director, moved the action to the 20th century; one scene takes place in a silly dandelion-yellow 1950s Formica kitchen. Falstaff is dumped out the window and salvages his ego in conversation with a horse that, like everyone at some point in this production, is seen happily eating.

For a moment, the ghost of a wayward robotic camera hovered like a space station on the set wall.

Then in the last scene, the wall opened out into a starry sky that canceled all sense of earthly time. It filled the house with its beauty. Falstaff and the chorus of townspeople wore antlers; low lights transformed their headdresses into a forest of shadow branches. Frightened, tricked, and almost chastened, Falstaff vocally defended his great belly, and everyone went to a party.

Falstaff moved to the front of the stage and sang the subject of a fugue, an archaic, rigorous form more often used to end a piece of sacred music, not an opera. The text: “Life is a joke, and everybody is fooled.” The contrapuntal lines wove together, separated, thinned to two or three voices, then swelled with consummate exuberance.

The house lights went up, the singers

pointed to the audience, including us in the joke. We were all fools, all part of the comedy—and of Verdi’s amen.

“Most operas are unhappy,” Halvorson had said to me before the performance. “This is a comedy. I’ve shot so many—I’m going to kill it.” I wanted to see how he did it.

In the second act, set in a restaurant, the camera cut back and forth between two tables of singers, matching the music’s shifting energy; it held still as Nannetta and Fenton, young lovers, forbidden (of course) to marry, serenaded each other. Falstaff’s sidekick stole a pocketbook, a bit of business I’d missed.

At halftime, Maestri, who’d cooked a risotto, invited Fleming to taste it; she had a hard time putting the plate down.

Halvorson made the kitchen slapstick feel like I Love Lucy. In the last scene, he slowed again to a gentle dance as Nannetta, pretending to be queen of the fairies, sang her ethereal aria to shadows and spirits and floated like a luna moth above the horny forest.

During the fugue, the camera moved from voice to voice, from singer to singer, following the shape of the music, revealing its intricate, triumphant joy. A happy fool, I watched to the last curtain call. 

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 85

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Sit and Wait for the Sadness The Ozarks—land of hillbillies and a few vast modern fortunes—are the setting for recent literary thrillers. BY MONICA POTTS B

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he Ozarks, a plateau carved by rivers and streams into what are generously called mountains, have always felt like their own American planet, jutting up from what should be uninterrupted plains.

They cover the isolated southern half of Missouri and the northern half of Arkansas, an area that’s been largely left out of the national consciousness until now. It’s easy to date recent interest in the Ozarks to the 2010 movie Winter’s Bone, based on a novel by the same name, which received four Oscar nominations and launched Jennifer Lawrence’s film career. A meth-fueled mystery that followed Lawrence’s character as she tried to find her drugdealer father and save her mother’s family’s land, the movie was treated by reviewers as more documentary than fiction, a portrayal of desperate poverty in a foreign patch of America.

The Ozarks bear some resemblance to their cultural cousin southern Appalachia and to any other spot where poor white Americans live on soil too rocky to farm. These lands get lumped into what demographers call Southern Highland culture—a nice term for “hillbilly.” People hunt and fish, quilt and crochet, weave baskets and can summer vegetables, and play banjos and dulcimers. Of course, the modern world is mixed in: Hillbillies also drive Fords, eat McDonald’s, and own iPhones. But there is a sense that no one here has stopped relying on the land. The handicrafts celebrated in museums weren’t revived by young hipsters; they’ve been practiced in an unbroken chain.

What sets the Ozarks apart from other hill country is a trait of the early 19th-century generation that first settled there. All that rich farmland farther west, being taken by the government and sold at a discount to white Americans? Ozark settlers never made it that far. Tired and

86 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAR /APR 2014

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scared, they didn’t so much settle as stop. From the start, the Ozark spirit was passive, nagged by a vague feeling that life was beyond control: Sit down, and wait for the black sadness to settle in. The folksongs are about hard times, dead children, and men and women murdered for love. Peaks and hollows—like Petit Jean Mountain and Goodnight Hollow, are named after little kids lost in the woods.

