Re: WHO WILL TELL THE PEOPLE -- THE BETRAYAL OF AMERICAN
Posted: Thu Oct 31, 2013 1:15 amPART 1 OF 2
Notes
INTRODUCTION: Mutual Contempt
1. The human yearning for democracy is profound and universal, as the upheavals in Communist nations have most recently confirmed. It is driven fundamentally by the impulse for individual self-realization, a desire to discover and establish one's one worth in the collective context of the surrounding world. The struggle to achieve this is so difficult that the search has proceeded fitfully even in the most congenial settings, such as the United States.
The history of nations has reflected this search over the last four or five hundred years as different societies sought to discover democratic meaning and establish its terms. Some places have advanced not at all; some created the forms of democracy but without the substance. Other places -- most notably the United States -- embraced the idea in their national character and have worked fairly steadily toward improving upon it. Democracy is a presumption, not that the majority of the voters will always be right, but that real choices will be put before them.
2. Alexander Hamilton defined the paternalistic skepticism of popular rule that is still reflected in the modern elites of both political parties. Quoted in John F. Manley, "The American Dream," Nature, Society and Thought, Fall 1988.
3. The New York Times published a four-part series in March 1990, called "The Trouble with Politics, Running vs. Governing," which concluded: "Politicians in both parties say government is being crippled by a new superstructure of politics that makes ideas harder to discuss and exalts public opinion over leadership."
4. Ernesto Cortes, Jr., "Powerlessness also corrupts," Speech to Farm Crisis Workers Conference, published in Texas Observer, July 11, 1986.
5. The voting decline of 20 percent was calculated by Curtis Gans of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. Dissatisfaction with the 1990 elections was described in "The People, the Press & Politics 1990," Times Mirror Company, November 16, 1990.
6. The poll was taken by Stanley Greenberg and Celinda Lake and reported in The Commonwealth Report, April 1989.
7. Polls on public perceptions of who controls government have shown increasing alienation for nearly thirty years with a brief reversal in the early 1980s when Ronald Reagan took office. Data from the Center for Political Studies, University of Michigan, were cited, for instance, by Herbert Gans, Middle American Individualism: The Future of Liberal Democracy, Free Press, 1988.
8. Lewis H. Lapham, "Inspectors General," Harper's, July 1989.
9. Senator D'Amato was quoted in The Wall Street Journal, January 30, 1990.
10. Inventories of the powerful are generally compiled by eccentric scholars of the left and right and their work often inspires a kind of brittle paranoia -- the image of a few influentials meeting somewhere in some dark room. Power in American politics is too diffuse -- and sometimes chaotic -- for such facile definitions. The sociologist C. Wright Mills came much closer a generation ago when he defined the "power elite" as five generic subcategories: the upper classes and wealthy; corporate executives and owners; the political directorate at the top of government, including lawyer-statesmen; the military managers and their industrial partners; and that vague status system known as celebrity. See C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, Oxford University Press, 1956.
ONE: Mock Democracy
1. An analysis by Common Cause determined that 239 practitioners of leveraged buyouts, their wives and children contributed $3.5 million, including $1.2 million in so-called "soft money" for George Bush. Washington Post, October 22, 1989.
2. The internal details of how the Superfund Coalition was organized were provided in memorandums made public by the Natural Resources Defense Council and other protesting environmental organizations.
3. I have no evidence to indicate that the New York Times story by Peter Passell on September 1, 1991, was directly linked to the Superfund Coalition, but it relied prominently on experts from General Electric and Clean Sites, an industry-sponsored organization that deals with toxic cleanup projects.
The major polluters were also active on the legal front in their efforts to stymie Superfund enforcement and force Congress to rewrite the law. The corporations launched a flurry of liability lawsuits against municipalities and small businesses -- even pizza parlors -- arguing that these enterprises had also contributed toxic wastes and should share in the cleanup costs, even if their liability was minuscule compared to that of the large manufacturers and insurance companies. This effort was designed to stimulate a political backlash against Superfund and persuade Congress to back off the original legislation. See Wall Street Journal, April 2, 1991.
4. Tommy Boggs was quoted in the National Journal, June 13, 1990.
5. The sampling of AEI's corporate patrons is from 1987, reported by James T. Bennett, Patterns of Corporate Philanthropy: Ideas, Advocacy and the Corporation, Capital Research Center, 1989.
6. Some details on how business set out to mobilize in Washington are drawn from David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America, Basic Books, 1989.
7. The Commerce Department per-capita income rankings are for 1987, Washington Post, March 1, 1990.
8. The rise of high incomes and the decline of low-income families in the Washington area are from Market Trends, Greater Washington Research Center, November 1988.
9. Business's growing share of interest organizations is from Michael D. Reagan, Regulation: The Politics of Policy, Little, Brown, 1987. The Senate Government Affairs Committee study of citizen participation was done in 1979 in an effort to rally support for government grants to citizen representation groups, a brief experiment that had its own flaws but, in any case, was killed during the Reagan years. The data were cited in Gary C. Bryner, Bureaucratic Discretion: Law and Policy in Federal Regulatory Agencies, Pergamon Press, 1987.
10. Anthony Downs, an economist at the Brookings Institution, is better known in contemporary Washington as an authority on real estate and urban development. His thesis in political philosophy challenged the civic smugness promoted by the mainstream political scientists extolling the virtues of pluralism. Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy, Harper & Row, 1957.
11. Politicians in tax-exempt activities, National Journal, December 9, 1989.
12. The New York Academy of Sciences reported, for instance, that the cancer death rate among men, excluding lung cancer, which is often attributable to smoking, has increased by 9 percent since 1950 in industrial nations. The report, compiled by twenty-six scientists in thirteen countries, adjusted for such factors as aging populations -- the explanation often offered for the rising cancer rates. Washington Post, December 10, 1990; also the Natural Resources Defense Council's report in Cancer Statistics Review, 1973-1986, National Cancer Institute, May 1989.
13. The study of scientific bias was cited by Gary C. Bryner in Bureaucratic Discretion, previously cited.
14. An exhaustive academic literature exists on the vagaries of cost-benefit analysis, most of it written by policy thinkers who deplore the weaknesses and inconsistencies. but still regard it as a useful tool for decisions of resource allocation. They do not, by and large, acknowledge the broader moral context in which they are operating and they seem unaware that public decisions made by government rely on a different kind of authority than the cost-benefit decisions made by private business.
The examples of life value arguments are drawn from several sources: Michael D. Reagan, Regulation, previously cited; V. Kerry Smith, editor, Environmental Policy under Reagan's Executive Order: The Role of Benefit-Cost Analysis, University of North Carolina Press, 1984; Martin J. Bailey, Reducing Risks to Life: Measurements of the Benefits, American Enterprise Institute, 1980; and an interview with David Vladeck of Public Citizen.
15. Charles E. Lindblom described democracy as "imprisoned" by markets. See "The Market as Prison," in Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, editors, The Political Economy: Readings in the Politics and Economics of American Public Policy, M.. E. Sharpe, 1984. Lindblom's argument was elaborated more fully in his own book, Politics and Markets: The World's Political-Economic Systems, Basic Books, 1977.
Two: Well-Kept Secrets
1. The frayed principles of liberals on the House Banking Committee were displayed in raw form when some of them in late 1989 tried to depose Henry Gonzalez as chairman. Their complaint was that he had failed to consult them on committee business and was insufficiently partisan. The reality is that Gonzalez is an independent-minded critic of the cozy relations between banking and the federal regulatory apparatus. Gonzalez, furthermore, had embarrassed his own party by holding a series of investigative hearings on Charles Keating and other S&L moguls who had manipulated various Democratic politicians with campaign money. For years, the liberals were silent when their committee was chaired by a corrupt finagler. When an honest politician became chairman, they rebelled. In any case, Gonzalez prevailed, by a vote of 163-89, in the House Democratic caucus.
2. I described the financial and economic consequences of the 1980 financial deregulation in Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country, Simon & Schuster, 1987, and also in The Trouble with Money, Whittle Direct Books, 1989. The most deft description of how deregulation doomed the savings and loan industry came from Albert M. Wojnilower, chief economist of First Boston Corporation. "Freeing the thrift and mortgage markets from government subsidy and guarantee, " he wrote, "is like freeing the family pets by abandoning them in the jungle."
3. Senators Garn and Proxmire were quoted by the Associated Press, July 26, 1985. The Treasury secretary's testimony was before a Senate banking subcommittee on June 13, 1985.
4. Alan Greenspan, as private consultant, wrote to federal regulators and asked them to give Lincoln Savings and Loan an exemption from the regulation limiting direct real-estate investment. He described Lincoln's management as "seasoned and expert in making direct investments" -- the very opposite of what subsequent events proved about Charles Keating's management. The Federal Reserve chairman, when asked later about his intervention in behalf of Keating, replied, "Of course I'm embarrassed." New York Times, November 20, 1989.
5. See my article, "The Growing Crisis in Our S&L Industry," Rolling Stone, August 11, 1988, which quoted Robert Dugger and other bank lobbyists on how they intended to do the taxpayer bailout right after the election.
6. The separation of electoral politics from governing politics is deeply ingrained in the culture that shapes and limits corporate journalism. After the 1988 election, with some embarrassment, political reporters recognized that they had missed the savings and loan story, but they pursued it in the same narrow terms -- which party might suffer more from this scandal at the next election? Political reporters are averse to the "substance" of such issues and often quite ignorant about them. In general, despite their embarrassment with the savings and loan debacle, the media repeated the same opacity as the crisis of failing commercial banks grew larger.
