Thread by @doctorow

It's hard not to feel powerless. The rich are getting richer, the middle class is disappearing, and poor people are evermore exposed to labor abuses, predatory finance, police violence, and food-, fuel- and housing-insecurity. 1/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2022/07/07/col… 2/

Our cities are increasingly segregated into the haves and have-nots, and the haves hoard the parks, schools and clean air:

nytimes.com/2022/07/06/us/…

The rich don't just own all the good stuff, they also own the political process. 3/

That's the conclusion of the now-classic 2014 paper "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens."

cambridge.org/core/journals/… 4/

"Ordinary citizens… get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically-elite citizens who wield the actual influence." 5/

How do material wealth and political power relate to each other? Well, on the one hand, it's obvious that if you have more wealth, you have more to spend on lobbying, both to the public and to lawmakers. 6/

As the leaks in @propublica's #IRSFiles show, just having a lot of money can scare off regulators and legal enforcers, who know you'll be able to hire more lawyers than they can.

propublica.org/article/irs-no… 7/

But the secret to oligarchy isn't (just) outspending the rest of us. Oligarchs wield a far more important weapon: class solidarity. 8/

There is *so much* solidarity among billionaires, centimillionaires, decimillionaires and ordinary millionaires, who fight for the right to financialize rent and suppress wages, but come together with admirable discipline when their collective interests are at stake. 9/

Take taxes. In a major new Propublica IRS Files story, @paulkiel and @mickeyd1971 document the behind-the-scenes spending that defeated Illinois's state referendum on a progressive state tax comparable to the system in 32 other states:

propublica.org/article/ken-gr… 10/

Led by the hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin of Citadel (the richest man in the state) the ultra-rich of Illinois unleashed a blizzard of money on deceptive ads that ultimately defeated the measure. That spending was a bargain! 11/

Propublica calculates that Griffin's $54,000,000 contribution saved him $51,000,000 per year thereafter (the IRS Files show Griffin's average income to be about $2.9 billion per year). 12/

Griffin led the "investment" in starving Illinois's tax coffers, but he had a lot of co-investors: there's Richard Uihlein, the billionaire behind @uline, who kicked in $100k. 13/

Uihlein's a shrewd investor in political corruption, having spent $20m on @SenRonJohnson's campaign, only to have Johnson insert a last-minute amendment to the Trump #TaxScam that saved him $215m in the first year alone:

pluralistic.net/2021/08/11/the… 14/

Sam Zell, whose leveraged buyout of the *Chicago Tribune* led the newspaper into bankruptcy, kicked in $1.1m and got $1.6m/year in savings every year thereafter. The *Tribune* now operates out of a windowless cinderblock bunker the size of a Chipotle:

pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/soc… 15/

Patrick Ryan gave $1m to realize a return of $2.1m/year. Richard Colburn's $500k nets him $5.5m/year. He told Propublica that the spending was an investment "to limit the temptation on me to relocate." Donald Wilson gave $250k to get back $3.5m/year. 16/

Richard Stephenson, who made his nut with a chain of for-profit cancer hospitals and was executive producer on two Ayn Rand film adaptations (you literally can't make this shit up), gave $300k through his trust. 17/

Another family spend came from Philip M Friedmann, who cashed out his family's greeting card business by selling to private equity looters. 18/

Friedmann's trust is a "personal" one, which makes his $25k investment illegal, according to three tax experts that Propublica consulted. 19/

The campaign to raise Illinois' 5% flat tax to an 8% tax for the richest people in the state was a rare example of billionaire-on-billionaire violence. Democrat Governor JB Pritzker - scion of the Hyatt Hotel fortune - won office by promising to raise taxes on the rich. 20/

This sparked a political bidding war, pitting former GOP governor Bruce Rauner (another private equity looter) in a race that ultimately cost more than $250m. 21/

Though the billionaire low-tax coalition lost the battle for the governorship, they won the war with $63m in ads that convinced the people of Illinois that they would see higher taxes as a result (the vast majority of Illinoisians would not have seen their tax bills go up). 22/

While Pritzker is a rare class traitor, he still maintained some loyalty to his cohort, continuing to milk his grandfather's fortune through a system of secret trusts. 23/

These are typical of dynastic wealth, which seeks to ensure that merely emerging from a very lucky orifice guarantees you the power to impact the lives of millions of people who lost the orifice lottery:

pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dyn… 24/

When even the "good" billionaires favor the eugenic proposition that being descended from someone who made a lot of money makes you suited to leadership and influence, it's no wonder that this proposition is so durable in our political system. 25/

Now, it's obvious why rich people would favor a system that increased and perpetuated their wealth and power, but self-interest alone doesn't explain the rock-solid solidarity of the oligarchs. 26/

The other crucial element is in their numbers: when your bloc is *small*, it's easier to come to agreement on how it should mobilize. 27/

This is how monopolies rot our society and politics. When an industry is composed of hundreds of companies, they'll struggle to agree on the catering for their annual meeting. 28/

