Monthly Archives: September 2015

Uncategorized

Introducing Ralph Nader at Harvard Law

I introduced Ralph Nader at Harvard Law School this past September:

Hello everyone, For students like us, the pre-professional rat race has a certain gravitational pull: diverting our focus from the structural to the trivial, blurring our sense of right and wrong, caging our moral imagination, and diminishing our belief in our own civic power.

Fortunately, there’s hope: if we build up a sense of systemic justice – and knowledge of today’s injustices – then we can inoculate ourselves from this pull, liberating our civic powers to take an alternative path of serving the public interest.

We are blessed that certain law students in history have taken this alternative path. If this Harvard Law Student with us here today had not taken this more visionary path, we would have never had Freedom of Information requests or the Clean Water Act; If this Harvard Law Student with us here today had not taken this more transformative path, we would have smoking on airplanes and the word whistleblower would not be in popular use; If this Harvard Law student with us here today had not take this more just path, we wouldn’t have the Occupational Health and Safety Act nor the seatbelts and airbags that have saved millions of American lives.  
In an effort to begin our own alternative path towards similar transformative legal vocations, we present the founder of the modern consumer movement, the original Nader Raider, the former host of Saturday Night Live, the only man to convince Sesame Street to have a song sung about consumer advocacy, America’s chief public citizen and a hero of mine… Mr. Ralph Nader.

Ideas

Hearts, Laws and Our 1L Orientation

I just published my first essay — a reflection on my law school orientation and how change happens in politics — in the Harvard Law Record:

Throughout my 1L orientation, my mind kept returning to this overlooked moment in the 2016 Presidential campaign– a moment that teaches us much more about American politics than the entire telethon of Trump-focused punditry ever has nor ever will. In a backroom after a Hillary Clinton campaign event, Julius Jones, a Black Lives Matter activist, is face-to-face with the frontrunner herself, challenging her to explain how she would change “hearts and minds” to address racism in America. Clinton, in a rare candid moment, responds passionately: “I don’t believe you change hearts; I believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate.”

What a great political tension! To address the great public problems of our time, should we be changing Hearts or changing Laws?  

Of course, Jones and Clinton are both right. Heart and Laws — and consequently, Heart-changers and Law-changers — are not opponents, but rather interlocutors in democracy’s great conversation.

Read the full essay — “Hearts, Laws and Our 1L Orientation” — here.

Ideas

Going to Work Everyday

To remind myself about the importance of work, I keep this clock on my desk with the batteries out so that it is always set to 9:20 PM.

Twenty years ago yesterday at 9:20 PM, at Oriole Park at Camden Yards, play stopped and the banner on the B&O Warehouse switched from 2130 to 2131, creating what is (along with the last out of Game 7 of the 2004 ALCS) the greatest moment in modern baseball history: the certification that CalIMG_6639 2 Ripken had broken Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games played record.
If football is about going to war, with generals from the sidelines commanding their troops to seize land from the other team, baseball is about going to work, with everyone honing their specialized craft, with the front offices crunching the numbers, and with the players needing to perform with consistency, day in and day out, for over a hundred and fifty days a year.

That’s why Cal’s record is the most important in all of American sports: it’s just about a guy who went to work everyday. And not only that: it’s about a guy who went to work everyday with unmatched dignity and commitment; it’s about a guy who went to work everyday at the same factory in which his brother had gone to work; it’s about a guy who went to work everyday because he learned from his father that that’s the honorable thing to do.

calripken2131 (1)And of course, the most important reason 2131 is America’s greatest sports record is because it’s not about Cal Ripken. It’s about the hundreds of millions of Americans who go to work every day in much harder jobs. Cal put it well himself: “[My fans] all had stories, they all had their own streaks, like working for a plant for 31 years and never missing a day. Whoa. Now that’s a streak. We should be celebrating those streaks. That’s work. I just played baseball.”

Laboring daily — going to work — is like breaking bread or praying or caring for the sick: it’s one of those basic and honorable practices that make us human. It takes us outside of ourselves. It brings us together. It has a grace and momentum of its own.