7. Theodore J. Lowi, a Cornell political scientist, wrote: "The people are shut out at the most creative phase of policy making -- where the problem is defined. " See "The New Public Philosophy: Interest-Group Liberalism," in Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, editors, The Political Economy: Readings in the Politics and Economics of American Public Policy, M. E. Sharpe, 1984.
8. General Electric purchased the apartment complexes with a promise that one third of the units would be available to low-income families. Robert Bass, the wealthy Texas investor, was among others who acquired defaulted properties under the program that reformers had enacted. See Leslie Wayne in The New York Times, June 27, 1991.
9. As one who participated in discussions of the Financial Democracy Campaign's proposals, I witnessed up close the dilemma of citizen groups that try to penetrate the special-interest circle surrounding legislative issues. At meeting after meeting, the participants in the coalition fen into the same argument among themselves: whether to push genuinely fundamental reforms that went far beyond the conventional terms of debate or to advance modest proposals on the margins that had at least some chance of acceptance.
Generally, the old hands from Washington-based groups tended to favor the moderate strategy since they had considerable experience in the frustrating task of lobbying for large ideas that no one in Congress would listen to. People who have spent years establishing working relationships with a handful of sympathetic members of Congress are not anxious to sacrifice their connections by pushing them to sponsor ideas bound to lose.
The other side, including myself, argued that nothing fundamental was likely to happen in Washington anyway until the general public became aroused and much better educated about their stake in the contest. The process of political education could only begin if the reformers pushed the larger ideas, regardless of whether Congress was ready to listen.
In the end, the campaign did a bit of both but its legislative efforts inevitably gravitated toward the narrower focus of modest amendments that seemed doable, given existing political realities. In this manner, even groups that wish to change the political agenda are co-opted by the status quo.
THREE: Bait and Switch
1. The shift in tax burdens was described in "The Decline in Progressivity and the Decline in Revenue," Citizens for Tax Justice, February 23, 1990.
2. Kevin P. Phillips described the shift of tax burdens with brilliant documentation in The Politics of Rich and Poor, Random House, 1990. But Phillips concluded by predicting that old cycles of American politics would correct the injustices -- Democrats would rediscover the working class and return to power to make things right. My argument is that the cyclical swings in which Phillips puts his faith are another of the self-correcting mechanisms that no longer seem to work. Democrats were principal coauthors of the vast shift in taxation and, unless there is a dramatic turnover within that party, Democrats will be reluctant to undo what they helped to create.
3. The imbalance of financial wealth was reported in the Federal Reserve Board's "Survey of Consumer Finances, 1983," Federal Reserve Bulletin, September and December 1984.
4. For more details on how elite opinion rallied around an austerity agenda during the presidential campaign, see my articles in Rolling Stone, "The Shadow Debate on the American Economy" and "The Real Election in America This Year," July 14 and August 25, 1988.
5. Alan Greenspan's statement on the need to curtail domestic consumption was in response to a written question submitted by Senator William Proxmire at a Senate Banking Committee hearing, February 24, 1988.
6. "Opinion leaders respond very differently from the general public when asked about potential new revenue sources to cut the deficit," the Gallup survey reported. "While much of the public would support a new tax on gasoline only as a last resort, opinion leaders overwhelmingly favor (74 percent) such a tax.... A majority of corporate leaders (54 percent) and about half of financial leaders (48 percent) favor the establishment of a national sales tax.... Slightly over half of the financial leaders surveyed (52 percent) favor taxing Social Security at the same rate as ordinary income." See "The Press, People & Economics," Times Mirror Company, May 1989.
7. The Gallup and IRS surveys as well as much other data on the public's opposition to the regressive trend in taxation are described by Barry Sussman in What Americans Really Think: And Why Our Politicians Pay No Attention, Pantheon, 1988.
8. Details on tax collection can be found in "Income Tax Compliance Research, Gross Tax Gap Estimates and Projections for 1973-1992," IRS; statement of Representative J. J. Pickle, oversight chairman, House Ways and Means Committee, February 20, 1990; speech by Charles A. Bowsher, comptroller general, "An Emergency Crisis: The Disinvestment of Government," December 2, 1988; and "Facts on the Federal Income Tax System-1989," National Treasury Employees Union.
9. The shifting income shares were described by Joseph A. Pechman of the Brookings Institution in "The Future of the Income Tax," a paper distributed December 22, 1990.
10. Darman was referring approvingly to the 1986 tax legislation that sharply reduced tax rates for the upper-income brackets, Washington Post, February 26, 1989.
11. Anthony Downs, in An Economic Theory of Democracy, described democracy's theoretical inclination to favor the many over the few. "The equality of franchise in a democratic society," Downs wrote, "creates a tendency for government action to equalize incomes by redistributing them from a few wealthy persons to many less wealthy ones."
12. Mellon's celebrated dictum was quoted in "Less Taxing Alternatives," Democracy Project Reports, March 1984. For an authoritative account of the intellectual combat surrounding the progressive income tax, see Ronald Frederick Key, "From Redistributive to Hegemonic Logic: The Transformation of American Tax Politics, 1894-1963," Policy & Society, 1983.
13. "Put the jam on the lower shelf" has been attributed to Ralph Yarborough by those who heard him campaign in the 1950s. I first heard the slogan in Kentucky politics in the early 1960s, employed by a Republican state senator from a rural district.
14. Darman's remarks were in a speech at the National Press Club, July 20, 1989.
15. Thomas B. Edsall, The New Politics of Inequality, W. W. Norton, 1984.
16. David Stockman was quoted by the author in The Education of David Stockman and Other Americans, New American Library, 1986.
17. The Wall Street Journal poll found that people with incomes over $50,000 favor a higher tax rate on unearned income, 61 percent to 19 percent. Wall Street Journal, October 26, 1990.
18. John D. Raffaelli was quoted in "Zap! You're Taxed," National Journal, February 3, 1990.
19. The White House argument that persuaded Reagan to endorse the Social Security tax increase was related by Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers, The Free Press, 1986.
20. Survey data on the 1983 Social Security legislation are from Barry Sussman, What Americans Really Think. Neustadt and May, professors at Harvard's Kennedy School, offered the Social Security episode as one of several case studies of wise political management in their book, Thinking in Time.
21. The statistics on the revenue shifts are from a statement by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, January 14, 1991.
22. See Barry Sussman, What Americans Really Think, for an insightful discussion of the public's skepticism toward tax reform. Bums Roper testified before the Joint Economic Committee, quoted in my article, "Break Dancing," Rolling Stone, October 1986. The windfall tax cuts in the 1986 legislation are drawn from data from the Joint Committee on Taxation. Other wealthy individuals were, of course, forced to pay more taxes since they were losing the benefit of various loopholes. Overall, however, all people with incomes above $200,000 enjoyed an average tax cut of $2,856 each-compared to a $200 tax cut for middle-income families. Sponsors argued the income-tax legislation was marginally progressive, but that claim was meaningless since it left out the rising burden imposed on most families by Social Security taxes.
23. Rostenkowski disparaged Moynihan's proposal in a speech before the Futures Industry Association convention in Boca Raton, Florida, March 9, 1990, where he promised to protect the brokers against federal taxes on their transactions. The evasion of Representative Richard Gephardt, House majority leader, was described by Fred Barnes, "Leaders to Follow," New Republic, May 14, 1990.
24. See The Wall Street Journal, March 14, 1990, and Washington Post, March 11, 1990, for details of Rostenkowski's plan.
25. For an insightful discussion of the Democrats' collaboration with Republicans on taxes and other matters, see Robert Kuttner, "Congress Without Cohabitation," American Prospect, Winter 1991.
26. The Wall Street Journal, because it rigorously and unsentimentally covers business's interface with government, is the best available source for news of the governing politics that I have described in this book. Journal reporters usually go right to the bottom line: Who won and who lost and how much? Three of its reporters, Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, David Wessel and Jackie Calmes, undoubtedly contributed to the 1990 rank-and-file revolt in Congress by describing the implications of the bipartisan budget agreement with such inescapable clarity. Wall Street Journal, October 2 and 3, 1990.
27. Reporters Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele found that a provision limiting personal exemptions for the well-to-do, which was billed as raising $10.8 billion from the wealthy, would actually yield no more than $2 billion or $3 billion-and that money would come from upper-middle-income families, not the rich. The same measure was proffered by congressional tax writers as proof of their even-handedness back in 1986 when it was first enacted. See Philadelphia Inquirer, November 4, 1990.
28. The Lipsey-Kravis study also challenged the conventional argument that the U.S. saving and investment rate lags far below its competitors' and that this explains disappointing economic growth. The different savings rates, they concluded, are really in large part differences in economic definitions of what counts as capital formation and in the cultural preferences of different nations. Robert E. Lipsey and Irving B. Kravis, Saving and Economic Growth: Is the United States Really Falling Behind? The Conference Board, 1987.
FOUR: The Grand Bazaar
1. Robert B. Reich's regulatory community included 12,000 lawyers in law firms representing business before courts and agencies, 9,000 lobbyists in firms specializing in lobbying, 42,000 trade association lobbyists and employees, 9,300 public-relations and public-affairs specialists, 1,200 trade journalists, 3,500 consultants advising government agencies and 15,500 lawyers and lobbyists from large corporations and federal agencies. Reich, "Regulation by Confrontation or Negotiation," Harvard Business Review, May-June 1981, cited by Bryner in Bureaucratic Discretion.
2. I can testify from personal experience on the enormous difficulty of covering regulatory politics in a manner that matches the demands of a daily newspaper. As assistant managing editor for national news at The Washington Post, I made several attempts to do so and all failed. In 1981, under my supervision, the Post initiated the "Federal Page," devoted each day to large and small stories from the regulatory government. For a year or so, the expanded coverage of regulation seemed engaging and occasionally significant, hut in time the effort lost its energy and focus.
