BOOK REVIEW
Power to the people with a political takeover plan
Crashing the Gate Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga Chelsea Green: 198 pp., $25
By Lee Drutman
Special to The Times
May 30, 2006
IN a given week, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga's progressive blog, Daily Kos, receives more than 3 million visits, making it one of the most widely read political blogs in the world, and earning its proprietor regular calls for advice from Democratic Party leaders. Not bad for somebody who just four years ago was a Silicon Valley dropout with no real political experience. Now Moulitsas, along with fellow blogger Jerome Armstrong of MyDD.com (the DD stands for "Direct Democracy"), has put down some thoughts in a more traditional medium — a book.
In "Crashing the Gate," the two are not shy about what they hope to accomplish: nothing but an all-out "people-powered" takeover of the Democratic Party — which, they are firmly convinced, is the only way to take America back from the conservatives currently ruining it. "To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson," they write, "the tree of a political party must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of reformers and insiders." So begins a chapter titled "Civil War."
Armstrong and Moulitsas are indeed relentless in their hatred for the "fat, lazy, and corrupt" entrenched class of Democratic insiders, whom they blame for just about all of the party's failures. A special ring of hell is reserved for the hapless Democratic Party consultants, who not only keep losing, but also get very rich in the process because they work off commissions. "Call it a cash cow, an incestuous circle … the point is, there is no accountability and the system rewards networking and schmoozing skills in D.C., not performance and results in elections."
The bloggers are also fed up with their party's shrill single-issue groups, who just don't seem to understand the meaning of the word "coalition." "So it's not a stretch," they write, "for demagogic Republicans to paint Democrats as a loose collection of selfish people who are fanatical about their specific cause and have no larger concerns — for the economy, the military, or the country." All this, they argue, makes it hard for Democrats to develop their "elevator pitch," that clear message that will resonate with voters. But Armstrong and Moulitsas argue the grass-roots online community that frequents their ilk of sites (a community tagged the "netroots" by Armstrong back in 2002) is above all that infighting. The "netroots activist," they write, is "fiercely multi-issue, and focused on building a broader movement."
Though the old Democratic establishment can do no right in their eyes, Armstrong and Moulitsas gush with envy at what Republican strategists have achieved. President Bush's top political advisor, Karl Rove, comes across as smarter than God (and able to leap tall buildings in a single thought!). Oh, to have the sophisticated ground operation of the GOP ("four times more accurate than … traditional direct mail, phone banks, and door-to-door canvassing"). To have their emotion-tweaking political advertising, their massive think-tank/media/talk radio echo chamber, their big-tent approach to keeping rival factions in line, their capacity to nurture their young, even their command of ideas: "[W]hat conservatives have built over the past thirty years is nothing short of brilliant. We can admire it the way we would admire the precision, engineering, and craftsmanship of a stealth fighter." The amazing thing, then, is that Democrats are competitive at all. But Armstrong and Moulitsas take heart here, because it "means that despite the massive advantages of the right-wing machine and their hundreds of millions of dollars, we are still the party of the people."
Like Rove, Armstrong and Moulitsas come across as heavily focused on winning, evincing only minimal interest in actual policy. They offer some helpful lessons from state-level Democratic revivals (Colorado: build coalitions; Montana: ignore interest groups except for the NRA; Virginia: target rural communities). But mostly they diagnose and dissect the national Democrats' stubbornly persistent ineptitudes. Though such critiques are valuable and well documented here, the authors' remedy — a bloody takeover of the party by progressive "riffraff like us" — seems like the easy-to-make outsiders' claim that "we could do it better" rather than a revolutionary plan for success.
"Crashing the Gate" is brash and infuriating, as it should be. The progressive blogosphere is starting to feel its own strength — in the continued growth of Web traffic, in its powerful fund-raising capacity, and in the rise of its man, Howard Dean, as Democratic National Committee chairman. As Eli Pariser of Moveon.org's political action wing wrote in December 2004 (after helping to raise a few hundred million dollars online): "Now it's our party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back." "Crashing the Gate" is a powerful salvo in that battle. And as such, it commands attention.
Lee Drutman is the co-author of "The People's Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy."
http://www.calendarlive.com/books/reviews/cl-et-book30may30,0,7653886.story?coll=cl-books-reviews
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Monday, May 22, 2006
Beyond Halliburton - TomPaine.com
Beyond Halliburton
Lee Drutman
May 22, 2006
Lee Drutman is the co-author of The People’s Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy.
