I did not know, for example, that the Confederate flag was revived in Southern states during and after the civil rights movement in clear defiance of racial equality and integration. This was not just a flag that Confederate soldiers fought and died under. It became, as some South Carolinian representatives told us, a symbol of defiance and hatred, and a reminder that the Civil War may have been won but that the battle for overcoming racial prejudice has not ended.
.. These new technologies of the public sphere also challenge democratic societies in that the speed of the circulation of images often overwhelms the communicative and deliberative processes that need to take place among all those affected to unpack and understand what is being implied by these images
.. John Locke was also tutor and secretary to the earl of Shaftesbury, and he wrote the Constitution of the Carolinas for him. Locke is a colonizer, who believes that the white man’s labor in appropriating and working the land will create a condition that will be beneficial to all.
.. In view of the presence of these “others,” who haunt the text, what do we make of Locke’s theory of consent, equality and rationality? How much of these ideals are “polluted” by the presence of the other whose equal rationality is never presumed? This is the kind of question that the critical investigation of race in these texts leads us to ask.
.. I would argue that from Aristotle to Hume to Smith and even the early Hegel, we find another model of rationality as “embodied intelligence,” as the shaping of emotion by reason rather than its domination. John Dewey is the most articulate philosopher of this alternative understanding of rationality.
.. G.Y.: As a political theorist, do you think democracy is really able to deliver equality to black people, to fully translate universalistic human rights into real change for them, especially as they have, for hundreds of years, been deemed sub-persons?
S.B.: I don’t think that it is democracy that is failing black people in the United States, but the assault on democracy itself through the forces of a global corporate capitalism run amok and the rise of a vindictive and racist conservative movement that is unraveling the civic compact. Democracy is impossible without some form of socio-economic equality among citizens. Instead, in the United States in the last two decades, the gap between the top 1 percent and the rest has increased, voting rights and union rights have been embattled. There is rampant criminal neglect of public goods such as highways, railroads and bridges – not to mention the brazen onslaught of big money to buy off elections since the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision. We have become a mass democracy that is producing gridlock in representative institutions precisely because it is in the interest of global corporate capitalism to render representative institutions ineffective.
Inside the Secretive World of Tax-Avoidance Experts
.. when Oxfam estimates that just 1 percent of the world’s population will own more than 50 percent of the world’s wealth by 2016, it’s important to realize that such a state of affairs doesn’t just happen by itself, or even through the actions of individual wealthy people. For the most part, the wealthy are busy enjoying their wealth or making more of it; keeping those personal fortunes out of the hands of governments (along with creditors, litigants, divorced spouses, and disgruntled heirs) is the job of wealth managers.
.. In designing my own research strategy, I was particularly inspired by the work of John van Maanen—now a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management—who famously did his doctoral research on a California police department in the early 1970s, not long after the Watts riots. In this period of heightened anti-police sentiment, van Maanen found himself shut out: He received over 20 rejections to his requests to study police departments as an outsider looking in. But rather than giving up and picking another subject for his research, van Maanen did something extraordinary: He enrolled in the police academy and underwent the full training process to become a police officer, including going out on armed patrols. Only then did he build enough trust and cooperation with fellow officers to conduct his research.
.. The credential I earned after two years was also my entry ticket to professional society meetings for wealth managers—more places where I could observe and recruit interview participants. Only by having the TEP credential in hand, or by showing I was enrolled in courses to obtain the credential, was I allowed to attend those meetings.
.. Like van Maanen, I disclosed my real name, institutional affiliation, and research aims throughout the research process; I did not, that is, go “undercover.” Whether I was attending classes or professional society meetings, I always wore a name tag that included my place of work, so it was clear that I was a scholar linked to a research institution.
.. Finally, people in a technically complex profession—especially one that carries some degree of social stigma—don’t have many opportunities to vent about their work lives with anyone: Their family and friends are unlikely to understand the nature of the work
.. There was also something bigger, and even more disturbing: a domain of libertarian fantasy made real, in which professional intervention made it possible for the world’s wealthiest people to be free not only of tax obligations but of any laws they found inconvenient.
Looking at a costly divorce? No problem—just hire a wealth manager to put your assets in an offshore trust. Then the assets are no longer in your name, and can’t be attached in a judgment.
