Third World America (20 page)

We had a similar reaction to the Soviets’ launch of Sputnik.
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“We responded with massive funding for education,” writes Kao, “revamped school curricula in science and math, and launched a flurry of federal initiatives that eventually put Neil Armstrong in position to make his ‘giant leap for mankind.’ ”

President Obama captured this essential part of the American character when he announced the kickoff of his Educate to Innovate campaign—a nationwide effort to move American students back to the top in science and math education.
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“This nation wasn’t built on greed,” he said. “It wasn’t built on reckless risk. It wasn’t built on short-term gains and shortsighted policies. It was forged on stronger stuff, by bold men and women who dared to invent something new or improve something old—who took big chances on big ideas, who believed that in America all things are possible.”

Many economists and historians are warning that our current economic downturn has created a new normal—that the country will never be the same. Things are, of course, going to be different. But that doesn’t mean that they are predestined to be worse. However, if we don’t get serious about the crises we face, they will be.

America is rich with resources—both natural and human.
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“America—with its open, free, no-limits, immigration-friendly society—is still the world’s greatest dream machine,” says Tom Friedman. “The Apple iPod may be made in China, but it was dreamed up in America.”

We must stop squandering these resources. If the middle class is to thrive and continue to be the backbone of America, we need to create the conditions that will allow these dreams to flourish–and our country to move forward in wiser ways.

“You can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps,” said World War I–era British prime minister David Lloyd George.
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And you can’t cross it in a series of little steps either. Instead, we have to reconnect with our bold national identity and once again take “big chances on big ideas.”
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Stopping our descent into Third World status won’t be easy. It will take daring initiatives from both the private and public sectors—supercharged with an infusion of personal responsibility.

On the one hand, this moment in our history demands that we stop waiting on others—especially others living in Washington, D.C.—to solve the problems and right the wrongs of our times. Now, more than ever, we must mine the most underutilized leadership resource available to us: ourselves.

On the other hand, the problems our society and, indeed, much of the world are facing are too monumental to be solved solely by individuals. We still need the raw power that only big government initiatives—and big government appropriations—can deliver.

But, as we’ve seen, in today’s Washington, the fix is in. So that’s the first thing we need to fix.

It’s a classic catch-22: The most effective way of fixing the multitude of problems facing America is through the democratic process, but the democratic process itself is badly broken. That is why the first step toward stopping our relentless transformation into Third World America has to be breaking the choke hold that special interest money has on our politics.

This has to start with a complete reboot of the way we finance our elections. The most effective means of restoring the integrity of our government is through the full public financing of political campaigns.

It’s the mother of all reforms—the one reform that makes all other reforms possible. After all, he who pays the piper calls the tune. If someone’s going to own the politicians, it might as well be the American people. Think of it: No hard money, no PAC money, no endless dialing for dollars, no
quid pro dough
deals. No more lobbyists sitting in House and Senate offices literally writing tailor-made loopholes into laws. No more corporate welfare giveaways buried in huge spending bills. No more dangerous relaxation of safety regulations that can be traced to campaign donations. Just candidates and elected officials beholden to no one but the voters.

Among those working to make this happen are Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig and Joe Trippi, who ran Howard Dean’s Internet-fueled 2004 presidential campaign.
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Together
they’ve founded Fix Congress First!—an attempt to build a grassroots movement to pressure Congress to pass public financing legislation. And to make sure the legislation can’t be struck down by an activist Supreme Court, the group is also pushing for a Constitutional amendment. “We must,” says Lessig, “establish clearly and without question the power in Congress to preserve its own institutional independence.”
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In May 2010, I was one of about 430,000 people to receive an email from the group with the eye-catching subject line “300 Million Lobbyists,” promoting an effort to create “the biggest lobby in the history of American politics.” And who is part of this all-powerful lobby? You, me, and the rest of the 300 million citizens of the United States.

As the Fix Congress First! founders put it: “This isn’t a Democratic issue or a Republican issue—it’s a fundamental question about what kind of democracy we want to have.”
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If you want to know what a democracy no longer beholden to special interests would mean for the political process, look no further than Senator Ted Kaufman of Delaware. When Kaufman, Joe Biden’s longtime chief of staff, was appointed to serve out his old boss’s term, he was originally thought of as a Senate placeholder.

But, far from biding his time, Kaufman soon emerged as one of the Senate’s fiercest critics of Wall Street and a champion of the need to push for a serious overhaul of our financial system to protect the middle class. What transformed this behind-the-scenes staffer into a fire-breathing accidental leader? A healthy sense of outrage.

In March 2010, on his seventy-first birthday, he took to the Senate floor to lambast the loss of the rule of law on Wall Street.
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He reminded his colleagues that the American taxpayer has laid
out more than $2.5 trillion to “save the system,” and asked, “What exactly did we save?” His answer: “a system of overwhelming and concentrated financial power that has become dangerous … a system in which the rule of law has broken yet again.… At the end of the day, this is a test of whether we have one justice system in this country or two. If we don’t treat a Wall Street firm that defrauded investors of millions of dollars the same way we treat someone who stole five hundred dollars from a cash register, then how can we expect our citizens to have faith in the rule of law? … Our markets can only flourish when Americans again trust that they are fair, transparent, and accountable.”

Watching his determination to fix the financial system offers a window on how we can fix our political system. Aside from his personal character, which we cannot duplicate, there is a dynamic that helped turn Kaufman into a fearless crusader that we
can
duplicate: the absence of money as a factor in his political life.