To cover the full range of complex regulatory battles with any depth would require a substantial number of reasonably sophisticated reporters and lots of patience -- an investment of resources that very few news organizations are able or willing to make. As a result, the coverage of regulatory issues is almost totally dependent on the sporadic alarums sounded by interested parties. A news story may be generated, for instance, by an environmental organization that exposes malign behavior in an agency's decisions. But otherwise reporters keep their distance from the process and are usually quite ignorant of who is winning or losing.
3. The growth of regulatory laws was cited by Bryner, Bureaucratic Discretion.
4. The unifying effect of modern regulation on business political action is described by Carl J. Mayer in "Personalizing the Impersonal: Corporations and the Bill of Rights," Hastings Law Journal, March 1990.
5. Theodore J. Lowi is the most penetrating critic of the governing system he calls "interest-group liberalism." See The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States, W. W. Norton, 1979.
6. The environmentalists' record of winning 68 percent of those challenges to EPA that were decided by judges was between 1970 and 1980, cited in Bryner, Bureaucratic Discretion.
7. The "grand bazaar" metaphor I am using in this chapter is borrowed from an essay I wrote on the same subject fifteen years ago on the eve of Jimmy Carter's inauguration. This ought to establish at least that my own analysis of lawless government did not result from the scandals in the Reagan years. See Washington Post, January 20, 1977.
8. The Nixon-Ford-Iacocca dialogue lasted only thirty-five minutes on the morning of April 27, 1971. The ill-focused quality of their conversation is a jarring contrast with the conventional claim that regulatory matters of health and safety should be decided with scientific precision. The tangled history of airbag regulation was recounted by Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen and highway-safety administrator under Jimmy Carter, in a speech, "Influencing Agency Decision-Making," August 1, 1983.
9. The delayed enforcement of the ban on red dyes was reported by Bryner, Bureaucratic Discretion.
10. Nuclear accidents and fines were analyzed by Ken Bossong, leader of Critical Mass, Ralph Nader's watchdog organization on nuclear power.
11. The fraud cases involving defense manufacturers covered seven years before 1990, New York Times, November 12, 1990.
12. On EPA's lax enforcement, see Michael Reagan, Regulation: The Politics of Policy, Little, Brown, 1987, and the testimony of John C. Martin, EPA inspector general, before Senator John Glenn of Ohio in "Serious Management Problems in the U.S. Government," Senate Government Affairs Committee, September 28, 1989.
13. Frederick Malek's manual on how to politicize the civil service was revealed during the Watergate investigations into the Nixon administration. The text was published in Federal Times, December 18, 1974. Malek himself became campaign manager for George Bush's 1992 re-election campaign.
14. Data on federal regulatory personnel are from Michael Reagan, Regulation: The Politics of Policy. Details on how the Reagan administration cut back enforcement are from David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes.
15. Gregg Easterbrook, "Radio Free Watkins and the Crisis at Energy," Washington Post Magazine, February 18, 1990.
16. Senator Pryor was quoted by Kirk Victor, "Farming It Out," National Journal, December 16, 1989.
17. Elite leaders, led by Lloyd Cutler and fanner Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, began a campaign in the late 1980s to reverse the decline of government management. The National Commission on the Public Service, chaired by Volcker, warned of a "quiet crisis" in the senior ranks of the civil service. The campaign produced some progress on salaries for senior executives, but it also collided with the antigovernment attitudes that conservative business interests had spent two decades encouraging. It seemed out of character for a think tank like the American Enterprise Institute to begin worrying about the quality of government employees, when AEI had devoted so much scholarship over the years to demeaning their efforts.
18. The New York Times's dramatic and repetitious coverage of this scandal actually drew some reproach from other news organizations, which seemed to consider it untoward for a major newspaper to "crusade" on public matters. In an earlier time, repetition and dramatic emphasis were the standard techniques that newspapers used to force political attention to neglected issues. See Washington Post, January 8, 1989.
19. Exhaustive congressional hearings as well as press investigations have focused on pollution by federal agencies, particularly the Energy and Defense departments. These few examples are from among scores cited in the following sources: "Review of Hazardous Waste Disposal Practices at Federal Facilities," August 15, 1983, and "Hazardous Waste Problems at Department of Defense Facilities," November 5, 1987, House Government Operations Committee; "Environmental Compliance by Federal Agencies," April 28, 1987, and "Cleanup at Federal Facilities," March 3, I988, House Commerce Committee. See also: Howard Kahn, "America's Worst Polluter," Rolling Stone, May 3, 1990.
20. The issues surrounding EPA's ability to enforce the law against other federal departments were explored in "Environmental Compliance by Federal Agencies," House Commerce Committee, April 28, 1987.
21. Data on OSHA prosecutions is from Raymond Maria, Labor Department inspector general, in "Serious Management Problems in the U.S. Government," Senate Government Affairs Committee, September 28, 1989. The National Safe Workplace Institute in Chicago has published a series of shocking reports on OSHA's weak enforcement, including "Unintended Consequences: The Failure of OSHA's Megafine Strategy," June 25, 1989.
22. Construction industry data are from "Construction: The Most Hazardous Industry in the Nation," Laborers' National Health and Safety Fund, 1990.
23. EPA also responded to the Lordstown workers' complaints and fined General Motors $1.5 million for toxic air pollution from the plant. Union and company officials again dismissed the action, claiming that GM had already complied with the law. Youngstown Vindicator, March 7, 1991.
FIVE: Hollow Laws
1. Mary Johnson's account of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Nation, October 23, 1989.
2. The academic studies on the failure of modern regulation, some of which have been cited here, generally focus on the managerial questions, not the larger democratic principles enunciated by Theodore Lowi. Many critical scholars start from a conservative probusiness position that assumes these laws were ill advised in the first place and attempted to deliver impossible goals that would not truly benefit the society. Others tend to focus on the techniques by which the laws are frustrated and propose various managerial reforms, but without examining the larger framework of power.
3. The EPA data on high-risk industrial facilities were released by Representative Henry Waxman, chairman of the House subcommittee on health and the environment, January 12, 1990. EPA placed a cautionary disclaimer on the data, which, it said, were calculated for purposes of relative comparisons and rankings of pollution sources but could not be relied upon as a plant-by-plant measure of health risks. Waxman acknowledged that the ratings were based on simplified assumptions but should nevertheless "raise a red warning flag in communities where these facilities are locating -- and spur prompt action to investigate the plants further."
4. Senator Moynihan sarcastically announced his own more modest goal for the year 2000- hat by then the nation would at least understand that the political system is not serious about improving education. See his speech, "Goals for the Year 2000," March 12, 1990.
5. The surveys of public opinion on environmental trade-offs were reported in The Wall Street Journal. April 20, 1990, and The New York Times, April 17, 1990.
6. Robert W. Crandell, "The Political Economy of Clean Air: Practical Constraints on White House Review." in V. Kerry Smith, editor, Environmental Policy Under Reagan's Executive Order, University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Some environmentalists predict that the modest progress on clean air will be reversed during the I 990s as the number of vehicles continues to multiply without offsetting improvements in emission controls.
7. The leisurely development of RCRA regulations in the Carter administration was described by Marc K. Landy, Marc J. Roberts and Stephen R. Thomas, The Environmental Protection Agency: Asking the Wrong Questions. Oxford University Press, 1990. The frustrations that led to development of the "hammer" provisions in the 1984 legislation are recounted by Richard C. Fortuna and David J. Lennett, Hazardous Waste Regulation: The New Era, McGraw-Hill, 1987.
8. The corporate intention to abandon deep-well injection in favor of higher treatment was reported in Pollution Prevention News, published by EPA, August 1990.
9. The intense discussions between EPA and industry lobbyists conducted between the proposed rule and the final rule are partially revealed in the administrative record-meeting notes that agency officials are required to maintain on their contacts with regulated industries. This record does not disclose, however, any of the informal political conversations at the White House or EPA that may have accompanied the decision making.
SIX: The Fixers
1. Many details on the Bush task force are from my article, "When Big Business Needs a Favor, George Bush Gets the Call," Rolling Stone, April 12, 1984.
2. Invoking global competition as an argument against sterner environmental regulation is particularly specious because the main industrial competitors in Europe and Japan have much better performance in this area. The leading foreign producers generate 50 percent to 80 percent less industrial waste than American companies -- efficiency that gives them a significant cost advantage in their production. See Warren Brookes, Washington Times, January 9, 1990. Vice-President Quayle's intervention was disclosed in The Washington Post, December 20, 1990.
3. When regulators, members of Congress and public-interest advocates became increasingly alarmed at Quayle's tampering in behalf of business, OMB Watch and Public Citizen's Congress Watch issued a joint report, "All the Vice President's Men: How the Quayle Council on Competitiveness Secretly Undermines Health, Safety and Environmental Programs," September 1991.
4. In 1986, Congress threatened to rein in OMB's powers by cutting off funding for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, but settled for an informal letter of agreement by which OMB promised to make public after the fact its communications with agencies and private interests. In practice, the reporting requirement has produced a grossly inadequate record of what transpired. The studies on OMB's impact on regulation in the Reagan and Bush terms were reported in the OMB Watch newsletter, OMB Watcher, September 30, 1990, and in testimony by Gary D. Bass before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, February 21, 1990.
5. Douglas Costle is quoted in Landy, Roberts and Thomas, The Environmental Protection Agency: Asking the Wrong Questions.
