Roosevelt Institute Braintruster Joe Costello argues for a new understanding of what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century, drawing inspiration from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one of the key organizations of the Civil Rights Movement. As Costello sees it, learning 'democratic patience' --the ability to debate fruitfully with each other --is the foundation of meaningful action.

In her must-read book  Many Minds, One Heart, Wesley Hogan recounts how the SNCC showed that great power can come from small gatherings:

SNCC ( Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) activities within the broader (civil rights) movement reshaped the republican tradition as it was widely understood in American life. From the colonial period forward, this tradition had depended on the vision of independent yeoman--each with a stake in society--gathering to stand against distant, impersonal, and overbearing institutions. SNCC revised this republican idea of standing up to demand one's natural rights to life, liberty, and property. The struggle to realize democratic social relations was an avenue of public work that was possible only in the company of others. SNCC workers demonstrated the simple proposition that one cannot live a democratic life alone.

A couple of years ago, I visited Atlanta. My first stop was the Martin Luther King memorial in the heart of the city. I have to admit, the memorial and its buildings were not only underwhelming; they seemed to lack the memory of life. The whole thing was very cold and sterile, until I walked to the one corner of the complex, where stands the old red-brick Ebenezer church.

Walking into the church, memory instantly comes to life. A half century before, in this church and hundreds of others even smaller, in small community rooms and in living rooms spread across the South, one of the great democratic movements in American history was founded and organized. Standing in the small church, I felt instantly connected to and overwhelmed by the astounding accomplishments of the former slave population of this republic, who, standing together, nonviolently gained the enfranchisement denied them for a century after emancipation.

This memory revived as I read Wesley Hogan's Many Minds, One Heart. The book is an excellent work of American history about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an important element of the Civil Rights Movement that brims with important lessons for America today. Across the South, they helped inspire and de-centrally organize direct action campaigns against segregation and for political enfranchisement. Ms. Hogan's book is essential history, and most importantly, it is written with "small-d" democratic knowledge and understanding that is sorely lacking from far too much American history. The book unfolds a story of the thoughts and actions of the disenfranchised who come together to demand their natural rights as human beings and their political rights as citizens, "gathering," Hogan writes, "to stand against distant, impersonal, and overbearing institutions.”

This is the challenge we Americans face today. Both voluntarily and through subtle coercion, the majority of Americans have become disenfranchised from any meaningful politics.

It is time for us to “gather against distant, impersonal, and overbearing institutions.” Just as SNCC helped to define and enfranchise a disenfranchised people, so must we. Our republic needs to redefine what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century. We need to rebuild and evolve new practices by which citizens discuss, interact, and implement politics. We need to develop a citizen culture, and most importantly as a society, value the hard work of being a citizen.

The SNCC overcame two great barriers. The first was fear, which the SNCC met by bringing people together in small groups to discuss the challenges they faced, showing people they were not alone. Despite overwhelming odds, people could act, persevere and triumph. The beginning, one of the Freedom Riders stated simply, was this: “I lost my fear.” The second barrier the SNCC confronted was the widely held belief of political impotence, that one person's actions had neither impact nor value. In the apartheid South, whites were enfranchised, while very single day the black community saw and experienced oppressive political power.

Today, America is an extremely fearful society. Much of this flows from our disenfranchisement, from feelings of powerlessness. People are not legally disenfranchised, yet they feel politically impotent. They see and experience the power of our mega-corporations, which control our politics. “I once thought politics was what you were for or against--not what you did,” one member of the SNCC said.

This is a key insight for changing our present situation. In breaking the barriers of disenfranchisement and fear, we need to bring people together to redefine politics and create a politics not of opinoion, of “for or against,” but a politics of action. The first and most crucial step, as SNCC understood, is simply to bring people together in small meetings--the Ebenezer church, libraries, living rooms--and begin "small d" democratic conversations. We must discuss the issues of our time and how they affect each person's daily life. Without the initiation of these small conversations, there can be no political revival. Two things need to come out of these conversations, one is a necessary new political dialog and the other -- a will to do.

In these conversations, we must reintroduce a most important aspect missing from our politics: democratic patience. Hogan does an excellent job of describing this part of democratic culture. Democratic patience is not about waiting ten more years for Jim Crow to end, another five for the vote, or in our time the end of Wall Street dominance of the economy. Democratic patience is the ability to talk about difficult problems with each other, especially with people with whom we disagree. We can start by developing patience with those with whom we agree, and then we may begin to engage those with whom we disagree.

Today, democratic patience is absent from all aspects of our politics. The idiocy that calls itself political debate in this country is toxic. Our political class prizes zingers, not understanding; entertainment, not enlightenment. Our politics is not democratic; in fact, it is oppressively doctrinaire. Without healthy political dialogue, there can be no healthy politics -- and without patience, there can be no dialogue.