Kaufman didn’t need to raise money to become a senator—he was appointed. And he doesn’t need to raise money for his reelection campaign—because he’s not running. So he is completely unencumbered by the need to curry favor with the moneyed interests. Kaufman is a great test case—a shining example of what it looks like when our representatives are not beholden to special interests and are only serving the public good.

Another important means of fighting the disillusionment, cynicism, and doubt that have infected the body politic in recent years is a top-to-bottom commitment to transparency. “Sunlight,” Justice Louis Brandeis famously said, “is said to be the best of disinfectants.”
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But real transparency means more
than just putting up a website for every government agency. Creating a system in which the people feel confident that they know what their representatives are doing involves more than just throwing data at the problem. It requires context—and ways of helping the public yank back the curtain on the back rooms of power so it can see who is really pulling the levers.

A great early iteration of this was provided by the Sunlight Foundation during the health-care summit in February 2010.
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As part of its live streaming of the discussion, the group’s website offered a dose of transparency by showing, as each of our elected officials was speaking, a list of his or her major campaign contributors. It was simple, powerful, and spoke volumes about the extent to which many players in the summit were bought and paid for.

In the future, a souped-up version of this kind of technology will allow us to see who is funding whom, and who is carrying water for which special interest, in real time and across every imaginable platform. The Sunday political shows will be a whole different animal when we are able to effortlessly, instantly, and literally follow the money—and discover why a seemingly irrational policy becomes the law of the land.

American politics has become a rigged game. But, moving forward, innovative technology can give us the chance to level the playing field.

Among those looking to use technology to improve the way our government is run is Tim O’Reilly, the tech guru CEO of
O’Reilly Media. In 2004, O’Reilly popularized the term Web 2.0. He’s now at the forefront of a movement to apply the concept to the way our democracy is run: Government 2.0.

He describes Government 2.0 as “a new compact between government and the public, in which government puts in place mechanisms for services that are delivered not by government, but by private citizens.”
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It’s about “government as a platform … If there’s one thing we learn from the technology industry, it’s that every big winner has been a platform company: someone whose success has enabled others, who’s built on their work and multiplied its impact.”

Using government as a platform is all about how the massive amount of information at the government’s disposal is used, how widely it is shared, how low is the barrier for innovators to access it. After all, the Internet itself was a government project. The government built the platform and innovators ran with it. Same with GPS—a “killer app” that originated with the government.

Other examples of innovators building on government-provided information and services are popping up all over the country—and the Web. For instance, sites like Everyblock and StumbleSafely use crime statistics that are publicly available and remake them into public safety applications (kind of the opposite of a killer app!).

Many of the most interesting experiments in bringing technology and government together are going on at the local level.
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One leader who has enthusiastically embraced the new model is Newark mayor Cory Booker. “We are one part of a larger democracy that is learning how to master media to drive social change,” says Booker. “Social media is a forum where people
can come together to connect, talk, mobilize, and create a larger sense of community.”

Booker has over one million followers on his very active Twitter page. Using Twitter, along with Facebook and YouTube, he maintains an open pipeline of communication with his constituents. He also uses these platforms to motivate them to take part in night patrols of troubled neighborhoods—patrols the mayor frequently joins. And he’s formed an advisory working group called the Newark Tech Corps, made up of leading tech executives who advise him on the newest technologies and how he can best adapt them to serve Newark’s residents.

We are reminded on a daily basis of the limits to what government can do.
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Going forward, it’s clear that we are going to have to forge a new relationship with our government. “Citizens are connected like never before and have the skill sets and passion to solve problems affecting them locally as well as nationally,” writes O’Reilly. “Citizens are empowered to spark the innovation that will result in an improved approach to governance.”

We can’t expect a government hobbled by centuries-old tools to deal with the challenges of the twenty-first century. That’s why Government 2.0 needs to be taken out of beta and put into practice across the nation.

Next up in our extreme makeover of America: education. Fixing our broken educational system is vital to rescuing America’s middle class and preserving our standing as a First World nation.
Education is the most basic tool for changing one’s life and circumstances. I think of it as a gateway opportunity: It makes everything else possible—which is why the failure of our leaders to truly address education reform is so troubling. Instead of fundamental reform, we get grandstanding and broken promises and reform in name only.

Real reform has to start with how we treat our nation’s teachers.

Teacher effectiveness is the single most important factor driving student performance, with top teachers able to boost the test scores of students up to 50 percentage points above the scores of those under the tutelage of the least-effective instructors.
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Yet, because of overly rigid union contracts, we cannot pay the best teachers more based on their performance—and we’ve seen how next to impossible it has become to fire even the worst teachers. Until we stop this insanity, our national education report card will continue to be littered with Fs.

We also have to put an end to our obsession with testing, which was supposed to be a way of assessing reform but is now treated as actual reform. It’s as if the powers-that-be all decided that a checkup was as good as a cure. This focus on testing reduces teachers to drill sergeants and effectively eliminates from the school schedule anything not likely to appear on a standardized test—things such as art, music, and class discussions.

And cash-strapped states inevitably end up relying on multiple-choice questions instead of essays, which are up to one thousand times more expensive to score.
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So it’s good-bye analytical thinking, hello rote memorization and educated guessing. Our all-out embrace of testing has given us the
standardization of education, the destruction of critical thinking, and the categorization of millions of our children as failures.