6. The analysis of desk officers at OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs was reported in "Playing the Numbers: OMB and Paperwork Reduction," OMB Watch, October 1989.
7. The anonymous policy analyst is quoted in Landy, Roberts and Thomas, The Environmental Protection Agency: Asking the Wrong Questions.
8. The examples of inconsistency in Regulatory Impact Analyses are from W. Norton Grubb, Dale Whittington and Michael Humphries, "The Ambiguities of Benefit-Cost Analysis: An Evaluation of Regulatory Impact Analysis under Executive Order 12291," in Environmental Policy Under Reagan's Executive Order. V. Kerry Smith, editor.
9. The examples of OMB intervention are from OMB Watcher. the newsletter of OMB Watch, and congressional testimony from Gary D. Bass, executive director of OMB Watch.
10. Patricia M. Wald, "The Sizzling Sleeper: The Use of Legislative History in Construing Statutes in the 1988-89 Term of the U.S. Supreme Court," American University Law Review. Winter 1990.
11. Robert Bork's complaint was in a review of Jeremy Rabkin's book Judicial Compulsions: How Public Law Distorts Public Policy, which makes similar arguments, Wall Street Journal, October 13, 1989.
12. Judge Laurence H. Silberman, "Chevron -- The Intersection of Law and Policy," George Washington Law Review, 1990.
13. For a parallel argument about democracy and the confusion over government authority, see James A. Morone, The Democratic Wish: Popular Participation and the Limits of American Government, Basic Books, 1990.
14. Data on what the poor receive in federal assistance are from "Receipt of Selected Non- ash Benefits: 1987," Bureau of the Census. Among 11.9 million designated as poor, 7.6 million received no cash stipends from welfare or Social Security. And 4.6 million received neither cash nor noncash benefits. The nonrecipients are typically screened out by the complex eligibility requirements of different programs, but the Reagan administration also conducted a visible campaign to drive poor people out of programs by challenging their applications and tightening the rules. The lives of the poor were one of the few areas of government activity that Reagan conservatives did not try to deregulate.
15. For further discussion of preventative protection for the environment, see Bruce Piasecki and Peter Asmus, In Search of Environmental Excellence: Moving Beyond Blame, Touchstone, 1990, and Barry Commoner, Making Peace with the Planer, Pantheon, 1990. How the tax code favors exploitation of virgin materials is described in "Facing America's Trash: What Next for Municipal Solid Waste?" Office of Technology Assessment, Congress, 1989.
16. Examples of state initiatives are from Margaret E. Kriz, "Ahead of the Feds," National Journal, December 9, 1989, and "Building an Environmentally Sustainable Economy," Center for Policy Alternatives, December 15, 1990.
SEVEN: The Politics of "Rude and Crude"
1. The Citizen's Clearinghouse estimate of seven thousand grassroots environmental groups seems excessive on its face, since it would mean an average of 140 such organizations in each of the fifty states. On the other hand, some states where environmental degradation has become a principal public issue have several hundred of these community organizations. Because the groups come and go or merge with others, it is difficult to find a precise answer to the question of their number.
2. The examples of successful protest tactics are taken from Everyone's Backyard, December 1990, monthly newsletter of the Citizen's Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes. Literally hundreds, perhaps thousands of such encounters occur every year and provoke local controversy but seldom rise to the level of national news events.
3. The Union Carbide memo was written by C. E. Greenert, director of corporate contributions, public issues and administration, November 24, 1989. A letter of apology from Ronald S. Wishart, Union Carbide's vice-president for public affairs, said: "I'm sorry that Mr. Greenert's (purloined) internal memorandum implies that the founder of CCHW has communist leanings, which was his short hand for a concern about the political directions some environmental activism seems to be taking."
4. EPA research, reported in the Archives of Environmental Health, March 1989, found excessive deaths from various kinds of cancers in Superfund counties in different regions of the country compared with counties that had no major hazardous-waste dumps. The patterns of increased disease, the EPA researchers noted, might be attributable to other causes, such as direct pollution from local industries, not exactly a comforting explanation for local citizens. A summary of the findings was reported in Rachel's Hazardous Waste News, May 2, 1989.
5. William Ruckelshaus was named CEO of Browning-Ferris Industries in 1988 to improve the company's environmental image, but BFI's hazardous-waste division, a small part of its overall operations, continued to face expensive controversies. New York State rejected its application for a new hazardous-waste site in Niagara Falls. In Ohio, BFI paid $3.5 million in fines and civil damages for past pollution at a dump outside Cincinnati. In Louisiana, it paid $1.5 million to settle allegations of violating hazardous-waste rules. Wall Street Journal, April 6, 1990.
6. The survey on political sophistication was cited by Herbert J. Gans, Middle American Individualism: The Future of Liberal Democracy, The Free Press, 1988. For an insightful essay on the strengths and weaknesses of citizen activism, see Karen Paget, "Citizen Organizing: Many Movements, No Majority," The American Prospect, Summer 1990.
7. The Washington Post's 1983 survey on environmental issues was cited by Barry Sussman, What Americans Really Think. Next to environmentalists, people most trusted local governments (55 percent favorable; 30 percent unfavorable), then the EPA (46 percent to 36 percent). President Reagan scored almost as poorly as business leaders (36 percent favorable; 45 percent unfavorable).
8. The StarKist boycott and others were described in The Wall Street Journal, "Facing a Boycott, Many Companies Bend," November 8, 1990.
9. Gillette, Dow Chemical, Sara Lee, and Sears Roebuck are among the companies that modified products in order to comply with California's "Prop 65" requirement of warning labels. In the political debates, of course, this is the sort of remedial action that corporations usually insist is impossible. See "California Spurs Reformulated Products," Wall Street Journal, November 1, 1990.
10. The Los Angeles survey was cited by Ken Hoover, "On the Take," Golden State Report, March 1990.
11. Tax-cutting measures were rejected in Massachusetts, Colorado, Nebraska and Utah, among other places, in 1990. California entertainment celebrities campaigned for "Big Green," the omnibus environmental initiative, but the chemical and agriculture industries countered with a trustworthy celebrity of their own, former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who advised voters that the proposed bans on carcinogenic chemicals would not benefit the health of children. For a survey of initiatives, see The Wall Street Journal, November 8, 1990.
12. Mervin Field's analysis of referendum voters was in "Falling Turnout -- A Nonvoting Majority," Public Affairs Report, Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California at Berkeley, March 1990.
13. The plastics industry's alarm and Larry Thomas's letter were reported in Everyone's Backyard, Citizen's Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes, March 1990.
14. Robert O. Aders's remarks to Produce Marketing Association are from an unpublished text, October 17, 1989.
15. I am indebted to the National Journal for its excellent coverage of regulatory politics and, in particular, its continuing reports on the power struggles between the states and the federal government and the cross-pressures generated by business interests and citizen reform groups. See, for instance, W. John Moore, "Stopping the States," July 21, 1990; Margaret E. Kriz, "Ahead of the Feds," December 9, 1989; and Julie Kosterlitz, "The Food Lobby's Menu," September 29, 1990.
16. The industry petition to the Federal Trade Commission was reported in The New York Times, February 15, 1991. 17. The Advocacy Institute and Congress Watch declaration was cited by W. John Moore, "Stopping the States," National Journal.
18. Enactment of federal preemptions for business regulation and health and safety laws increased from 65 in the 1970s to 72 in the 1980s. The data from the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations were reported by W. John Moore in "Stopping the States," National Journal. The agency counted a total of 350 federal preemptions, 127 for business regulation and 134 for health and safety regulations. In two other areas, civil rights and financial regulation, the number of new preemptions declined during the decade.
EIGHT: Political Orphans
1. The leaflet was quoted by Jon Cohen, "Down and Dirty," City Paper, May 19, 1989.
2. AEI's complete catalog of books, Fall 1989, lists the minimum-wage literature it has sponsored.
3. Richard Thompson was quoted in City Paper, May 19, 1989.
4. Details on the NLRB are from David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America, Basic Books, 1989.
5. For a compelling account of how law has helped to collapse the labor movement, see Thomas Geoghegan, Which Side Are You On? Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1991.
6. Michael Merrill, "Why There Will Be a Labor Party by the Year 2000," Social Policy, Spring 1990. See also my article, "Down but Not Out: Labor Struggles to Find Its Voice," Rolling Stone, October 17, 1991.
7. The D.C. minimum wage, like that of many states, was higher than the level set by federal law and would have been pushed upward if Congress had enacted a sufficiently large increase. The D.C. wage board subsequently adopted a $7.25 minimum for clerical workers (though not janitors), but the city council reduced this to $5.25 under pressure from local businesses.
8. The Progressive Policy Institute's report was entitled "Work and Poverty: A Progressive View of the Minimum Wage and the Earned Income Tax Credit," June 1989.
9. The survival "cheating" on federal benefits by the working poor is described by Christopher Jencks and Kathryn Edin in "The Real Welfare Problem," American Prospect, Spring 1990.
10. The late Joseph A. Pechman of the Brookings Institution, leading expert on tax equity, described the perverse effect of improving welfare benefits when the income-tax structure was no longer progressive: "The tax system has been getting less progressive in the last two decades, while the ratio of transfers to income has been increasing. In other words, the recent increases in transfer payments in the United States have been financed by the low and middle-income groups, while the rich have been getting tax cuts." Pechman, "The Future of the Income Tax," Brookings, December 22, 1989.
11. The charity event was a fund-raising gala for the Jewish Community Center of metropolitan Washington, and the Charles E. Smith Company changed its labor policies after several rabbis in the Washington area expressed their support for the demands made by "Justice for Janitors." Jewish Week, the community newspaper, also published a sympathetic account of why the janitors had staged their demonstration at the community center's banquet.