Though people worship God, they are obsessed with the devil and warn of the spooky caves he dwells in.

But there’s something else that sets the region apart: its booming Western corridor. A string of towns in the highest part of the mountains include the University of Arkansas (Fayetteville); the headquarters of Tyson Foods (Springdale); the birthplace of WalMart (Bentonville); a theme park and country-music theater strip (Branson); and Missouri State University (Springfield). The populations of some of these cities have doubled in the past two decades. Sam Walton’s heirs, the owners of Wal-Mart, are together worth more than $100 billion—Christy Walton, the widow of Sam’s son, is the second-wealthiest woman in the world. New Gilded Age robber barons who use up people as much as resources, the Waltons are an embodiment of the top 1 percent living among the bottom 40 percent. The Wal-Mart scions, who still call northwest Arkansas home, have built the sorts of cultural institutions that make young people want to stay after college and draw in new retirees, who can cheaply build mansions with mountain views.

THESE ARE THE THEMES Daniel

Woodrell, the author of Winter’s Bone, explores. Woodrell, now 61, was born in Springfield. He joined the Marines as a young man and returned to the area after getting a bachelor’s degree from the University of Kansas and

THE MAID’S VERSION

BY DANIEL WOODRELL

Little, Brown and Company

THE WEIGHT OF BLOOD

BY LAURA MCHUGH

Spiegel and Grau

attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His eighth and latest novel, The Maid’s Version, released last fall, takes place in West Table, a fictionalized version of the town he now calls home, West Plains, Missouri. West Plains, which sits in the still-rural eastern half of the Ozarks, is a town of about 12,000. Deep in the mountains, far from the boomtowns, that counts as a crossroads of commerce, home to powerful people. The novel centers on a dance-hall fire from 1929 that killed 42 residents—it’s loosely based on a fire that occurred in West Plains in 1928. Our narrator, Alek, first learned about the incident when he was a boy, an outsider visiting family in the summer of 1965. He recounts the story as an adult, looking back decades later at his childhood.

Alek’s recall is prompted by an event in 1989. A statue of a black angel marking the site of the infamous dance-hall fire starts to shake, he tells us, as if disturbed by the burned dancers trapped in hell. It’s the sort of miracle the area comes out to see: “The spiritualists and goths beamed haughtily as though publicly vindicated, the stoners cackled until told to hush, the gathered relatives seemed to slump in recognition of an old responsibility to their own lost kin that they had long ago put aside when frazzled apathetic by too many mysteries and myriad angles, but might now need to resurrect.” Alek had heard about the fire from his grandmother, Alma; Alma’s beautiful sister Ruby was one of those killed, and the event and its aftermath slowly drove Alma insane. Alma’s son, John Paul—father of Alek—was adopted as a boy by an older couple, who left West Table during the war. John Paul married a rich girl, went to St. Louis for a job selling metal and night classes at Washington University, and worked his way into a stable life.

The story is presented as a mystery, but the book’s true subjects are the two women, Alma and Ruby, and the ways in which desperate folk like them have always had to navigate towns like West Table. As children, the girls were so poor they had to wake up at night to steal good soil for their family’s land from a bottomlands farm close to a river. Their father, Cecil, a

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worse than good-for-nothing alcoholic, mule-worked his wife and daughters, and Alma ran away. “Ruby had it worse,” Alek relates. “She was allowed no schooling at all, and Cecil in his dotage had become fond of the whip.” Ruby was also so beautiful that Cecil suspected her of not truly being his daughter. “In looks she did not favor Cecil or any kin he ever saw and that made her nothing but a mouth to feed, an ass to beat, a young body of no relation he could sometimes let his hands rub on the buds and rump and linger until his breathing thickened and he had to lie down next to the whore, her mother, for a piddling relief.” It’s here that Woodrell’s writing, if over-reliant on a Faulknerian rhythm, builds a matter-of-fact terror—a visceral feeling that these characters can’t do anything to stop awful events from unfolding.