Out of democratic conversation must come democratic action. Once people are engaged they must have something to do. For SNCC the actions were desegregating diners and buses and registering to vote. What will constitutes democratic action today? I'll suggest two things: involvement in local government and energy conservation. People need to engage in local government to begin making necessary changes in their communities. There needs to begin a process of taking power away from DC and the state capitals. The only way to fix corruption is to drain the swamp. Meanwhile, energy conservation provides an opportunity for people to become actively involved at home, work and school, and in the community to kick America's oil addiction.

From democratic conversations and democratic action will come democratic experience. As historian Lawrence Goodwyn has written, democracy is experiential; it is about doing and learning. The SNCC, as Hogan documents it, was one big experiment and learning experience. She writes, “By pushing the boundaries, movement participants could see more clearly what was at stake....People saw a small number of individuals taking action and were inspired to join them; through the experiences they then shared, the activists and their recruits developed and understanding of what was possible—one that differed considerably from that of most blacks and whites in Mississippi.”

I pulled from Ms Hogan's book -- which needs to be widely read -- a couple points that will help us in reviving our politics. We don't need a revolution in America; we need a reformation. Our political economy has become top heavy and eminently corrupt. Our economy is controlled by and for a few massive corporations. Our politics is run by a small unrepresentative professional political class, who do the bidding of these corporations. Technology has massively changed our politics and most of us have voluntarily disengaged from being citizens. We are fed a vapid, fear-laden death cult of patriotism, instead of building the life affirming culture of courage and work necessary to being a citizen. Yet we know one thing, as long as it flows somewhere in us, the fount of democracy is eternal, and renewal possible.

We must come together to reclaim, revive and evolve our politics. We must become citizens, and in so doing, we will gain meaning for ourselves. As one SNCC participant put it, “I had never had that much dignity before. It was exhilarating, it was something I had earned—the sense of independence that comes to a free person.”

Joe Costello was communications director for Jerry Brown’s 1992 presidential campaign and was a senior adviser for Howard Dean’s effort in 2004.

Charles Keating opposed him. What more endorsement does he need in this wilder-than-wild-world?

PS:  It is a scary time when the pornographers become the truth tellers about the discrediting of expertise. We are, folks, in a profound political crisis. I fear that we cannot channel things into a healthy direction in this climate. Do you share my concern??

Excerpt from Larry Flynt's latest on HuffPo:

"The American government -- which we once called our government -- has been taken over by Wall Street, the mega-corporations and the super-rich. They are the ones who decide our fate. It is this group of powerful elites, the people President Franklin D. Roosevelt called "economic royalists," who choose our elected officials -- indeed, our very form of government. Both Democrats and Republicans dance to the tune of their corporate masters. In America, corporations do not control the government. In America, corporations are the government..." Read full article.

Rob Johnson is a Senior Fellow and the Director of the Project on Global Finance at the Roosevelt Institute.

Roosevelt Institute Braintruster Joe Costello riffs on the myth of recovery, deflation, and the way economic decisions are made in the Oval Office.

And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget

falls drop by drop upon the heart

and in our own despair, against our will,

comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

-- Aeschylus via RFK

The economy of the last quarter-century is not coming back.  We need to understand this. Oil is about as good a global indicator as we have -- oil is the life blood of the global economy. After having gotten carried away by the green shoots euphoria, or more accurately, the green shoots campaign, IEA's numbers have led them to tone down the rhetoric:

The US summer driving season "seems to have fizzled out before getting started" the International Energy Agency said on Wednesday, striking a cautious tone on prospects for a recovery in global energy demand next year.

But in its monthly Oil Market Report for August, released on Wednesday, the IEA said that in spite of the improvement in some economic indicators in a few countries, "the most that can be said is that the global economy may be stabilising".

The Post also has good story entitled "A Recovery Only a Statistician Could Love," and after having pumped more money into the financial system than Croesus, the Fed again makes it clear that deflation remains concern # 1:

Household spending has continued to show signs of stabilizing but remains constrained by ongoing job losses, sluggish income growth, lower housing wealth, and tight credit. Businesses are still cutting back on fixed investment and staffing but are making progress in bringing inventory stocks into better alignment with sales.

The prices of energy and other commodities have risen of late. However, substantial resource slack is likely to dampen cost pressures, and the Committee expects that inflation will remain subdued for some time.

Finally, to prove that high comedy and great tragedy can go hand in hand, the WSJ has an amusing(unintended?) piece on how economic decisions are made in the Oval Office:

He [Rahm] says Mr. Obama was frustrated his team wasn't offering up a full range of views on how to approach derivatives regulation. "Get me some other people's opinions on this," Mr. Emanuel recalls the president as saying. "I want more than what's in this room."...In the end, the administration tweaked its position on derivatives.