Notes
INTRODUCTION: Mutual Contempt
1. The human yearning for democracy is profound and universal, as the upheavals in Communist nations have most recently confirmed. It is driven fundamentally by the impulse for individual self-realization, a desire to discover and establish one's one worth in the collective context of the surrounding world. The struggle to achieve this is so difficult that the search has proceeded fitfully even in the most congenial settings, such as the United States.
The history of nations has reflected this search over the last four or five hundred years as different societies sought to discover democratic meaning and establish its terms. Some places have advanced not at all; some created the forms of democracy but without the substance. Other places -- most notably the United States -- embraced the idea in their national character and have worked fairly steadily toward improving upon it. Democracy is a presumption, not that the majority of the voters will always be right, but that real choices will be put before them.
2. Alexander Hamilton defined the paternalistic skepticism of popular rule that is still reflected in the modern elites of both political parties. Quoted in John F. Manley, "The American Dream," Nature, Society and Thought, Fall 1988.
3. The New York Times published a four-part series in March 1990, called "The Trouble with Politics, Running vs. Governing," which concluded: "Politicians in both parties say government is being crippled by a new superstructure of politics that makes ideas harder to discuss and exalts public opinion over leadership."
4. Ernesto Cortes, Jr., "Powerlessness also corrupts," Speech to Farm Crisis Workers Conference, published in Texas Observer, July 11, 1986.
5. The voting decline of 20 percent was calculated by Curtis Gans of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. Dissatisfaction with the 1990 elections was described in "The People, the Press & Politics 1990," Times Mirror Company, November 16, 1990.
6. The poll was taken by Stanley Greenberg and Celinda Lake and reported in The Commonwealth Report, April 1989.
7. Polls on public perceptions of who controls government have shown increasing alienation for nearly thirty years with a brief reversal in the early 1980s when Ronald Reagan took office. Data from the Center for Political Studies, University of Michigan, were cited, for instance, by Herbert Gans, Middle American Individualism: The Future of Liberal Democracy, Free Press, 1988.
8. Lewis H. Lapham, "Inspectors General," Harper's, July 1989.
9. Senator D'Amato was quoted in The Wall Street Journal, January 30, 1990.
10. Inventories of the powerful are generally compiled by eccentric scholars of the left and right and their work often inspires a kind of brittle paranoia -- the image of a few influentials meeting somewhere in some dark room. Power in American politics is too diffuse -- and sometimes chaotic -- for such facile definitions. The sociologist C. Wright Mills came much closer a generation ago when he defined the "power elite" as five generic subcategories: the upper classes and wealthy; corporate executives and owners; the political directorate at the top of government, including lawyer-statesmen; the military managers and their industrial partners; and that vague status system known as celebrity. See C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, Oxford University Press, 1956.
ONE: Mock Democracy
1. An analysis by Common Cause determined that 239 practitioners of leveraged buyouts, their wives and children contributed $3.5 million, including $1.2 million in so-called "soft money" for George Bush. Washington Post, October 22, 1989.
2. The internal details of how the Superfund Coalition was organized were provided in memorandums made public by the Natural Resources Defense Council and other protesting environmental organizations.
3. I have no evidence to indicate that the New York Times story by Peter Passell on September 1, 1991, was directly linked to the Superfund Coalition, but it relied prominently on experts from General Electric and Clean Sites, an industry-sponsored organization that deals with toxic cleanup projects.
The major polluters were also active on the legal front in their efforts to stymie Superfund enforcement and force Congress to rewrite the law. The corporations launched a flurry of liability lawsuits against municipalities and small businesses -- even pizza parlors -- arguing that these enterprises had also contributed toxic wastes and should share in the cleanup costs, even if their liability was minuscule compared to that of the large manufacturers and insurance companies. This effort was designed to stimulate a political backlash against Superfund and persuade Congress to back off the original legislation. See Wall Street Journal, April 2, 1991.
4. Tommy Boggs was quoted in the National Journal, June 13, 1990.
5. The sampling of AEI's corporate patrons is from 1987, reported by James T. Bennett, Patterns of Corporate Philanthropy: Ideas, Advocacy and the Corporation, Capital Research Center, 1989.
6. Some details on how business set out to mobilize in Washington are drawn from David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America, Basic Books, 1989.
7. The Commerce Department per-capita income rankings are for 1987, Washington Post, March 1, 1990.
8. The rise of high incomes and the decline of low-income families in the Washington area are from Market Trends, Greater Washington Research Center, November 1988.
9. Business's growing share of interest organizations is from Michael D. Reagan, Regulation: The Politics of Policy, Little, Brown, 1987. The Senate Government Affairs Committee study of citizen participation was done in 1979 in an effort to rally support for government grants to citizen representation groups, a brief experiment that had its own flaws but, in any case, was killed during the Reagan years. The data were cited in Gary C. Bryner, Bureaucratic Discretion: Law and Policy in Federal Regulatory Agencies, Pergamon Press, 1987.
10. Anthony Downs, an economist at the Brookings Institution, is better known in contemporary Washington as an authority on real estate and urban development. His thesis in political philosophy challenged the civic smugness promoted by the mainstream political scientists extolling the virtues of pluralism. Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy, Harper & Row, 1957.
11. Politicians in tax-exempt activities, National Journal, December 9, 1989.
12. The New York Academy of Sciences reported, for instance, that the cancer death rate among men, excluding lung cancer, which is often attributable to smoking, has increased by 9 percent since 1950 in industrial nations. The report, compiled by twenty-six scientists in thirteen countries, adjusted for such factors as aging populations -- the explanation often offered for the rising cancer rates. Washington Post, December 10, 1990; also the Natural Resources Defense Council's report in Cancer Statistics Review, 1973-1986, National Cancer Institute, May 1989.
13. The study of scientific bias was cited by Gary C. Bryner in Bureaucratic Discretion, previously cited.
14. An exhaustive academic literature exists on the vagaries of cost-benefit analysis, most of it written by policy thinkers who deplore the weaknesses and inconsistencies. but still regard it as a useful tool for decisions of resource allocation. They do not, by and large, acknowledge the broader moral context in which they are operating and they seem unaware that public decisions made by government rely on a different kind of authority than the cost-benefit decisions made by private business.
The examples of life value arguments are drawn from several sources: Michael D. Reagan, Regulation, previously cited; V. Kerry Smith, editor, Environmental Policy under Reagan's Executive Order: The Role of Benefit-Cost Analysis, University of North Carolina Press, 1984; Martin J. Bailey, Reducing Risks to Life: Measurements of the Benefits, American Enterprise Institute, 1980; and an interview with David Vladeck of Public Citizen.
15. Charles E. Lindblom described democracy as "imprisoned" by markets. See "The Market as Prison," in Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, editors, The Political Economy: Readings in the Politics and Economics of American Public Policy, M.. E. Sharpe, 1984. Lindblom's argument was elaborated more fully in his own book, Politics and Markets: The World's Political-Economic Systems, Basic Books, 1977.
Two: Well-Kept Secrets
1. The frayed principles of liberals on the House Banking Committee were displayed in raw form when some of them in late 1989 tried to depose Henry Gonzalez as chairman. Their complaint was that he had failed to consult them on committee business and was insufficiently partisan. The reality is that Gonzalez is an independent-minded critic of the cozy relations between banking and the federal regulatory apparatus. Gonzalez, furthermore, had embarrassed his own party by holding a series of investigative hearings on Charles Keating and other S&L moguls who had manipulated various Democratic politicians with campaign money. For years, the liberals were silent when their committee was chaired by a corrupt finagler. When an honest politician became chairman, they rebelled. In any case, Gonzalez prevailed, by a vote of 163-89, in the House Democratic caucus.
2. I described the financial and economic consequences of the 1980 financial deregulation in Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country, Simon & Schuster, 1987, and also in The Trouble with Money, Whittle Direct Books, 1989. The most deft description of how deregulation doomed the savings and loan industry came from Albert M. Wojnilower, chief economist of First Boston Corporation. "Freeing the thrift and mortgage markets from government subsidy and guarantee, " he wrote, "is like freeing the family pets by abandoning them in the jungle."
3. Senators Garn and Proxmire were quoted by the Associated Press, July 26, 1985. The Treasury secretary's testimony was before a Senate banking subcommittee on June 13, 1985.
4. Alan Greenspan, as private consultant, wrote to federal regulators and asked them to give Lincoln Savings and Loan an exemption from the regulation limiting direct real-estate investment. He described Lincoln's management as "seasoned and expert in making direct investments" -- the very opposite of what subsequent events proved about Charles Keating's management. The Federal Reserve chairman, when asked later about his intervention in behalf of Keating, replied, "Of course I'm embarrassed." New York Times, November 20, 1989.
5. See my article, "The Growing Crisis in Our S&L Industry," Rolling Stone, August 11, 1988, which quoted Robert Dugger and other bank lobbyists on how they intended to do the taxpayer bailout right after the election.
6. The separation of electoral politics from governing politics is deeply ingrained in the culture that shapes and limits corporate journalism. After the 1988 election, with some embarrassment, political reporters recognized that they had missed the savings and loan story, but they pursued it in the same narrow terms -- which party might suffer more from this scandal at the next election? Political reporters are averse to the "substance" of such issues and often quite ignorant about them. In general, despite their embarrassment with the savings and loan debacle, the media repeated the same opacity as the crisis of failing commercial banks grew larger.