The unfolding follows no obvious time line, except for the one Woodrell wants readers to experience. This can be confusing but causes us to focus on the town and its class-bound residents. Alma was a housecleaner for the wealthy—the bankers, county judges, lawyers, and merchants. (The “rich” people in town are only a little better off than the poor, but proximity seems to strengthen their sense of being on top.) The lesson Alma learned from her father was to keep her head down and not disturb those who can hurt her, whereas Ruby tried to gain clout by awakening desire.

By the book’s midpoint, it’s not hard to piece together what happened.

Ruby left the wrong man, a powerful one, heartbroken. Many people in town knew the truth. But they decided to console themselves with half-baked alternate theories about the fire’s cause—gangsters from St. Louis make an appearance, as does an itinerant Arkansas preacher. Why the culprit was never charged is easy to figure out, too. The lives lost were worth less than the price of justice.

When the story of what happened in 1929 is finally told, there’s no sense of triumph or revelation; it’s an acquiescent sigh. This fits with our image of Alma, whose

In Daniel Woodrell’s The Maid’s Version, a statue of a black angel marking the site of an infamous dance-hall fire begins to shake.

Daniel Woodrell

snake-bitten life has left her ghostly, wandering in town with her long white hair flowing loose to her feet. Of her three sons, Alek’s father is the only one to make it to adulthood. When Alek first visits West Table as a child, he’s able to move between the town’s two classes—not fully Alma’s grandson, granted a grudging love by a wealthy maternal grandfather. Alek’s in-between-ness makes him the perfect vehicle for the tale, and now is the time for Woodrell to let him tell it. In another era, following the Great Depression, Alek’s father was able to work hard in a country that still created opportunity for men (only men, and white ones at that) who could achieve it. Woodrell tells this story when there is no such promise—only a two-tier country, content to let its underclass burn.

THIS SEASON, A DEBUT novel by anoth-

er Missouri writer, Laura McHugh, is trying to capitalize on the new interest in the Ozarks. McHugh was raised in Iowa and southern Missouri, and now lives in Columbia, a college town in the northern part of the state. The Weight of Blood is benefitting from a big publicity push from Random House, in part because of its superficial similarities to Winter’s Bone: a southern Missouri setting, an investigative teenage girl, an absent parent, a scary uncle, and a mystery.

The book starts from the perspective of Lucy, a 17-year-old whose childhood friend and down-theroad neighbor turns up dead—chopped into pieces and buried for all to see in a hollow tree trunk. Lucy grew up in Henbane, a fictional town of about 700, and has reached the age her mother, Lila, was when she arrived as a strange, beautiful outsider, an orphan from a farm in Iowa.

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Lila disappeared when Lucy was a baby, and some chapters are written from her viewpoint. What happened to Lucy’s friend and what happened long ago to Lila become part of the same story. Lucy discovers the truth with help from some locals, who are haunted by Lila and look at Lucy as if she’s her dead mother returned.

McHugh isn’t as observant as Woodrell. One strength of Winter’s Bone is how clearly Woodrell makes readers see the Ozarks today. Yes, there are log cabins and deer slain for food. But the heroine also wears combat boots, and characters argue over whether they can afford a fresh shaker of Parmesan for their spaghetti. Old-timey folk traditions get some of their power from the fact that modern people seem committed to them. It’s discordant but believable. In The Weight of Blood, Lila would have come to live in Henbane in the 1990s. But we can’t see what she wore or hear the music she listened to. Lucy’s life as a 17-yearold today suffers from the same lack of specifics: There are hints of teenagers making out at bonfire parties by the river and drinking apple wine, but none of them carry the menace or despair of Winter’s Bone.