Another time, Mr. Obama asked Mr. Geithner to make a pitch for reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act, which split apart commercial banks and investment banks in 1933 and kept them separate until its repeal in 1999. Aides say Mr. Obama didn't support reinstatement but wanted to hear the merits of the idea.

"I often take the role of making sure that discussions in the daily briefing incorporate views not in the room," says Mr. Summers, a former Clinton administration Treasury secretary.

That's funny stuff. The tragedy is that we want to believe that a half-dozen people sitting around a room can provide homogeneous solutions for challenges we face.

We're going to have a different world than the one we know, but it can be better.

Joe Costello was communications director for Jerry Brown’s 1992 presidential campaign and was a senior adviser for Howard Dean’s effort in 2004.

Could a new Pecora-style commission swell a tide of new populism? Taking a look back into history, Roosevelt Institute Braintruster Henry C.K. Liu concludes that it could.

Back in the 1930s, the Great Depression that followed the 1929 market crash had direct political repercussions. In the 1930 mid-term elections, the Democrats gained control of Congress, and in 1932 Democratic candidate Franklin D Roosevelt was easily elected president over Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover, carrying over 40 states. The Democrats finally gained control of both Congress and the Executive Branch after more than a decade of Republican rule.

The new Democratic chairman of the Senate Banking and Currency Committee, Senator Duncan U. Fletcher of Florida, immediately dismissed the Republican general counsel of the commission on the 1929 crash. He appointed Ferdinand Pecora, an assistant district attorney for New York. The Pecora Commission investigations after 1930 revealed a host of conflicts of interest in the financial sector in the years leading up to the 1929 crash, such as bank underwriting of unsound securities to save near non-performing bank loans, rampant insider trading and "pool operations" by speculators banding together to move a stock and to close out the pool at a peak price for profit, leaving the manipulated public with subsequent losses.

More shocking still, the Pecora Commission uncovered the embarrassing fact that JP Morgan and his fellow banking titans not only continued to reap huge profit from rescuing firms they helped put in distress while the economy fell into severe depression, but they were also able to avoid paying any income tax in 1931 and 1932 through tax loopholes on paper losses of distressed companies they acquired. These bankers were in fact buying up a country in economic distress on the cheap with their tax deductions.

Revival of populism: the Single Land Tax

The excesses of the Roaring Twenties revived populist calls for reform and even radical demands for revolutionary systems of taxation. The Robert Schalkenbach Foundation (RSF) was organized in 1925 to promote public awareness of the social philosophy and economic reforms advocated by Henry George (1839-1897), centering around the "single tax on land values" first published in The Christian Advocate in 1890. The Henry George Foundation of America was formed in 1926 as a non-profit entity by some of the leading luminaries of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. George believed that exclusive private ownership of land (natural resources) created unwarranted special privileges for certain people and felt that keeping land out of production was destructive to the economy. He advocated shifting taxes from labor and capital onto the value of land and natural resources.

Riding on a wave of populism, George ran, though unsuccessfully, twice for mayor of New York, the first time in 1886 when he came in second ahead of a young Theodore Roosevelt. George died in the midst of his second run in 1897, aged 64. Between elections, he traveled the world promoting his vision of economic justice, influencing many reformers. In pre-revolution Russia, George's ideas were popularized by Leo Tolstoy, and in China by Sun Yat Sen, the leader of the revolution that overthrew in 1911 the 267-year-old Qing dynasty. George's grand daughter was the celebrated American choreographer Agnes George de Mille.

The 1920s were a time of revival for 1860s socio-economic Darwinism manifesting itself through laissez-faire market capitalism which condones no-holds-barred competitiveness not just for economic growth but for corporate survival. It denied the early American communal spirit of cooperation. Big business adopted the "survival of the fittest" theme of English sociologist Herbert Spencer and Yale professor William Graham Sumner with self-righteous morality. Yet survival of the fittest among the animal kingdom is practiced only between species, while intra-species cooperation is the general law. The symbiotic interdependence of different species is well recognized in all ecological systems. Moreover, the laissez-faire market system is far from a natural phenomenon, but a contrived mechanism with the purpose of reconciling individual pursuit of self interest with the welfare of society. It was becoming clear that this reconciliation was again failing in the 1920s and it had been in the 1860s.

Reacting against economic individualism, other populist voices included Lester Frank Ward (1841-1913), who asserted that man should use his intelligence to control and direct his future, making a distinction between the "telic" and the "genetic", insisting that there is "no natural harmony between natural law and human advantage". Thus laissez-faire market capitalism does not necessarily promote human progress, and when it runs amuck, could pervert economic progress to reverse human progress in civilization. Ward's views paved the way to positive socio-economic planning by government that the Progressive and the New Dealers promoted.