7. Theodore J. Lowi, a Cornell political scientist, wrote: "The people are shut out at the most creative phase of policy making -- where the problem is defined. " See "The New Public Philosophy: Interest-Group Liberalism," in Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, editors, The Political Economy: Readings in the Politics and Economics of American Public Policy, M. E. Sharpe, 1984.
8. General Electric purchased the apartment complexes with a promise that one third of the units would be available to low-income families. Robert Bass, the wealthy Texas investor, was among others who acquired defaulted properties under the program that reformers had enacted. See Leslie Wayne in The New York Times, June 27, 1991.
9. As one who participated in discussions of the Financial Democracy Campaign's proposals, I witnessed up close the dilemma of citizen groups that try to penetrate the special-interest circle surrounding legislative issues. At meeting after meeting, the participants in the coalition fen into the same argument among themselves: whether to push genuinely fundamental reforms that went far beyond the conventional terms of debate or to advance modest proposals on the margins that had at least some chance of acceptance.
Generally, the old hands from Washington-based groups tended to favor the moderate strategy since they had considerable experience in the frustrating task of lobbying for large ideas that no one in Congress would listen to. People who have spent years establishing working relationships with a handful of sympathetic members of Congress are not anxious to sacrifice their connections by pushing them to sponsor ideas bound to lose.
The other side, including myself, argued that nothing fundamental was likely to happen in Washington anyway until the general public became aroused and much better educated about their stake in the contest. The process of political education could only begin if the reformers pushed the larger ideas, regardless of whether Congress was ready to listen.
In the end, the campaign did a bit of both but its legislative efforts inevitably gravitated toward the narrower focus of modest amendments that seemed doable, given existing political realities. In this manner, even groups that wish to change the political agenda are co-opted by the status quo.
THREE: Bait and Switch
1. The shift in tax burdens was described in "The Decline in Progressivity and the Decline in Revenue," Citizens for Tax Justice, February 23, 1990.
2. Kevin P. Phillips described the shift of tax burdens with brilliant documentation in The Politics of Rich and Poor, Random House, 1990. But Phillips concluded by predicting that old cycles of American politics would correct the injustices -- Democrats would rediscover the working class and return to power to make things right. My argument is that the cyclical swings in which Phillips puts his faith are another of the self-correcting mechanisms that no longer seem to work. Democrats were principal coauthors of the vast shift in taxation and, unless there is a dramatic turnover within that party, Democrats will be reluctant to undo what they helped to create.
3. The imbalance of financial wealth was reported in the Federal Reserve Board's "Survey of Consumer Finances, 1983," Federal Reserve Bulletin, September and December 1984.
4. For more details on how elite opinion rallied around an austerity agenda during the presidential campaign, see my articles in Rolling Stone, "The Shadow Debate on the American Economy" and "The Real Election in America This Year," July 14 and August 25, 1988.
5. Alan Greenspan's statement on the need to curtail domestic consumption was in response to a written question submitted by Senator William Proxmire at a Senate Banking Committee hearing, February 24, 1988.
6. "Opinion leaders respond very differently from the general public when asked about potential new revenue sources to cut the deficit," the Gallup survey reported. "While much of the public would support a new tax on gasoline only as a last resort, opinion leaders overwhelmingly favor (74 percent) such a tax.... A majority of corporate leaders (54 percent) and about half of financial leaders (48 percent) favor the establishment of a national sales tax.... Slightly over half of the financial leaders surveyed (52 percent) favor taxing Social Security at the same rate as ordinary income." See "The Press, People & Economics," Times Mirror Company, May 1989.
7. The Gallup and IRS surveys as well as much other data on the public's opposition to the regressive trend in taxation are described by Barry Sussman in What Americans Really Think: And Why Our Politicians Pay No Attention, Pantheon, 1988.
8. Details on tax collection can be found in "Income Tax Compliance Research, Gross Tax Gap Estimates and Projections for 1973-1992," IRS; statement of Representative J. J. Pickle, oversight chairman, House Ways and Means Committee, February 20, 1990; speech by Charles A. Bowsher, comptroller general, "An Emergency Crisis: The Disinvestment of Government," December 2, 1988; and "Facts on the Federal Income Tax System-1989," National Treasury Employees Union.
9. The shifting income shares were described by Joseph A. Pechman of the Brookings Institution in "The Future of the Income Tax," a paper distributed December 22, 1990.
10. Darman was referring approvingly to the 1986 tax legislation that sharply reduced tax rates for the upper-income brackets, Washington Post, February 26, 1989.
11. Anthony Downs, in An Economic Theory of Democracy, described democracy's theoretical inclination to favor the many over the few. "The equality of franchise in a democratic society," Downs wrote, "creates a tendency for government action to equalize incomes by redistributing them from a few wealthy persons to many less wealthy ones."
12. Mellon's celebrated dictum was quoted in "Less Taxing Alternatives," Democracy Project Reports, March 1984. For an authoritative account of the intellectual combat surrounding the progressive income tax, see Ronald Frederick Key, "From Redistributive to Hegemonic Logic: The Transformation of American Tax Politics, 1894-1963," Policy & Society, 1983.
13. "Put the jam on the lower shelf" has been attributed to Ralph Yarborough by those who heard him campaign in the 1950s. I first heard the slogan in Kentucky politics in the early 1960s, employed by a Republican state senator from a rural district.
14. Darman's remarks were in a speech at the National Press Club, July 20, 1989.
15. Thomas B. Edsall, The New Politics of Inequality, W. W. Norton, 1984.
16. David Stockman was quoted by the author in The Education of David Stockman and Other Americans, New American Library, 1986.
17. The Wall Street Journal poll found that people with incomes over $50,000 favor a higher tax rate on unearned income, 61 percent to 19 percent. Wall Street Journal, October 26, 1990.
18. John D. Raffaelli was quoted in "Zap! You're Taxed," National Journal, February 3, 1990.
19. The White House argument that persuaded Reagan to endorse the Social Security tax increase was related by Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers, The Free Press, 1986.
20. Survey data on the 1983 Social Security legislation are from Barry Sussman, What Americans Really Think. Neustadt and May, professors at Harvard's Kennedy School, offered the Social Security episode as one of several case studies of wise political management in their book, Thinking in Time.
21. The statistics on the revenue shifts are from a statement by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, January 14, 1991.
22. See Barry Sussman, What Americans Really Think, for an insightful discussion of the public's skepticism toward tax reform. Bums Roper testified before the Joint Economic Committee, quoted in my article, "Break Dancing," Rolling Stone, October 1986. The windfall tax cuts in the 1986 legislation are drawn from data from the Joint Committee on Taxation. Other wealthy individuals were, of course, forced to pay more taxes since they were losing the benefit of various loopholes. Overall, however, all people with incomes above $200,000 enjoyed an average tax cut of $2,856 each-compared to a $200 tax cut for middle-income families. Sponsors argued the income-tax legislation was marginally progressive, but that claim was meaningless since it left out the rising burden imposed on most families by Social Security taxes.
23. Rostenkowski disparaged Moynihan's proposal in a speech before the Futures Industry Association convention in Boca Raton, Florida, March 9, 1990, where he promised to protect the brokers against federal taxes on their transactions. The evasion of Representative Richard Gephardt, House majority leader, was described by Fred Barnes, "Leaders to Follow," New Republic, May 14, 1990.
24. See The Wall Street Journal, March 14, 1990, and Washington Post, March 11, 1990, for details of Rostenkowski's plan.
25. For an insightful discussion of the Democrats' collaboration with Republicans on taxes and other matters, see Robert Kuttner, "Congress Without Cohabitation," American Prospect, Winter 1991.
26. The Wall Street Journal, because it rigorously and unsentimentally covers business's interface with government, is the best available source for news of the governing politics that I have described in this book. Journal reporters usually go right to the bottom line: Who won and who lost and how much? Three of its reporters, Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, David Wessel and Jackie Calmes, undoubtedly contributed to the 1990 rank-and-file revolt in Congress by describing the implications of the bipartisan budget agreement with such inescapable clarity. Wall Street Journal, October 2 and 3, 1990.
27. Reporters Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele found that a provision limiting personal exemptions for the well-to-do, which was billed as raising $10.8 billion from the wealthy, would actually yield no more than $2 billion or $3 billion-and that money would come from upper-middle-income families, not the rich. The same measure was proffered by congressional tax writers as proof of their even-handedness back in 1986 when it was first enacted. See Philadelphia Inquirer, November 4, 1990.
28. The Lipsey-Kravis study also challenged the conventional argument that the U.S. saving and investment rate lags far below its competitors' and that this explains disappointing economic growth. The different savings rates, they concluded, are really in large part differences in economic definitions of what counts as capital formation and in the cultural preferences of different nations. Robert E. Lipsey and Irving B. Kravis, Saving and Economic Growth: Is the United States Really Falling Behind? The Conference Board, 1987.
FOUR: The Grand Bazaar
1. Robert B. Reich's regulatory community included 12,000 lawyers in law firms representing business before courts and agencies, 9,000 lobbyists in firms specializing in lobbying, 42,000 trade association lobbyists and employees, 9,300 public-relations and public-affairs specialists, 1,200 trade journalists, 3,500 consultants advising government agencies and 15,500 lawyers and lobbyists from large corporations and federal agencies. Reich, "Regulation by Confrontation or Negotiation," Harvard Business Review, May-June 1981, cited by Bryner in Bureaucratic Discretion.
2. I can testify from personal experience on the enormous difficulty of covering regulatory politics in a manner that matches the demands of a daily newspaper. As assistant managing editor for national news at The Washington Post, I made several attempts to do so and all failed. In 1981, under my supervision, the Post initiated the "Federal Page," devoted each day to large and small stories from the regulatory government. For a year or so, the expanded coverage of regulation seemed engaging and occasionally significant, hut in time the effort lost its energy and focus.