In the weeks following Hurricane Katrina, there was much hue and cry about the massive no-bid “cost-plus” cleanup and rebuilding contracts going to politically-connected firms like Bechtel, Fluor and CH2M Hill.
And sure enough, eight months later, the first audits are in and it is that same old depressing reel of fraud and waste and mismanagement. According to a recently released memo by Rep. Henry Waxman, D.-Calif.:
The documents disclose widespread mismanagement, waste and fraud in contracts worth billions of dollars. The documents reveal a host of major problems that occurred in numerous locations under multiple contracts over a period of many months.
We’re talking about double-billing for hauling the same debris, hauling extra debris to boost reimbursements, overstating mileage—the same old tricks. As a neat touch, inspectors found that Army Corps of Engineers officials had an “informal agreement” not to challenge bills that exceeded estimates by 50 percent.
So why is this storyline so achingly familiar? Politically well-connected company gets massive no-bid contract to do re-construction work in New Orleans, Iraq, Afghanistan—wherever. Without any real accountability, said contractor runs up excessive costs for taxpayers. Sometimes the public gets upset; sometimes a wrist gets slapped. But in the end nothing changes.
It is certainly tempting to blame it on cronyism. Dick Cheney rewarding Halliburton. George W. Bush, the ultimate CEO president, doing all this to help his corporate friends.
Sure, our leaders may have certain personal sympathies. But to think they are doing this all to help out a few friends gives them too much credit. More importantly, it ignores the structural reasons why all this contracting out is bound to fail, no matter who is in charge and what their sympathies are. After all, let’s not forget that back in 2000 (under Clinton), a GAO study of Kellogg, Brown and Root’s $2.2 billion contract in the Balkans concluded that U.S. Army officials “frequently have simply accepted the level of services the contractor provided without questioning whether they could be provided more efficiently or less frequently at lower cost."
To understand why contractor fraud keeps happening over and over again, it’s worth thinking about why some folks thought contracting out for services was such a good idea in the first place. Think back to the 1990s, when Bill Clinton and Al Gore talked proudly about “reinventing government”—tapping into the supposed efficiencies of the private sector, cutting out the supposed inefficiencies of the public bureaucracy (Clinton and Gore eliminated 426,200 federal civilian workforce jobs).
The argument then and today is that turning to the private sector harnesses the power of competitive markets. Since companies must compete for contracts, this competition should discipline them into using taxpayer money more efficiently, especially compared to the dreaded government bureaucracy.
So why hasn’t this worked?
The first reason is that contracting out requires monitoring—and monitoring requires actual people. Over and over again, reports of contractor fraud find at best minimal oversight. The ideological turn that “reinvented” the public sector to favor private contracting has severely limited government’s oversight capacity. No wonder New Orleans is the land of contractors gone wild—FEMA lacks the resources to keep contractors in line.
The second, and related, reason for the failure of private contracting is that when it comes to certain services and products (say, building military bases), there is no real competition. There are only a few firms capable of doing this work, and there is only one buyer—the U.S. government (in economic terms, having only one buyer is a monopsony).
Imagine for a second that you owned a company that specialized in building military bases. Would you put your energy into providing the best service at the best price? Or would you put your energy into securing friends in the government—your one and only customer? There is a simple reason that all of the major contractors are politically well-connected—they have to be to stay in business. It’s the same reason that Mitchell J. Wade handed Randy “Duke” Cunningham $2.4 million in bribes. Without Cunningham’s help in securing defense contracts, Mitchell’s MZM Inc. wouldn’t have much of a business model.
Add up the two, and you have an explanation for why contractor fraud is rampant. Government agencies, made lean by a turn towards privatization and promises of “reinventing government,” don’t have the capacity to effectively monitor contractors. And the market forces that are supposed to discipline private contractors don’t work. Any contractor with any sense is going to develop political connections to get around these market forces. In most cases there is only one buyer and only a few sellers.
Perhaps its time to stop blaming cronyism and instead take a good hard look at the underlying policies that make it possible for such cronyism and profiteering to run rampant in the first place.
One approach might be to establish an independent commission to study the overall effects of contracting out. Were we to seriously re-assess the whole policy of private contracting, we would probably learn that in many cases, it actually costs more to contract out. It’s hard to imagine that an expanded U.S. military force would have done a worse job in Iraq than Halliburton. In other cases, such as unexpected disasters that call for sudden expanded capacity, it may still make sense to contract out, but agencies that do contract out should be properly equipped to monitor the contractors and be empowered to hold them accountable.
But until we thoroughly study the issue, we won’t know. Instead we’ll keep wasting taxpayer money on a policy that has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to generate waste, fraud and abuse.