While McHugh clunkily drops folksy phrases and bits of lore—a “man with clean nails hides his dirt on the inside”; “I seem to remember Birdie telling me hedge apples kept away spiders, not ghosts”—she seems uncommitted to place. “The welcome sign was peppered with holes, as if someone had blasted it with a shotgun,” Lila observes on one car ride. Of course it was blasted with a shotgun— we’re in the rural South! Characters speak of haints (ghosts) and witches, but their conviction in supernatural powers comes off as hokey, a ploy to give the mystery a backcountry sheen.

The Weight of Blood is meant to be about how small towns punish outsiders for being different, but it could take place anywhere. Its focus on the mostly happy teenager Lucy gives it a feel-good, “I was never the same after that summer” tone. Better to wait for the next Woodrell to wrestle with the Ozark spirit—what it’s reconciled to without peace, with a horror that haunts. 

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 87

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Francis and His Predecessors Why the new pope’s tenure may be less liberal but more countercultural than it seems BY MOLLY WORTHEN R

p o p e : r i c c a r d o d e lu c a / a p i m a g e s ; c o lu m n : u n l i m 3 d / f o t o l i a

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n April 27, Pope Francis will canonize two of his predecessors, elevating them to the ranks of the saints in heaven who may intercede for sinners here on Earth. He has praised John XXIII as a “country priest” with a heart for the faithful and John Paul II as “the great missionary of the church.” But saints are human, and both popes have mixed legacies. John XXIII, father of the Second Vatican Council, initiated reforms that angered conservatives, while their limits left progressive Catholics frustrated. If Cold War historians have cast John Paul II as democracy’s hero, spokesman for Christians silenced by the communist regimes of Eastern Europe, in other ways he stood firm against the tide of 20th-century liberalism. He condemned contraception and homosexual acts as grave sins and censured theologians who called for the church to stand up to Latin American dictators (often Rome’s allies against communism).

Benedict XVI, John Paul II’s close friend and successor, defended traditional doctrine against the “dictatorship of relativism” and seemed to fear that bold action against clergy who committed or abetted child sexual abuse would present an intolerable challenge to the church’s authority.

Benedict might have performed the upcoming canonization rite himself— except that last year he became the first pope in nearly 600 years to resign his post, citing lack of “strength of mind and body.”

In some ways, these conflicts are nothing special. They are the most recent chapter in the church’s ancient minuet of adaptation and resistance, the old Christian dilemma of existing in the world but being not entirely of it. Francis, too, is unlikely to resolve the child-abuse scandal, the clash over women’s ordination, corruption in the Roman Curia, or any of the

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other long-standing crises plaguing the church.

Yet Christian and non-Christian observers alike can’t take their eyes off this pope. They probe the symbolic significance of his humble dress and the make of his car (a 1984 Renault 4). No matter that his declarations on behalf of the poor deviate in no way from more than a century of church teaching; no matter that Francis has affirmed his predecessors’ views on sexuality. There is a collective sense, at least in the West, that the papacy—as an ancient institution presiding over a modern world—is at some kind of turning point.

American Catholics themselves often seem impatient to pronounce verdicts on the pope rather than to alter their beliefs or conduct on the basis of his counsel.

Both liberals and conservatives pounced upon Francis’s apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, when the Vatican published it last November, and both found in it some affirmation of their views. Liberals lauded the pope’s denunciation of free-market ideology and the “globalization of indifference.” Conservatives noted that he called for the “defense of unborn life.” Both sides also have found cause for complaint: Either Francis doesn’t favor real reform (and excommunicates priests who are too outspoken in support of women’s ordination and LGBT rights), or he has bent too far with the winds of secular unbelief.

“Francis is beating a retreat for the Catholic Church, and making sure its controversial doctrines are whispered, not yelled—no wonder The New York Times is in love,” Catholic journalist Adam Shaw wrote in a column for Fox News last December.