To cover the full range of complex regulatory battles with any depth would require a substantial number of reasonably sophisticated reporters and lots of patience -- an investment of resources that very few news organizations are able or willing to make. As a result, the coverage of regulatory issues is almost totally dependent on the sporadic alarums sounded by interested parties. A news story may be generated, for instance, by an environmental organization that exposes malign behavior in an agency's decisions. But otherwise reporters keep their distance from the process and are usually quite ignorant of who is winning or losing.
3. The growth of regulatory laws was cited by Bryner, Bureaucratic Discretion.
4. The unifying effect of modern regulation on business political action is described by Carl J. Mayer in "Personalizing the Impersonal: Corporations and the Bill of Rights," Hastings Law Journal, March 1990.
5. Theodore J. Lowi is the most penetrating critic of the governing system he calls "interest-group liberalism." See The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States, W. W. Norton, 1979.
6. The environmentalists' record of winning 68 percent of those challenges to EPA that were decided by judges was between 1970 and 1980, cited in Bryner, Bureaucratic Discretion.
7. The "grand bazaar" metaphor I am using in this chapter is borrowed from an essay I wrote on the same subject fifteen years ago on the eve of Jimmy Carter's inauguration. This ought to establish at least that my own analysis of lawless government did not result from the scandals in the Reagan years. See Washington Post, January 20, 1977.
8. The Nixon-Ford-Iacocca dialogue lasted only thirty-five minutes on the morning of April 27, 1971. The ill-focused quality of their conversation is a jarring contrast with the conventional claim that regulatory matters of health and safety should be decided with scientific precision. The tangled history of airbag regulation was recounted by Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen and highway-safety administrator under Jimmy Carter, in a speech, "Influencing Agency Decision-Making," August 1, 1983.
9. The delayed enforcement of the ban on red dyes was reported by Bryner, Bureaucratic Discretion.
10. Nuclear accidents and fines were analyzed by Ken Bossong, leader of Critical Mass, Ralph Nader's watchdog organization on nuclear power.
11. The fraud cases involving defense manufacturers covered seven years before 1990, New York Times, November 12, 1990.
12. On EPA's lax enforcement, see Michael Reagan, Regulation: The Politics of Policy, Little, Brown, 1987, and the testimony of John C. Martin, EPA inspector general, before Senator John Glenn of Ohio in "Serious Management Problems in the U.S. Government," Senate Government Affairs Committee, September 28, 1989.
13. Frederick Malek's manual on how to politicize the civil service was revealed during the Watergate investigations into the Nixon administration. The text was published in Federal Times, December 18, 1974. Malek himself became campaign manager for George Bush's 1992 re-election campaign.
14. Data on federal regulatory personnel are from Michael Reagan, Regulation: The Politics of Policy. Details on how the Reagan administration cut back enforcement are from David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes.
15. Gregg Easterbrook, "Radio Free Watkins and the Crisis at Energy," Washington Post Magazine, February 18, 1990.
16. Senator Pryor was quoted by Kirk Victor, "Farming It Out," National Journal, December 16, 1989.
17. Elite leaders, led by Lloyd Cutler and fanner Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, began a campaign in the late 1980s to reverse the decline of government management. The National Commission on the Public Service, chaired by Volcker, warned of a "quiet crisis" in the senior ranks of the civil service. The campaign produced some progress on salaries for senior executives, but it also collided with the antigovernment attitudes that conservative business interests had spent two decades encouraging. It seemed out of character for a think tank like the American Enterprise Institute to begin worrying about the quality of government employees, when AEI had devoted so much scholarship over the years to demeaning their efforts.
18. The New York Times's dramatic and repetitious coverage of this scandal actually drew some reproach from other news organizations, which seemed to consider it untoward for a major newspaper to "crusade" on public matters. In an earlier time, repetition and dramatic emphasis were the standard techniques that newspapers used to force political attention to neglected issues. See Washington Post, January 8, 1989.
19. Exhaustive congressional hearings as well as press investigations have focused on pollution by federal agencies, particularly the Energy and Defense departments. These few examples are from among scores cited in the following sources: "Review of Hazardous Waste Disposal Practices at Federal Facilities," August 15, 1983, and "Hazardous Waste Problems at Department of Defense Facilities," November 5, 1987, House Government Operations Committee; "Environmental Compliance by Federal Agencies," April 28, 1987, and "Cleanup at Federal Facilities," March 3, I988, House Commerce Committee. See also: Howard Kahn, "America's Worst Polluter," Rolling Stone, May 3, 1990.
20. The issues surrounding EPA's ability to enforce the law against other federal departments were explored in "Environmental Compliance by Federal Agencies," House Commerce Committee, April 28, 1987.
21. Data on OSHA prosecutions is from Raymond Maria, Labor Department inspector general, in "Serious Management Problems in the U.S. Government," Senate Government Affairs Committee, September 28, 1989. The National Safe Workplace Institute in Chicago has published a series of shocking reports on OSHA's weak enforcement, including "Unintended Consequences: The Failure of OSHA's Megafine Strategy," June 25, 1989.
22. Construction industry data are from "Construction: The Most Hazardous Industry in the Nation," Laborers' National Health and Safety Fund, 1990.
23. EPA also responded to the Lordstown workers' complaints and fined General Motors $1.5 million for toxic air pollution from the plant. Union and company officials again dismissed the action, claiming that GM had already complied with the law. Youngstown Vindicator, March 7, 1991.
FIVE: Hollow Laws
1. Mary Johnson's account of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Nation, October 23, 1989.
2. The academic studies on the failure of modern regulation, some of which have been cited here, generally focus on the managerial questions, not the larger democratic principles enunciated by Theodore Lowi. Many critical scholars start from a conservative probusiness position that assumes these laws were ill advised in the first place and attempted to deliver impossible goals that would not truly benefit the society. Others tend to focus on the techniques by which the laws are frustrated and propose various managerial reforms, but without examining the larger framework of power.
3. The EPA data on high-risk industrial facilities were released by Representative Henry Waxman, chairman of the House subcommittee on health and the environment, January 12, 1990. EPA placed a cautionary disclaimer on the data, which, it said, were calculated for purposes of relative comparisons and rankings of pollution sources but could not be relied upon as a plant-by-plant measure of health risks. Waxman acknowledged that the ratings were based on simplified assumptions but should nevertheless "raise a red warning flag in communities where these facilities are locating -- and spur prompt action to investigate the plants further."
4. Senator Moynihan sarcastically announced his own more modest goal for the year 2000- hat by then the nation would at least understand that the political system is not serious about improving education. See his speech, "Goals for the Year 2000," March 12, 1990.
5. The surveys of public opinion on environmental trade-offs were reported in The Wall Street Journal. April 20, 1990, and The New York Times, April 17, 1990.
6. Robert W. Crandell, "The Political Economy of Clean Air: Practical Constraints on White House Review." in V. Kerry Smith, editor, Environmental Policy Under Reagan's Executive Order, University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Some environmentalists predict that the modest progress on clean air will be reversed during the I 990s as the number of vehicles continues to multiply without offsetting improvements in emission controls.
7. The leisurely development of RCRA regulations in the Carter administration was described by Marc K. Landy, Marc J. Roberts and Stephen R. Thomas, The Environmental Protection Agency: Asking the Wrong Questions. Oxford University Press, 1990. The frustrations that led to development of the "hammer" provisions in the 1984 legislation are recounted by Richard C. Fortuna and David J. Lennett, Hazardous Waste Regulation: The New Era, McGraw-Hill, 1987.
8. The corporate intention to abandon deep-well injection in favor of higher treatment was reported in Pollution Prevention News, published by EPA, August 1990.
9. The intense discussions between EPA and industry lobbyists conducted between the proposed rule and the final rule are partially revealed in the administrative record-meeting notes that agency officials are required to maintain on their contacts with regulated industries. This record does not disclose, however, any of the informal political conversations at the White House or EPA that may have accompanied the decision making.
SIX: The Fixers
1. Many details on the Bush task force are from my article, "When Big Business Needs a Favor, George Bush Gets the Call," Rolling Stone, April 12, 1984.
2. Invoking global competition as an argument against sterner environmental regulation is particularly specious because the main industrial competitors in Europe and Japan have much better performance in this area. The leading foreign producers generate 50 percent to 80 percent less industrial waste than American companies -- efficiency that gives them a significant cost advantage in their production. See Warren Brookes, Washington Times, January 9, 1990. Vice-President Quayle's intervention was disclosed in The Washington Post, December 20, 1990.
3. When regulators, members of Congress and public-interest advocates became increasingly alarmed at Quayle's tampering in behalf of business, OMB Watch and Public Citizen's Congress Watch issued a joint report, "All the Vice President's Men: How the Quayle Council on Competitiveness Secretly Undermines Health, Safety and Environmental Programs," September 1991.
4. In 1986, Congress threatened to rein in OMB's powers by cutting off funding for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, but settled for an informal letter of agreement by which OMB promised to make public after the fact its communications with agencies and private interests. In practice, the reporting requirement has produced a grossly inadequate record of what transpired. The studies on OMB's impact on regulation in the Reagan and Bush terms were reported in the OMB Watch newsletter, OMB Watcher, September 30, 1990, and in testimony by Gary D. Bass before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, February 21, 1990.
5. Douglas Costle is quoted in Landy, Roberts and Thomas, The Environmental Protection Agency: Asking the Wrong Questions.
6. The analysis of desk officers at OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs was reported in "Playing the Numbers: OMB and Paperwork Reduction," OMB Watch, October 1989.
