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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (86704)	12/11/2010 10:16:50 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

Obama won't fight the.. Drift . Susan Crawford Blog Dec 6, 2010 In their recent book, “Winner-Take-All Politics,” Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson take on the winners and losers in public policy over the last thirty years. The winners are clearly the hyper-rich. The top one-tenth of one percent of Americans now make an average of $7.1 million a year. In 1974, they were making just over $1 million. Most of the hyper-rich are company executives and managers. But it’s the hyper-hyper rich who are really doing well - the richest one in ten thousand households in the US now earns more than $35 million a year, or more than 6 percent of national income. Income inequality in the US is skyrocketing, and is way up from the 1980s on all scales. This didn’t happen because of the sheer merit of the individuals involved. Public policy sets the conditions for the very rich to be their very richest, and public policy has been steadily making those conditions better and better over the last thirty years. The very rich and the very concentrated companies they control have strong incentives to resist any change in direction. Markets just can’t produce public goods we all need, like transportation and communications infrastructure that are expensive to install and throw off enormous benefits to people who are outside the particular transaction that led to the infrastructure being built in the first place. Just think about Times Square and its powerfully-lit buildings these days - tourists love it, it’s a booming area, and a recent NY Times story made clear that it wouldn’t have happened without intense, sustained government involvement: “The irony is that this place represents in many ways the epitome of free-market capitalism,” said Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance. “But its transformation is due more to government intervention than just about any other development in the country.” The sidewalks of Times Square, the infrastructure necessary for that location to be what it is today, were intentionally planned as a matter of public policy. The market wasn’t going to provide the environment for competition. Maybe Times Square doesn’t move you - it seems too planned. How about the subway? You can get just about anywhere in New York, all comers are welcome, and it makes possible great benefits for the rest of us. Winner-Take-All-Politics recounts the steady march of the tax-cutting-above-all, freewheeling-market, astonishingly-well-funded deregulatory politics that, in the service of the super-rich, have led over the last couple of decades to the situation in which we now find ourselves: Democrats as well as Republicans are anxious to appear “friendly to business” and economic hard-liners. Implacable hostility to regulatory intervention is the order of the day. That hostility doesn’t have to take the form of action. Hacker and Pierson point out that it can take the form of drift. Ideas and people leave the table, never to return. The idea that government has a role to play in setting infrastructure policy becomes unthinkable. The details matter, and the lobbyists for the most-privileged, most-concentrated businesses have the patience and resources to ensure that the drift they want continues. The power of the hyper-rich and the hyper-concentrated in our politics is like the anaconda coiled in the chandelier - it doesn’t have to move, it doesn’t have to be explicit, but it sends a message. Everyone has adjusted to its presence. scrawford.net Susan Crawford is a professor at Cardozo Law School in New York City and a Visiting Research Collaborator at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. She was a full professor at the University of Michigan Law School between July 1, 2008 and July 1, 2010.