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Despite this grumbling, the vast majority of American Catholics (88 percent, as of December) approve of Francis. The reason is not because they believe he will settle questions that have troubled the church for generations. Rather, his example—his decision to wash the feet not of fellow priests but of juvenile inmates on Holy Thursday; his invitation to homeless men to join him on his birthday—reminds many Catholics of what the church means to them on a daily basis and what they hope it means to the world.

“The married-priests issue is a footnote; the female-priests issue is a footnote; so is divorce, contraception, Latin Masses, changes in the liturgy, even perhaps the death penalty,” Yale historian Paul Kennedy, who is a practicing Catholic, wrote last year. “What matters is your reaching out to help. That’s the sole question you will be asked when you reach the Pearly Gates.”

FRANCIS’S PERSONAL con-

duct has reframed the church’s resistance to secular Western pluralism. Under Benedict, this clash was a “culture war” over sexuality and exclusive claims to truth, and an ugly contradiction between public moralizing and private protection of sexual predators. In Francis’s care, the narrative of the church has become the story of a persistent Christian community of dissent: one led by a man who tries to abide

by Jesus’s commands in his own life and one that challenges income inequality on the same grounds it challenges abortion and gay marriage (all of these, Francis says, reflect “moral relativism” and the “throwaway culture” of modern capitalism).

Francis is a countercultural prophet, whether you like his prophecy or not. He has caught the attention of Protestants as well. It’s worth recalling that they have always followed the Vatican closely. Until about 50 years ago, the one thing that united Protestants—who

MAR/APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 89

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otherwise disagreed about nearly every aspect of doctrine and worship—was their common hatred of the pope. (The Vatican has, in this sense, provided more consistent confidence and clarity of purpose for Protestants than it has done for Catholics.) From the Puritans’ first ventures in Massachusetts Bay to clergy’s warnings that John F. Kennedy would let the Vatican dictate White House policy, anti-­ Catholicism was a powerful creed.

Most of the time, liberals were just as anxious as conservatives to publicize the threat that “Roman-controlled priests” and their unthinking sheep posed to democracy.

The strong undercurrent of prejudice that had long informed this bias slowly declined as Catholics of European descent climbed the socioeconomic ladder and assimilated (racism continues to inflect ill will against Latino Catholics, although modern nativists are more likely to attack their immigration status than their church). The Second Vatican Council’s elevation of the laity’s role in worship and parish life, as well as the council’s olive branch to Protestant “separated brethren,” looked to some like a mild “Protestantization” of Rome. A global Pentecostal revival swept through Protestant and Catholic congregations alike in the 1960s and 1970s—while at home, conservative evangelicals increasingly saw Catholics as allies in the culture wars.

Anti-Catholicism is no longer a socially acceptable form of intolerance. But perhaps we underestimated the ideological vacuum left behind.

Anti-Catholicism permitted American Protestants to claim the side of free thought, democracy, and progress without wholly confronting their own hypocrisies. The liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s provided liberals and conservatives with a means to reorient their theology: Would Jesus have stood for or against the March on Washington? What about Stonewall? But the late 20th century yielded more fracture and confusion than unity. What exactly does it mean to be Protestant—as opposed to merely Christian—now that they have stopped protesting

“that arrant Whore of Rome, And all her blasphemies,” as the Puritans’ New England Primer put it?

In the 21st-century West, thoughtful Christians of all persuasions are looking for guidance as they transition from centuries of cultural dominance in Christendom to their new identity as a subculture in a wider world—a moral minority. Francis offers a reference point that resonates with Christians disillusioned with the grandstanding of the religious right and the confrontations of the culture wars.