7. The anonymous policy analyst is quoted in Landy, Roberts and Thomas, The Environmental Protection Agency: Asking the Wrong Questions.
8. The examples of inconsistency in Regulatory Impact Analyses are from W. Norton Grubb, Dale Whittington and Michael Humphries, "The Ambiguities of Benefit-Cost Analysis: An Evaluation of Regulatory Impact Analysis under Executive Order 12291," in Environmental Policy Under Reagan's Executive Order. V. Kerry Smith, editor.
9. The examples of OMB intervention are from OMB Watcher. the newsletter of OMB Watch, and congressional testimony from Gary D. Bass, executive director of OMB Watch.
10. Patricia M. Wald, "The Sizzling Sleeper: The Use of Legislative History in Construing Statutes in the 1988-89 Term of the U.S. Supreme Court," American University Law Review. Winter 1990.
11. Robert Bork's complaint was in a review of Jeremy Rabkin's book Judicial Compulsions: How Public Law Distorts Public Policy, which makes similar arguments, Wall Street Journal, October 13, 1989.
12. Judge Laurence H. Silberman, "Chevron -- The Intersection of Law and Policy," George Washington Law Review, 1990.
13. For a parallel argument about democracy and the confusion over government authority, see James A. Morone, The Democratic Wish: Popular Participation and the Limits of American Government, Basic Books, 1990.
14. Data on what the poor receive in federal assistance are from "Receipt of Selected Non- ash Benefits: 1987," Bureau of the Census. Among 11.9 million designated as poor, 7.6 million received no cash stipends from welfare or Social Security. And 4.6 million received neither cash nor noncash benefits. The nonrecipients are typically screened out by the complex eligibility requirements of different programs, but the Reagan administration also conducted a visible campaign to drive poor people out of programs by challenging their applications and tightening the rules. The lives of the poor were one of the few areas of government activity that Reagan conservatives did not try to deregulate.
15. For further discussion of preventative protection for the environment, see Bruce Piasecki and Peter Asmus, In Search of Environmental Excellence: Moving Beyond Blame, Touchstone, 1990, and Barry Commoner, Making Peace with the Planer, Pantheon, 1990. How the tax code favors exploitation of virgin materials is described in "Facing America's Trash: What Next for Municipal Solid Waste?" Office of Technology Assessment, Congress, 1989.
16. Examples of state initiatives are from Margaret E. Kriz, "Ahead of the Feds," National Journal, December 9, 1989, and "Building an Environmentally Sustainable Economy," Center for Policy Alternatives, December 15, 1990.
SEVEN: The Politics of "Rude and Crude"
1. The Citizen's Clearinghouse estimate of seven thousand grassroots environmental groups seems excessive on its face, since it would mean an average of 140 such organizations in each of the fifty states. On the other hand, some states where environmental degradation has become a principal public issue have several hundred of these community organizations. Because the groups come and go or merge with others, it is difficult to find a precise answer to the question of their number.
2. The examples of successful protest tactics are taken from Everyone's Backyard, December 1990, monthly newsletter of the Citizen's Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes. Literally hundreds, perhaps thousands of such encounters occur every year and provoke local controversy but seldom rise to the level of national news events.
3. The Union Carbide memo was written by C. E. Greenert, director of corporate contributions, public issues and administration, November 24, 1989. A letter of apology from Ronald S. Wishart, Union Carbide's vice-president for public affairs, said: "I'm sorry that Mr. Greenert's (purloined) internal memorandum implies that the founder of CCHW has communist leanings, which was his short hand for a concern about the political directions some environmental activism seems to be taking."
4. EPA research, reported in the Archives of Environmental Health, March 1989, found excessive deaths from various kinds of cancers in Superfund counties in different regions of the country compared with counties that had no major hazardous-waste dumps. The patterns of increased disease, the EPA researchers noted, might be attributable to other causes, such as direct pollution from local industries, not exactly a comforting explanation for local citizens. A summary of the findings was reported in Rachel's Hazardous Waste News, May 2, 1989.
5. William Ruckelshaus was named CEO of Browning-Ferris Industries in 1988 to improve the company's environmental image, but BFI's hazardous-waste division, a small part of its overall operations, continued to face expensive controversies. New York State rejected its application for a new hazardous-waste site in Niagara Falls. In Ohio, BFI paid $3.5 million in fines and civil damages for past pollution at a dump outside Cincinnati. In Louisiana, it paid $1.5 million to settle allegations of violating hazardous-waste rules. Wall Street Journal, April 6, 1990.
6. The survey on political sophistication was cited by Herbert J. Gans, Middle American Individualism: The Future of Liberal Democracy, The Free Press, 1988. For an insightful essay on the strengths and weaknesses of citizen activism, see Karen Paget, "Citizen Organizing: Many Movements, No Majority," The American Prospect, Summer 1990.
7. The Washington Post's 1983 survey on environmental issues was cited by Barry Sussman, What Americans Really Think. Next to environmentalists, people most trusted local governments (55 percent favorable; 30 percent unfavorable), then the EPA (46 percent to 36 percent). President Reagan scored almost as poorly as business leaders (36 percent favorable; 45 percent unfavorable).
8. The StarKist boycott and others were described in The Wall Street Journal, "Facing a Boycott, Many Companies Bend," November 8, 1990.
9. Gillette, Dow Chemical, Sara Lee, and Sears Roebuck are among the companies that modified products in order to comply with California's "Prop 65" requirement of warning labels. In the political debates, of course, this is the sort of remedial action that corporations usually insist is impossible. See "California Spurs Reformulated Products," Wall Street Journal, November 1, 1990.
10. The Los Angeles survey was cited by Ken Hoover, "On the Take," Golden State Report, March 1990.
11. Tax-cutting measures were rejected in Massachusetts, Colorado, Nebraska and Utah, among other places, in 1990. California entertainment celebrities campaigned for "Big Green," the omnibus environmental initiative, but the chemical and agriculture industries countered with a trustworthy celebrity of their own, former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who advised voters that the proposed bans on carcinogenic chemicals would not benefit the health of children. For a survey of initiatives, see The Wall Street Journal, November 8, 1990.
12. Mervin Field's analysis of referendum voters was in "Falling Turnout -- A Nonvoting Majority," Public Affairs Report, Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California at Berkeley, March 1990.
13. The plastics industry's alarm and Larry Thomas's letter were reported in Everyone's Backyard, Citizen's Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes, March 1990.
14. Robert O. Aders's remarks to Produce Marketing Association are from an unpublished text, October 17, 1989.
15. I am indebted to the National Journal for its excellent coverage of regulatory politics and, in particular, its continuing reports on the power struggles between the states and the federal government and the cross-pressures generated by business interests and citizen reform groups. See, for instance, W. John Moore, "Stopping the States," July 21, 1990; Margaret E. Kriz, "Ahead of the Feds," December 9, 1989; and Julie Kosterlitz, "The Food Lobby's Menu," September 29, 1990.
16. The industry petition to the Federal Trade Commission was reported in The New York Times, February 15, 1991. 17. The Advocacy Institute and Congress Watch declaration was cited by W. John Moore, "Stopping the States," National Journal.
18. Enactment of federal preemptions for business regulation and health and safety laws increased from 65 in the 1970s to 72 in the 1980s. The data from the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations were reported by W. John Moore in "Stopping the States," National Journal. The agency counted a total of 350 federal preemptions, 127 for business regulation and 134 for health and safety regulations. In two other areas, civil rights and financial regulation, the number of new preemptions declined during the decade.
EIGHT: Political Orphans
1. The leaflet was quoted by Jon Cohen, "Down and Dirty," City Paper, May 19, 1989.
2. AEI's complete catalog of books, Fall 1989, lists the minimum-wage literature it has sponsored.
3. Richard Thompson was quoted in City Paper, May 19, 1989.
4. Details on the NLRB are from David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America, Basic Books, 1989.
5. For a compelling account of how law has helped to collapse the labor movement, see Thomas Geoghegan, Which Side Are You On? Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1991.
6. Michael Merrill, "Why There Will Be a Labor Party by the Year 2000," Social Policy, Spring 1990. See also my article, "Down but Not Out: Labor Struggles to Find Its Voice," Rolling Stone, October 17, 1991.
7. The D.C. minimum wage, like that of many states, was higher than the level set by federal law and would have been pushed upward if Congress had enacted a sufficiently large increase. The D.C. wage board subsequently adopted a $7.25 minimum for clerical workers (though not janitors), but the city council reduced this to $5.25 under pressure from local businesses.
8. The Progressive Policy Institute's report was entitled "Work and Poverty: A Progressive View of the Minimum Wage and the Earned Income Tax Credit," June 1989.
9. The survival "cheating" on federal benefits by the working poor is described by Christopher Jencks and Kathryn Edin in "The Real Welfare Problem," American Prospect, Spring 1990.
10. The late Joseph A. Pechman of the Brookings Institution, leading expert on tax equity, described the perverse effect of improving welfare benefits when the income-tax structure was no longer progressive: "The tax system has been getting less progressive in the last two decades, while the ratio of transfers to income has been increasing. In other words, the recent increases in transfer payments in the United States have been financed by the low and middle-income groups, while the rich have been getting tax cuts." Pechman, "The Future of the Income Tax," Brookings, December 22, 1989.
11. The charity event was a fund-raising gala for the Jewish Community Center of metropolitan Washington, and the Charles E. Smith Company changed its labor policies after several rabbis in the Washington area expressed their support for the demands made by "Justice for Janitors." Jewish Week, the community newspaper, also published a sympathetic account of why the janitors had staged their demonstration at the community center's banquet.