Fights for economic and environmental justice must also incorporate the fight against big money's hold on our political system.

Most people remember the famous sign in the Clinton campaign war room in 1992 as “It’s the economy stupid!” But what is often forgotten is the second phrase in the admonition to Clinton campaigners to keep a sharp focus on the campaign’s message: “And don’t forget health care.”

Today, the sign should read, “It’s the economy stupid. And don’t forget democracy.” That advice was provided recently by the pollster who worked on Clinton’s 1992 campaign, Stan Greenberg. In an opinion piece in the New York Times, Greenberg summarized the views of many Americans as, “There’s just such a control of government by the wealthy that whatever happens, it’s not working for all the people; it’s working for a few of the people… They think that the game is rigged and that the wealthy and big industries get policies that reinforce their advantage. And they do not think their voices matter.”

Unlike most advocates for economic justice or democracy who have separated the issues, the Occupiers got this right from the beginning. They clearly see economic inequality, corporate power, and the capture our democracy by big money as a unified problem. The “we are the 99%" meme embraces both gracefully: We can’t have an economy that works for the 99% until we put our democracy in the hands of the 99%.

I recently wrote a strategic paper for the Piper Fund, an arm of the Proteus Fund, on a comprehensive strategy to fight the stranglehold that big money has on our democracy. I found in dozens of interviews that Occupy gave much needed encouragement to campaign finance reformers who were reeling in the aftermath of Citizens United. But Occupy provides more than a moral boost -- it provides a way out of the dead end that both campaigners for economic justice and political reform have found themselves in.

The way forward is for champions of reforms in money and politics to become closely allied with champions of economic justice and other issues of pressing concern, particularly the environment. This must be a reciprocal alliance, a partnership, because champions of those pushing for an economy of shared prosperity or a sustainable environment will be unable to rally people to their issues unless they take on the control of our government by corporations and other well-financed interests

The good news is that many advocates for both campaign finance reform and issues of economic and environmental justice understand this. As I talked with dozens of activists and funders in all three areas of work, the strategy that was most often proposed was to intimately link specific issues to money and politics and to do so in every sphere: communications, organizing and mobilization, legislative advocacy, and electoral accountability.

As one longtime campaign finance reformer told me, “We need to build a populist movement that will have energy. We need to take what people get about corporate money and elections and turn cynicism into movement and action. We need to stop talking about campaign finance reform – it puts people to sleep – and talk about democracy in terms of jobs, economy, and environment.”

Our actions and words must point the way to broad policy solutions as well, because people need to have some basic understanding of how we can create an economy and democracy that works for all of us. Demonstrating against Wall Street must be linked with policies that create broad-based prosperity, which are achieved through democratic reforms. All of us – Occupy included – can incorporate policies that people can easily grasp without becoming deadly wonky. So we can say, “Tax Wall Street speculation to pay for Main Street job creation.” And, “Elect candidates with small contributions from the 99%, instead of mega-contributions from the 1%.”

In an age where our politics are so dominated by concentrated economic and political power, it is hard to grasp the possibility of fundamental change. We can read Justice Brandeis’s observation almost 100 years ago that “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both” as either a warning that plutocracy will destroy our nation or a prediction that the contradictions of plutocracy will provide the pathway to a transformation. In FDR’s day, the nation made that transformation. It is up to us to make it again in the next New Deal. 

Richard Kirsch is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, a Senior Adviser to USAction, and the author of Fighting for Our Health. He was National Campaign Manager of Health Care for America Now during the legislative battle to pass reform.

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How to make sure congressmen have the information they need without relying on special interests?

Thanks in part to Lawrence Lessig's excellent book Republic, Lost, out recently, a new way of thinking about lobbying has entered public discourse: Lobbying as "legislative subsidy." In this view (which originated in an article in the American Political Science Review in 2006), lobbyists aren't entirely in the persuasion business. Rather, a large part of what they do is to help already friendly but under-staffed and not-always-smart legislators understand complex issues and figure out how to do their jobs. At The Atlantic, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry proposes offsetting the leverage of lobbyists by "adding more money to the system," giving members of Congress $20 million staff budgets (versus about $1.3 million today) and paying congressional chiefs of staff $1 million.

I can't tell whether Gobry's proposal is serious or satirical, but it's worth taking the whole idea, if not his numbers, seriously. Congress is under-staffed given the complexity of the issues members have to deal with, and staffers, like all public employees, are often underpaid. (Measured against the dubious standard of "what they could be making," rather than, say, the U.S. median household income.) The best tend to leave after a few years, whether for the more lucrative opportunities offered by lobbying or lawyering or simply for a more family-friendly work life.

But as Lessig points out, "legislative subsidy" is hardly benign, especially when it moves from big questions like union organizing rights to more technical ones like financial regulation or copyright, the issue that drove him into thinking about money and politics. And there are issues on which lobbyists are standing by on all sides to offer their "subsidy." For example, Congress spent more time last year on the "credit card swipe fee" issue, which pitted credit card companies and their lobbyists against big retailers and theirs, than any other.  Issues like K-12 education have fewer lobbyists standing by to offer their friendly subsidy.