.. Vulnerable to lawsuits? Have a wealth manager put your fortune into a Cook Islands asset-protection trust, as the Rothschilds and the less well-known wealthy families of the world have done. In effect, such trusts make these fortunes essentially immune from the application of inconvenient national laws. No litigant on earth has been able to break a Cook Islands trust, including the U.S. government, which has repeatedly been unable to collect on multi-million-dollar judgments against fraudsters convicted in federal court.
.. So at the airport, I discovered I didn’t have my passport and told the CEO I had to go home to get it. He said, “Don’t worry about it.” I said, “But we’re leaving Europe; I need my passport.” And he said, “Really, you don’t need it; you don’t need to go home.” So I figured okay, if the CEO tells me twice not to go get my passport, I won’t press the issue, and if I get detained and stuck at the airport, so be it. So we get on the plane in Zurich, and no one checked our documents. And then when we arrived at the client’s location, and there was just a limo waiting to take us directly to him. Nobody asked for our passports, even when we returned to Switzerland on the client’s jet. The CEO was right. These people, our wealthiest clients, are above the law…It’s potentially very dangerous.
.. The story was reminiscent of Joan Didion’s observation that “The secret point of money and power is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake…but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.”
.. What these professionals most emphatically did not look like is people with control over millions in global capital flows. And yet that is exactly what they were. Call it the “banality of professional power”—the cultivation of a useful obscurity, which allows the very wealthy to exist in a realm of freedom verging on lawlessness.
.. It may be more productive to turn the spotlight away from the rich themselves, and instead focus on the professionals who—in their quiet, discreet, and extremely effective way—make it possible for the wealthiest people in the world to gain all the benefits of society, while flouting its laws. Rather than asking whether the distribution of economic resources is fair, perhaps the more compelling question lies upstream, in the way that distribution is created in the first place: by a kind of shell game played with international law. Most people have little tolerance for such shenanigans on the street corner. What about on a global scale?
Is There a Silver Lining to Citizens United?
Democratic bills now pending before the House — The Government by the People Act, and the Senate, the Fair Elections Now Act – propose a grant of $6 in public money for every dollar raised from donors of $150 or less.
.. matched-funding operations, including New York City, suggest that such programs have the potential to significantly alter politics and policy in three different ways.
The first is a shift away from candidate dependence on PACs and other special interest sources and an increase in the amount of money politicians raise from their own constituents.
.. The second effect cited by reformers is the increased likelihood of adoption of legislation generally opposed by business interests, including increases in minimum wage and liberalized family leave policies.
.. The third positive consequence cited by advocates of public financing is the election of more working class and moderate income men and women to state legislatures and city councils.
.. I’ve watched as Maine’s Clean Elections system has transformed the state’s Legislature and opened the door for everyday people like plumbers, teachers, carpenters and firefighters to be able to run for office and compete against deep-pocketed or well-connected opponents.
.. A candidate for Congress choosing to accept matching money would first have to raise $50,000 from 1,000 small donors who give $150 or less and who live in the candidate’s state.
.. Persily raised the possibility, however, that legislation boosting the role of small donors could increase polarization because there is evidence that such donors are “more ideologically motivated” than others. To counter the potential of increased polarization, Persily said that public funding could be expanded to “cut very large checks to the political parties to spend as they wish,” since the parties tend to be moderating forces.
.. For reformers to have a chance requires post-2020 congressional redistricting with Democrats in control in such key states as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and North Carolina, allowing the party to take control of the House in 2022.
.. The Roberts court has deregulated campaign finance on the premise that the only legitimate grounds for restricting money in politics is to prevent explicit corruption.
.. a Supreme Court “that will accept political equality as a compelling interest that justifies reasonable campaign regulations
A Sensible Version of Donald Trump
They looked at the results of a Clinton-era program called Moving to Opportunity, which took poor families and moved them to middle-class neighborhoods. At first the results were disappointing. The families who moved didn’t see their earnings rise. Their kids didn’t do much better in school.
But as years went by and newer data accumulated, different and more promising results came in. Children who were raised in better environments had remarkable earnings gains. The girls raised in the better neighborhoods were more likely to marry and raise their own children in two-parent homes.
The first implication of this research is that neighborhood matters a lot.
.. Then we’ve got to get integrationist, to integrate different races and classes through national service and school and relocation vouchers. And finally, we have to get a little moralistic. There are certain patterns of behavior, like marrying before you have kids and sticking around to parent the kids you conceive, that contribute to better communities.