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/05/22/beyond_halliburton.php
Lee Drutman
May 22, 2006
Lee Drutman is the co-author of The People’s Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy.
In the weeks following Hurricane Katrina, there was much hue and cry about the massive no-bid “cost-plus” cleanup and rebuilding contracts going to politically-connected firms like Bechtel, Fluor and CH2M Hill.
And sure enough, eight months later, the first audits are in and it is that same old depressing reel of fraud and waste and mismanagement. According to a recently released memo by Rep. Henry Waxman, D.-Calif.:
The documents disclose widespread mismanagement, waste and fraud in contracts worth billions of dollars. The documents reveal a host of major problems that occurred in numerous locations under multiple contracts over a period of many months.
We’re talking about double-billing for hauling the same debris, hauling extra debris to boost reimbursements, overstating mileage—the same old tricks. As a neat touch, inspectors found that Army Corps of Engineers officials had an “informal agreement” not to challenge bills that exceeded estimates by 50 percent.
So why is this storyline so achingly familiar? Politically well-connected company gets massive no-bid contract to do re-construction work in New Orleans, Iraq, Afghanistan—wherever. Without any real accountability, said contractor runs up excessive costs for taxpayers. Sometimes the public gets upset; sometimes a wrist gets slapped. But in the end nothing changes.
It is certainly tempting to blame it on cronyism. Dick Cheney rewarding Halliburton. George W. Bush, the ultimate CEO president, doing all this to help his corporate friends.
Sure, our leaders may have certain personal sympathies. But to think they are doing this all to help out a few friends gives them too much credit. More importantly, it ignores the structural reasons why all this contracting out is bound to fail, no matter who is in charge and what their sympathies are. After all, let’s not forget that back in 2000 (under Clinton), a GAO study of Kellogg, Brown and Root’s $2.2 billion contract in the Balkans concluded that U.S. Army officials “frequently have simply accepted the level of services the contractor provided without questioning whether they could be provided more efficiently or less frequently at lower cost."
To understand why contractor fraud keeps happening over and over again, it’s worth thinking about why some folks thought contracting out for services was such a good idea in the first place. Think back to the 1990s, when Bill Clinton and Al Gore talked proudly about “reinventing government”—tapping into the supposed efficiencies of the private sector, cutting out the supposed inefficiencies of the public bureaucracy (Clinton and Gore eliminated 426,200 federal civilian workforce jobs).
The argument then and today is that turning to the private sector harnesses the power of competitive markets. Since companies must compete for contracts, this competition should discipline them into using taxpayer money more efficiently, especially compared to the dreaded government bureaucracy.
So why hasn’t this worked?
The first reason is that contracting out requires monitoring—and monitoring requires actual people. Over and over again, reports of contractor fraud find at best minimal oversight. The ideological turn that “reinvented” the public sector to favor private contracting has severely limited government’s oversight capacity. No wonder New Orleans is the land of contractors gone wild—FEMA lacks the resources to keep contractors in line.
The second, and related, reason for the failure of private contracting is that when it comes to certain services and products (say, building military bases), there is no real competition. There are only a few firms capable of doing this work, and there is only one buyer—the U.S. government (in economic terms, having only one buyer is a monopsony).
Imagine for a second that you owned a company that specialized in building military bases. Would you put your energy into providing the best service at the best price? Or would you put your energy into securing friends in the government—your one and only customer? There is a simple reason that all of the major contractors are politically well-connected—they have to be to stay in business. It’s the same reason that Mitchell J. Wade handed Randy “Duke” Cunningham $2.4 million in bribes. Without Cunningham’s help in securing defense contracts, Mitchell’s MZM Inc. wouldn’t have much of a business model.
Add up the two, and you have an explanation for why contractor fraud is rampant. Government agencies, made lean by a turn towards privatization and promises of “reinventing government,” don’t have the capacity to effectively monitor contractors. And the market forces that are supposed to discipline private contractors don’t work. Any contractor with any sense is going to develop political connections to get around these market forces. In most cases there is only one buyer and only a few sellers.
Perhaps its time to stop blaming cronyism and instead take a good hard look at the underlying policies that make it possible for such cronyism and profiteering to run rampant in the first place.
One approach might be to establish an independent commission to study the overall effects of contracting out. Were we to seriously re-assess the whole policy of private contracting, we would probably learn that in many cases, it actually costs more to contract out. It’s hard to imagine that an expanded U.S. military force would have done a worse job in Iraq than Halliburton. In other cases, such as unexpected disasters that call for sudden expanded capacity, it may still make sense to contract out, but agencies that do contract out should be properly equipped to monitor the contractors and be empowered to hold them accountable.