Dave Miller, a Southern Baptist pastor in Iowa, recently urged fellow believers to take heart: “We can learn to live as a minority in America. …

The church was born in a hostile Israel and spread throughout a depraved Roman Empire.” Progressive evangelicals agree, even if their politics are different. Shane Claiborne, who heads a Christian commune in innercity Philadelphia called the Simple Way, says he is devoted to “creating God’s counterculture in the midst of a dominant culture.” Evangelicals like Claiborne have long made no secret of Catholic role models like Dorothy Day, the laywoman who founded the Catholic Worker Movement. They have branded communities like the Simple Way a “new monasticism” that draws on the example of serviceoriented Catholic orders like the Franciscans.

I AM NOT CATHOLIC, but when I

opened a Twitter account a few months ago, @Pontifex was one of the first feeds I sought out. Like many of the Holy Father’s 11 million–plus followers, I find his (or rather his e-deputy’s) tweets—oracular entreaties to compassion and faith—a welcome antidote to the tide of political debate, depressing headlines, and selfpromotion that greets me on social media. “Lord have mercy!” he tweeted last fall. “Too often we are blinded by our comfortable lives, and refuse to see those dying at our doorstep.”

The underlying message of many of Francis’s homilies is that Christians are no longer called to police the boundaries of public morality but should speak the gospel’s unsettling

Thoughtful Christians are looking for guidance as they transition to their new identity as a subculture in a wider world.

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truths to arbiters of worldly power.

During a recent prayer with college students in Vatican City, he told them “to be not spectators, but protagonists in contemporary events.” “If you don’t let yourselves be conditioned by prevailing opinions, but remain faithful to Christian ethical and religious principles, you will find the courage even to go against the current,” he said.

Liberals have been overly optimistic in interpreting Francis’s reluctance to harp on sexual morality as a sign that he is a closet liberal. Benedict, too, worried that preaching constantly on sexual sins gave “the impression that we are moralists with a few somewhat antiquated convictions, and not even a hint of the true greatness of the faith appears.”

At the same time, Francis’s selfeffacing manner and his insistent call to “be poor among the poor” have challenged the way in which conservative Christians typically think about their priorities.

The notion of being a minority in a hostile culture is not news to them.

However, conservative evangelicals have tended to see themselves as political martyrs on behalf of “family values” while they have allowed the drift of laissez-faire economic ideology to carry them away from Jesus’s social teachings. “We need to be known more by how we care about the hurting than how we yell at them,” wrote Southern Baptist leader Ed Stetzer in a Christianity Today essay on what evangelicals can learn from the pope. “The world is often confused when they see Jesus caring for the poor and hurting while His followers, well, don’t.”

Jesus, of course, had many things to say that confused and angered the world. He warned of God’s judgment against those who defied his law and a hell where “there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” When Francis adds the names of John XXIII and John Paul II to the litany of the saints, he will remind us that each pope was a mortal man shaped by his moment in history—but also one called by the gospel to stand against history, to eschew an easy home on our modern political map. If Francis manages this, perhaps he is doing his job. 

MAR /APR 2014 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 91

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This Year’s Moderates

BY ABBY RAPOPORT

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or those anxiously awaiting the emergence of a less-extreme Republican Party, 2014 got off to a depressing start. The Bridgegate scandal in New Jersey changed Governor Chris Christie’s image from lovable, gruff straighttalker to retributive, partisan bully.

In Virginia, the once-rising star of former Governor Bob McDonnell— who came into office with strong Christian-right credentials but left after granting voting rights to ex-felons and spearheading a bipartisan effort to improve transportation infrastructure—crashed to earth when he was charged on 14 federal corruption counts of taking loans and gifts from a nutrition-­ supplement mogul and doing favors in return. He’ll be lucky to escape prison time. It’s not quite so bad for Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin. Many have posited him as a “moderate” possibility for 2016—moderate in that he limits his extremism to demolishing unions and killing government programs. But now he’s damaged goods, with an ongoing investigation of his 2012 recall election after a probe into improper campaign activities in 2010 resulted in the convictions of six Walker aides and allies.