Populism and new security laws

With a backdrop of such populist ideas, the 1932 hearings and findings of the reconstituted Pecora Commission galvanized broad public support for new securities laws. As a result, Congress passed and Roosevelt signed into law the Security Act of 1933, referred to as the "truth in securities" law, with two basic objectives: 1) require that investors receive financial and other significant information concerning securities being offered for public sale; and 2) prohibit deceit, misrepresentations, and other fraud in the sale of securities.

Congress also passed in 1933 the Glass-Steagall Act, which mandated a separation of commercial banks that took deposits and extended loans, from investment banks that underwrote, issued, and distributed stocks, bonds and other securities. The House of Morgan had to split into JP Morgan Bank, a commercial bank, and Morgan Stanley, an investment bank to satisfy Glass-Steagall, even though both were still controlled by Morgan.

The next year, Congress passed the new Security Exchange Act of 1934, creating the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to protect the interests of the small investor. The act empowers the SEC with broad authority over all aspects of the securities industry, including the power to register, regulate, and oversee brokerage firms, transfer agents, and clearing agencies as well as the nation's securities self regulatory organizations (SROs). The various stock exchanges, such as the New York Stock Exchange, American Stock Exchange and National Association of Securities Dealers which operates the NASDAQ system are SROs.

President Roosevelt appointed Joseph P. Kennedy as first SEC chairman. Kennedy was a highly successful speculator on Wall Street with a wide network of business dealings, some of which were questionable, whose appointment Newsweek described as "a former speculator and pool operator will now curb speculation and prohibit pools".

Unlike other run-of-the-mill speculators, Kennedy had farsighted political vision, which he realized by the shrewd use of his considerable wealth gained from market tactics that he was now responsible for policing. In his first speech as SEC chairman, Kennedy pronounced a new populist path for the stock market: "The New Deal in finance will be found to be a better deal for all." Kennedy's populism paved the way for his son, John F Kennedy, to the White House three decades later in 1961.

Clinton's rejection of the Jackson/FDR/Kennedy tradition

Ironically, another Democratic president, Clinton, elected on a populist platform in 1992 another three decades later, repealed in 1999 the Glass-Steagall Act that had created the SEC. On November 12, 1999, Clinton signed into law the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act. This allowed commercial and investment banks to re-consolidate. The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, by combining the conflicting roles of lending institutions and security issuing institutions, facilitated the development of structured finance and debt securitization that contributed structurally to the 2007 credit crisis.

Phil Gramm, who began his political career as a Democratic congressman in the Texas populist tradition, changed party affiliation to become a neo-liberal Republican senator from Texas. As Republican chairman and ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, he spearheaded the Gramm-Leach-Bailey Act of 1999 with the conviction that higher bank profits commensurate with higher risk were the salvation of the economy, reversing the age-old principle that banks should be the economy's most risk-averse institution.

Between 1995 and 2000, Gramm received more than $1 million in campaign contribution from the securities and investment industry, more than he received from oil and gas interests that traditionally were a key source of financial energy in Texas politics. After retiring from politics, Gramm became vice-chairman of the investment banking arm of Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), an institution at present in the spotlight for massive losses from subprime mortgage exposure. Gramm has was also an economic adviser to the presidential campaign of Republican candidate John McCain.

Gramm became linked to the Enron scandal when it came to light that his wife, Wendy, while serving on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, was involved in granting an exemption for Enron from federal oversight, immediately after which she was named a director at Enron. It came to light later that Gramm had helped to turn the regulatory exemption into law as well as push through the deregulation of energy markets that led to the Enron scandal. During this period, Enron was a major contributor to Gramm's political campaigns.

The New Pecora-style commission and the rising tide of New Populism

If the new Pecora-type commission is anything like the original one, it would return to the original mandate of the SEC, which was to protect small investors who were not professional enough to survive on caviat emptor. Remember, FDR appointed Joseph Kennedy as first Chairman of the SEC. The issue of the new commission is not merely a matter of appointing members of correct political affiliation, but whether the prosposed commission reflects the rising New Populism that is sweeping across the entire nation. This rising tide is partly what got Obama elected -- he himself ran as a populist (as did Congressman Ron Paul and Gov. Mike Huckabee). Since the election, continuing comparisons between Obama and FDR, as well as ongoing media references to the New Deal, are evidence of the trend towards populism. And the financial crisis, of course, has turned a lot of moderates into populists. Whether the New Populism will actually take root is another matter, but the commission would be wise not to ignore the hunger among ordinary people to hold the elites accountable.