But until we thoroughly study the issue, we won’t know. Instead we’ll keep wasting taxpayer money on a policy that has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to generate waste, fraud and abuse.
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/05/22/beyond_halliburton.php
Friday, May 19, 2006
Lee Drutman: The real two-tiered Internet problem
01:00 AM EDT on Friday, May 19, 2006
BERKELEY, Calif.
UP TILL NOW, the Internet has mostly been an anything-goes world, largely free of both content discrimination and regulatory oversight. But recently, Internet-service providers (ISPs), such as AT&T and Verizon, have made rumblings that they would like to charge high-intensity content providers, such as Google, a little extra, to ensure the speediest content delivery. Such fees are necessary, say the ISPs, to help finance a faster Internet for everyone.
Unfair, say such heavily trafficked content providers as Google, Yahoo, Amazon.com and eBay, which would be asked to pay more. If the Verizons of the world demand a shakedown for faster service, pretty soon the competitive, free-flowing Internet we know and love will start to disappear. Instead of individual users' voting with their clicks, ISPs will be picking the winners and losers, with their tolls.
The proposed solution is "net neutrality," a legislative measure to ensure that Internet-service providers do not create a two-tiered Internet that gives preference to some content over others, by creating a fast lane for content providers that want to pay and a slow lane for those that don't. Supporters of this approach, mostly Democrats, are trying to get a net-neutrality provision into a major telecommunication bill moving forward in Congress. So far, they've been unsuccessful, but the battle is far from over.
The Internet-service providers are fighting hard, and understandably. They've set up a phony grassroots campaign, "Hands off our Internet," which makes the usual anti-regulation arguments: The Internet has worked well without government regulation. The service providers have never discriminated and have no plans to do so. Besides, even if they did, and consumers were unhappy, the market would discipline such errant behavior. And isn't it actually fairer to force bandwidth hogs to pay more, instead of making everyone pay the same, regardless of use? And so on.
Such conservative heavyweights as Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform are sending out action alerts to help the cause.
In favor of net neutrality, a coalition called Save the Internet now boasts more than 500 members and more than 600,000 signers of the petition "Don't Let Congress Ruin the Internet." The powerhouse liberal group MoveOn also has an online petition: "Internet providers like AT&T and Verizon are lobbying Congress hard to gut Network Neutrality, the Internet's First Amendment and the key to Internet freedom. Many members of Congress take campaign contributions from these companies."
But don't members of Congress also take contributions from companies such as Yahoo and Microsoft? And wasn't MoveOn founded by a bunch of Silicon Valley folks? Come to think of it, why are advocacy groups jumping into this issue? And why is it such a partisan issue? It couldn't be that Democrats and liberal advocacy groups are now carrying water for the Googles and eBays of the world, while Republicans and conservative advocacy groups are carrying water for the Verizons and Comcasts of the world -- could it?
Concerns on both sides are probably overstated, whipped up by the corporations with much at stake. Sure, we don't want Comcast deciding which Web sites load and which Web sites don't; but how exactly will letting the Internet-service providers charge the heaviest users a little extra for speedy delivery shut out smaller sites, whose servers probably can't keep up with top speed anyway? Nor does it seem convincing that a little regulation is going to stifle investment in the Internet. Either way, it's likely to be the consumers who pay most of the bill.
Meanwhile, lots of more pressing Internet issues are not getting debated. There's little talk, for example, of how to ensure that affordable broadband service reaches into every home -- even though a recent survey by the International Telecommunications Union found that the United States ranked 16th globally in broadband penetration. Nor is there real discussion about U.S. consumers' paying more for worseInternet service than do consumers in many other industrial nations (Japan, for instance, has widely accessible "high-speed" broadband that is 16 times faster than that in the United States, for only $22 a month.)
And while no one has yet had to pay for priority service on the Internet, the issue remains very real in Congress. Since 1998, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Time Warner have spent a combined $230.9 million on lobbying and campaign contributions. During the same period, Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have spent a combined $71.2 million on such efforts. No wonder this is such a hotly contested issue.
It's true that a two-tiered system could create discrimination, and on that ground, net neutrality is probably good policy. But the bigger problem these days is the two-tiered system of access in Washington.
Lee Drutman, a frequent contributor, is the co-author of The People's Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy, Berrett-Koehler Publishers (ldrutman@gmail.com).
http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/projo_20060519_19drut.21b5bb85.html
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