Looking down the bench of bigname GOP moderates—which, let’s face it, really means rightwingers who occasionally reach out to the center—pundits tend to point to Jeb Bush, who not only shares a family name with the most unpopular president in

recent times but who also hasn’t held an office, or campaigned for one, in quite a while. Then there’s Paul Ryan, who’s moderate, apparently, because he doesn’t say vicious things about minorities or women in public and only wants to privatize Medicare and Social Security and cut just about every remaining tax on the wealthy. Or Marco Rubio, who has remained loyal to Tea Party interests aside from one toe-dip into the scalding waters of immigration reform. (A toe-dip now qualifies you as a moderate.)

Of course, running for president­ —or hoping to—makes it hard to buck your party’s prevailing drift.

Christie earned some bipartisan cred by embracing President Barack Obama after Hurricane Sandy. On other issues, from gay marriage to union-bashing, he’s thrown the hard right plenty of red meat. How else to win the Republican primaries? But in less-watched corners of the country, hidden away from D.C.’s chattering classes, more successful models of pragmatic conservatism can be found— governors who have been freer to govern and used that freedom to sometimes-surprising ends.

Nevada’s Brian Sandoval was elected in the Tea Party stampede of 2010; a former federal judge, he beat out the scandal-plagued sitting Republican governor in a primary that stressed Sandoval’s anti-immigrant, anti-tax, anti-government views. Once in office, though, Sandoval—while never straying from his version

of fiscal conservatism—proved less predictable. He loudly criticized the Affordable Care Act, but after the Supreme Court upheld it, he became one of two Republican governors to both sign off on

Can the Republican Party yet have a future that Ronald Reagan would recognize?

Medicaid expansion and allow the state to create its own health-care exchange. He’s called for comprehensive immigration reform and backed a successful bill to allow undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s permits. Earlier this year, when the state party sent out a 13-question survey for candidates—one that looked suspiciously like a purity test— Sandoval refused to fill it out.

If he sounds like the next Republican who’s likely to face a big-money Tea Party challenge, think again. Sandoval is one of the five most popular governors in the country, maintaining approval ratings in the 60s. As of late February, with just a month to go before

the filing deadline, not a single Tea Partier or Democrat had lined up to run against him this year. That might be rotten for democracy in Nevada, but it’s a good sign for Sandoval’s political future.

Governor Susana Martinez of New Mexico has less of an independent streak than Sandoval, and she’s taken some flak for her unusually combative relationship with her state’s Democrat-led legislature. But she’s the only Republican governor besides Sandoval to back both Medicaid expansion and a state-based exchange. She’s popular, too, and expected to cruise to re-election with ease in November.

Sandoval and Martinez are the country’s only Latino governors, but they aren’t worth watching because they represent a magic formula for wooing Latinos to the GOP. (Sandoval actually fared worse among Latinos in 2010 than the previous Republican governor, an Anglo.) Diversity isn’t just about voting blocs; it’s also about broadening the definition of what a party can be, in terms of governance as well as race and ideology. Republicans need that kind of diversity in the worst way. The party has become extreme partly because it’s so homogeneous— and it has become even more homogeneous because it’s grown so extreme. If Republicans can welcome pragmatists—if not moderates—back into the fold and learn to look west for models of a saner conservatism, the GOP may yet have a future that Ronald Reagan could recognize. 

VOLUME 25, NUMBER 2. The American Prospect (ISSN 1049-7285) is published bi-monthly by The American Prospect, Inc., 1710 Rhode Island Ave., NW, 12th Floor, Washington, DC 20036. Periodicals-class postage paid at Washington, DC, and additional mailing offices. Copyright © 2014 by The American Prospect, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without the consent of The American Prospect, Inc. The American Prospect ® is a registered trademark of The American Prospect, Inc. Postmaster: Please send address changes to The American Prospect, P.O. Box 421087, Palm Coast, FL 32142. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

92 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG MAR /APR 2014

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A Hand Up Is Not a Handout

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mericans love the notion that we can all pull ourselves up by the bootstraps. Yet in this time when millions of jobs have vanished in the United States, supports for struggling Americans are crumbling, and education budgets have been squeezed and slashed, we need to focus on another enduring American ideal—strengthening the rungs on the ladder of opportunity.

