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 New Part Three - July 24: James Fallows Kevin Phillips Part Two - July 12: James Fallows Kevin Phillips Part One - July 3: James Fallows Kevin Phillips Kevin Phillips is a contributing columnist to the Los Angeles Times and a regular contributor to National Public Radio. Phillips was the chief political analyst for the 1968 Republican presidential campaign, and in 1969 published his landmark book The Emerging Republican Majority. His bestseller The Politics of Rich and Poor was described as a "founding document" of the 1992 presidential election. James Fallows is The Atlantic's national correspondent and the author of Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy (1996) and of Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel. To learn about his new book and look through an archive of his recent articles, visit jamesfallows.com. |
fallows@large | Dialogues with James Fallows ..... From: Kevin Phillips To: James Fallows Subject: Re: The silent crash - Part Three Dear Jim: Thank you for your kind words about Wealth and Democracy. The fortuitous overlap between the timing of its publication and the events of the past ten weeks has put the book in a helpful spotlight. As for your questions asking me to put myself in three different roles, I will, but with a quibble here and there. Let's begin with the idea of my being head strategist for a presidential campaign in which I and the candidate "have decided that inequality, injustice, and the distortion of democracy" are the major platform points. The first thing I would write is a memo to the candidate saying, "You must have lost my detailed outline of last week, because even if these three points are part of the national predicament, they are not the parts you should prioritize." In this country, such issues become central and important to parts of the public only when the economy has gone into a major downturn and/or a major stock-market bubble has imploded, generally because faith in business and finance has been proven false, or due to corruption, gross favoritism, crony capitalism, failed economic management, and the like. These failures are what a candidate should zero in on, be he McCain in a primary or as a third-party contender, or a Democrat running for nomination in the general election. A McCain should focus on these, with the inequality and injustice issues as tertiary angles and the diminution of democracy as a secondary one. For a Democrat, the ingredients of economic-management failure, corruption, and cronyism should be the focus, together with the undercutting of democracy. Inequality and injustice should be secondary and emphasized to liberal and progressive constituencies. Readers angry about corporate chicanery have a lot of options. If they own stock, they should just routinely vote those shares against the management, absent convincing reasons to believe that the company is either clean or reforming. Concerned citizens could also launch short chain letters that recipients could repackage and send to House or Senate members. The letters could propose corporate reforms or complain about how great wealth and CEO pay have gotten out of line because of Washington collusion or permissiveness. People could vote against a congressman or senator who has received more than a certain level of dollars (or percentage of his or her contributions) from corporate PACs. Or they could ask their newspapers or broadcast media to run polls showing how area residents feel about various proposals to regulate corporate malpractice or the financial behavior of those with great wealth. As for the four or five big changes I would push if my President had a willing Congress like FDR's, here is a quick response: 1) full public funding of elections; 2) a simple constitutional amendment saying that a) donations to political campaigns are not free speech within the meaning of the Constitution and its amendments and b) that corporations are not persons (as now considered) within that same meaning; 3) a sweeping Financial Practices and Household Economic Protection Act; and 4) an Eisenhower/Happy Days Tax Fairness Act, by which we return to a tax-rate structure that differentiates between the upper middle class, the rich, and the really rich in a way that current rates do not. During the fifties, for example, there were four or five rates applying to different levels of income within the top 1 percent of Americans. Were something similar set up today, $300,000-$1 million incomes could keep the current 39.6 percent bracket (slightly lower because of the phase-in of last year's cuts), but annual income over $1 million could be taxed at 44 percent, over $5 million at 48 percent, over $20 million at 52 percent and over $50 million at 56 percent. During the Eisenhower years, the top rate was 91 percent (begun under FDR) and CEOs and robber barons knew their place, but we could settle for much lower today. Perhaps capital-gains rates should also be raised back to 25 percent or 28 percent, given the way in which the cut to 20 percent fed the 1997-2000 bubble. I could keep going, but those four are enough to start with. Thanks, and I will look forward to your Pentagon article. Kevin Phillips
What do you think? Join the conversation in Post & Riposte. More on books in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. Copyright © 2002 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. | [an error occurred while processing this directive] | ||
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