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For a good picture of what "legislative subsidy" lobbying looks like in wonky real life, and how it intersects with campaign money, there's nothing better than this long article from 2010 by Huffington Post reporters Ryan Grim and Arthur Delaney, about the House Financial Services Committee's debate on financial regulation. Financial Services is known as a "cash committee," not because of its jurisdiction but because members are able to raise money from the industry they oversee. Newly elected members of Congress, worried about cash for reelection, clamor for spots on that enormous committee. New members in turn tend to have younger, less experienced staff, who may have stellar academic credentials but don't know anything about financial regulation. They, in turn, are easy prey for lobbyists.

Gobry's proposal is classically libertarian: if individual members lack information, give each individual member more resources to develop information on his own and to hire people with more experience to sort out the competing claims. But there's no reason those resources have to go to individuals. They can be shared resources. For example, before the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, there was an institution called the Office of Technology Assessment, which could undertake highly wonky analyses for members of Congress. There were caucuses with independent staff, such as the Northeast-Midwest Coalition, which provides all sorts of analysis on issues of importance to the two regions (and which still exists as a privately funded operation).

Destroying some of these independent resources, and discrediting those that remained, was not just an irresponsible means of saving money. It was a central part of the conservative project, and remains so. One way to think of it is as a means to ensure that the "legislative subsidy" remains in private control.

Another independent resource for legislators and other public officials is think tanks. That's why the current battle over control of the CATO Institute and the debate over the "politicization" of think tanks sparked by a recent article by Tevi Troy is so important and so connected to debates about money and influence. I'll have more to say on this in a second post tomorrow.

Mark Schmitt is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Fellows Program at the Roosevelt Institute.

President Obama raised some very important issues but still isn't focused on the real roots of the problems.

President Obama's third State of the Union address was certainly a masterful performance, delivered with a sense that he'd finally gained command of both the political and policy demands of the office. (Ryan Lizza's brilliant article yesterday on the early decision making around economic stimulus struck me as a sharp reminder of how far Obama was from that mastery in 2009. But, not to make excuses, nobody arrives in the Oval Office knowing how to do the job of President of the United States.) It also contained a wonderful statement of the social contract, the idea that people who acquire skills and work hard should be assured of the basic economic security that allows them to take advantage of opportunity.

Plenty of praise will be heaped on the speech, so instead of layering on, I have two small gripes. First, it goes without saying that Obama's reaffirmation of the "Buffet Rule" -- that millionaires shouldn't pay a lower tax rate than salaried employees such as Warren Buffet's secretary, who sat in Michelle Obama's section of the gallery -- resonated brilliantly with Mitt Romney's tax returns, released the same day. Mitt Romney's effective tax rate is not only lower than Buffett's secretary, it's probably even lower than Buffet's, at just 13.9 percent.

But Obama's focus on millionaires misses the big lesson of Romney's returns. They're not different just because the numbers are bigger. (Although they are very big -- even the trivial numbers that make an ordinary upper-middle-class tax return seem complex, like the credit for foreign taxes paid by a mutual fund, is in the high six figures for Romney.) But the real difference in Romney's return is that it doesn't look like mine or yours. There are no 1040s badly stapled onto the front page. It's an entirely different world, comprised of capital gains and more capital gains, a few dividends, and some interest.

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And that should be the point. It's not that Romney's a millionaire, or multi-millionaire. There are surely other millionaires who make as much money as Romney or more but pay a far higher tax rate because all or part of it is in salary and none of it moves through the Cayman Islands. The real "Buffet Rule" should not be focused on the amount of income at all. It's not, as Obama put it last night, that millionaires should pay at least 30 percent. It's that all income should be taxed at the same rate, whether it comes from wages, salary, capital gains, dividends, interest, carried interest, or some new form just being invented by the rocket scientists.

I was also a bit disappointed by the section of the speech on money in politics. As we see the emergence of Super PACs and a full return to the Watergate-era culture, the beginning of this election is a teachable moment, as they say, an opportunity to lay out an alternative vision in which public financing, broad participation, and reasonable regulation offset the Super PACs. Instead, Obama focused on two minor, distracting issues. He called for a ban on insider trading by members of Congress, responding to claims by Jack Abramoff, Peter Schweizer of the Hoover Institution, and an ancient, dubious academic study. There's nothing wrong with prohibiting members of Congress from using inside information, but it really isn't a significant element of corruption, in part because Congress is still a fairly open institution. If as an ordinary member you know that some bill or amendment is going to pass, chances are that lots of other people do as well. (The real corruption has been members being given early access to initial public offerings, but that has nothing to do with information and wouldn't be affected by an insider trading ban.)

Getting more directly at the reality of money in politics, Obama called for prohibiting "bundlers" of political money from lobbying "and vice versa" -- that is, banning campaign contributions from lobbyists. A federal circuit court recently upheld North Carolina's ban on contributions from lobbyists, but this will still, if it passes, pose an interesting constitutional question about whether either donating (in regulated amounts) or lobbying are protected rights. Still, the focus on lobbyists, which has been the hallmark of the Obama administration's ethics agenda from the beginning, is far too narrow. As the example of Newt Gingrich's work for Freddie Mac and pharmaceutical companies shows, the real influence peddlers never bother with the proletarian business of "registering" as lobbyists. And most of the money that corrupts and distorts politics comes from wealthy individuals who aren't lobbyists, but who can certainly make their interests known to the politicians they support.

What Obama's version of the Buffett rule and the two congressional ethics proposals have in common is that they are interesting ideas but far too narrowly focused. In all three cases, they are targeting people -- millionaires, lobbyists -- when they should instead be focused on the thing: money.

Mark Schmitt is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Fellows Program at the Roosevelt Institute.