Reduce the number of firms until all their CEOs will fit around a board-room table, and they'll be able to agree on far more ambitious issues, like whether to raise prices in unison and blame "inflation":

pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its… 29/

Collective action problems are some of our hardest challenges. 30/

Institutions exist to ease collective action: from mafias to churches, unions to governments, the UN to drug cartels, organizations find ways to let groups of people coordinate their activities to do more than any individual could do on their own:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of… 31/

Oligarchs benefit from having a lot of money to spend, but even more important is that their numbers are so low that they can agree on how to spend it. Every time the rich figure out how to coordinate better, they clean up. 32/

Take this @nberpubs working paper that shows that when giant funds become company shareholders, worker wages go down:

nber.org/system/files/w… 33/

Once the power of the wealthy is gathered into the hands of a few fund managers, they're able to direct that power to pick managers who'll endure the internal strife from slashing wages, benefits and staffing levels. 34/

Workers, by contrast, are atomized and can be divided and pitted against one another.

Now, obviously if real wages are declining, then there must have been a time when forces drove them *up*, when workers were able to hold the line against the power of the owning class. 35/

The most familiar tool workers used to exercise this power was unionization, which is why oligarchs hate unions and spend millions to keep their workers from organizing. 36/

Though unions are having a renaissance, they are still far weaker than they were during the period in which workers built and expanded power - and oligarchs are far stronger (richer, more coordinated). 37/

Oligarchs have built a flywheel, where more power gives them more money which gives them more power.

To brake the flywheel, we have to come up with our own virtuous cycle of systems, laws and tactics that build one atop another. 38/

"Countervailing Power" is a new series from @TheProspect and @ForgeOrganizing that systematically explores how to build that system:

prospect.org/topics/counter… 39/

The debut article is "Laws That Create Countervailing Power," a discussion between ACORN's Steve Kest and @bsachs and @kateandrias, facilitated by @rkuttnerwrites:

prospect.org/power/laws-tha… 40/

The discussion is framed by "Constructing Countervailing Power: Law and Organizing in an Era of Political Inequality," a @YaleLawPolicyR article by Sachs and Andrias about laws that can be used to build, fortify and expand worker power:

yalelawjournal.org/article/constr… 41/

They propose that there are six categories of law that build countervailing power:

I. Laws that "grant collective rights in an explicit and direct way to create a frame that encourages organizing" 42/

II. Laws that "provide for financial, human, and other resources," including money, but also "information that helps direct the work of the organization and inform its leadership" 43/

III. Laws that create "free spaces in which movement organizing can occur, free from surveillance and control," both physical and digital 44/

IV. Laws that "remove barriers to participation both by protecting people involved in organizing efforts from retaliation and also by removing material obstacles that make it difficult for people to organize" 45/

V. Laws that "provide organizations with ways to make material change in their members’ lives" by "creating ways to engage in bargaining with private and public actors that actually correspond to the way political and economic power is organized" 46/

VI. Laws that "enable contestation and disruptive collective action" including "strikes and protests and other kinds of disruptive activity" 47/

The article and the discussion give good examples of all six, but I'm more interested in how they play into one another - like how the New Deal electrification co-ops created enduring institutions that organized people, incubated leaders, and turned into telephone co-ops. 48/

Some of these are around today, providing blazing-fast co-op internet (AKA, the "free spaces" mentioned above) to poor people:

newyorker.com/tech/annals-of… 49/

I was recently on an organizing tactics call about the housing crisis, and we got to talking about the wicked panoply of problems that drive people to oppose affordable housing. 50/

With the elimination of unions - and thus work - as a path to social mobility, we've told working people that everything depends on their house appreciating. 51/

Unless their family home goes up in value, they will not be able to afford retirement, their kids' college education or emergency medical bills. They certainly won't be able to put down a deposit for their own kids' homes.

gen.medium.com/the-rents-too-… 52/

All of this drives people to want to limit the supply of housing, and also to hoard the benefits of housing, supporting nakedly inequitable policies like funding schools through local taxes, so richer neighborhoods get better schools. 53/

It also drives people to with homes to favor policies that make life worse for tenants. The worse things are for tenants, the more landlords can extract from them. 54/

That drives up the price of *all* houses, because everyone is bidding against landlords who can raise rents, evict, and pass on maintenance costs. 55/

On the one hand, this is dismal, because maybe it means that we can't improve our housing system until we fix pensions, student debt, for-profit healthcare, and tenants' rights. 56/

But on the other hand, you can think of each of these issues as a loose end in the gnarly knot of housing dysfunction, a place where we can start unpicking the problem. 57/

Like, if we fix student debt, a major part of the reason to favor anti-tenancy policies will disappear (the parents who want to use home equity to send their kids to college also realized that their kids will be tenants, after all). 58/

In other words, the entanglement of all our social problems means that any battle where we can eke out a victory produces tactical benefits for all the other fronts in the war. It means we can build victory upon victory. 59/

It means we can tear apart the countersolidaristic coalitions (say, homeowners) by addressing the material conditions that lead people to fight against the human right to shelter. 60/

Uncoupling a dignified retirement, a decent education, and lifesaving medical treatment from the need to immiserate others is a powerful tool to build countervailing power - to create coalitions like the ones that suppressed oligarchy from the New Deal to the Reagan years. 61/