Rather than helping the millions of individuals and families who have been affected by the economic earthquakes that have reshaped the American economy, many GOP lawmakers are employing an alarming blend of spin and psychology to justify unraveling the social safety net. Their rationale? Extending unemployment benefits would be a “disservice” to jobless individuals, and the food stamp program encourages “dependency” and “discourages people from working.” Such logic ignores the millions of people who rely on assistance not because they are shirking work, but because they’re unable to find it. The troubling message is that aid for people in poverty or in crisis is a handout, not a hand up.

Let’s do a mini-lesson in critical thinking.

Here’s a glossary of programs that many lawmakers love to hate. Let’s examine whether they are a drain on or a benefit to individuals, their families and our communities.

Unemployment insurance: There are currently more out-of-work job seekers than jobs being created, and many new jobs require new skills. Unemployment insurance is a lifeline for Americans looking for work, as well as for their families. And it’s good for the economy. Unemployment insurance lifted an estimated 2.5 million people out of poverty in 2012 alone. One dollar of extended unemployment insurance pumps $1.49 back into the economy.

Food stamps: The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program helped 4 million people climb out of poverty in 2012 and kept millions from going hungry. And every $5 billion of food stamps generates up to $9 billion in economic activity.

Medicaid: The Affordable Care Act allows states to expand Medicaid coverage to many more low-income people, with the federal government picking up almost all of the costs. Not surprisingly, expanding Medicaid to cover low-income adults reduces mortality and improves access to care, particularly preventive care, which lowers healthcare costs. Yet 25 states, cheered on by the Tea Party, have refused to expand coverage.

Pre-K: High-quality early learning programs help close the school readiness gap

Weingarten with the Rev. Dr. William Barber II and others following the largest civil rights gathering in the South since 1965, held Feb. 8 in Raleigh, N.C.

for disadvantaged children and lead to greater literacy, decreased need for special education services and increased high school graduation rates. At-risk children who attend high-quality early learning programs have been shown to have increased employment as adults and higher lifetime earnings, as well as reduced incarceration and less need for social welfare programs. Every dollar spent on high-quality programs produces long-term savings of at least $7.

Minimum wage: Raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 by 2016 would restore it to roughly the same inflation-adjusted value it had in the late 1960s, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Such an increase would raise the wages of 27.8 million workers, and grow gross domestic product by about $22 billion, resulting in the creation of roughly 85,000 net new jobs.

Paid sick leave: Paid sick leave offers eco-

nomic benefits by reducing workforce turnover, increasing productivity and lowering healthcare costs. And the health and societal benefits are priceless. Paid leave is a lifeline for female workers in particular, 42 million of whom are in poverty or on the brink, and for the 28 million children who depend on them.

Retirement: Half of American households have less than $3,000 in retirement savings, and those near retirement have less than $12,000. Many have none. Social Security provides more than 90 percent of retire-

Photo: AFT Staff

By Randi Weingarten, President AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS

Let’s strengthen the rungs on America’s ladder of opportunity.

ment income for a quarter of married couples and almost half of unmarried people.

Yet rather than confront our retirement insecurity problem, states are making it worse by cutting public sector pensions.

Union membership: The decline in unionization is directly related to the decline of the middle class, stagnant wages and rising income inequality in America. Workers’ pay is higher when they’re in a union, and they have greater access to health insurance and retirement benefits.

The shifts in our economy have shown how easy it is to fall into poverty and how hard it is to climb out. But this decline is not inevitable and it is not irreversible. The policies described above, including a strong labor movement, are rungs on America’s ladder of opportunity. They should be strengthened, not destroyed.

Follow AFT President Randi Weingarten: www.twitter.com/RWeingarten