Without a strong Labor movement, calls to go to work everyday — to have our own streaks of committed Labor, like Cal’s — are perverse and cynical, the smarm of bosses misusing this sacred human practice to squeeze more out of us for their own private profit (and often, worse, have us smile while they fleece us).

Labor Day is about recognizing those people — like my grandpa Joe Gubbins, who was a Chicago union lawyer — who have struggled to make sure that this dignity of Labor — this American pride in going to work everyday, like Cal did — is not perverted by the greed of a few. It’s about building workplaces which empower people to go to work everyday with the secure knowledge that their Labor will be respected. It’s about blabor-movementuilding an economy where we can all go to work everyday and be proud of our Labor, because we had a hand in deciding what is done with it, because we had a hand in deciding in how it was treated, because we had a hand in deciding how it was rewarded. It’s about recognizing the centuries-long union struggle that gave us the weekend and compensation for injury; that gave us health and safety standards and sexual harassment protections; that gave us sick pay and an end to child labor; that gave us parental leave and the forty hour workweek.

I want to live in a country where we can talk about the dignity of going to work everyday without rolling our eyes; where streaks like Cal’s and streaks like that of his fan at the plant are both respected: not just with pats on the back, but with serious power and serious paychecks. Our American Labor Movement — and the more democratic workplaces and fairer economy that have come with it — has brought us much closer to that country than we could have ever imagined a century ago. Think of how much closer we will be if we keep supporting it, if we keep building it, if we have the commitment and dignity to ensure we’re not going to be the generation that breaks its magnificent streak.

Ideas, Political Projects

Political Equality First

I just wrote a new essay — “Political Equality First” — for The Progressive Alternative.  I attempt to make the case that the Democratic Party’s revival of the economic message of Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism (the idea that state power should be deployed to ameliorate disparities in economic power) will fail if we do not revive Roosevelt’s political message that political equality — restoring political power to the people and away from the grip of monied interests — must be achieved first:

Although the same sentiments are expressed, President Obama and his fellow “New New Nationalists” have echoed only half of Roosevelt’s program. They have failed to articulate the role political equality plays in achieving economic equality. The progressives of the First Gilded Age understood that if they wanted the New Nationalism to work — if they wanted state power to be able to occasionally counterbalance free-wheeling economic power — they had to ensure that state power was free from the control of economic power. They had to fight for state power to be deployed democratically, in the interest of the public sentiment of equal citizens.

In the Gilded Age that Roosevelt faced, state power was not deployed democratically. In practice, there was not an equal distribution of political power. Worse, the disparity in political power mapped on to the disparity in economic power, so that those with economic power had political power and those without economic power did not have political power. The government was not in the control of the People; rather, it was controlled by those with the economic power. Our nation — conceived as a democracy of citizens with equal political power — suffered a crisis of immeasurable political inequality.

…

Today, with the crisis of economic inequality in the spotlight, but the crisis of political inequality sidelined, we must finally address this second strand of Roosevelt’s New Nationalism and give the cause of political equality its due. Even more, we should call forPolitical Equality First: the strategic prioritization of equalizing our distribution of political power. If we want to use state power to better achieve income equality, wealth equality, or structural equality — or even gender equality or racial equality — we need political equality first. We need to wrest back control of state power from those with economic power.

Practicing a strategy of Political Equality First comes with important benefits. Whereas a sizable portion of Americans are — rightly or wrongly (in my view, wrongly) — philosophically opposed to efforts to increase economic equality, most Americans believe in the democratic principle of political equality. Political equality takes the relatively popular sentiment of “the rich deserve their economic power” off the table and centers focus on the even more popular sentiment of “the citizens deserve their political power.”  Whereas most efforts to increase economic equality will immediately affect the direct experiences of only a segment of Americans, the 90+% of Americans who have little to no voice in government would — given efforts to increase political equality — immediately experience increased political power.

Read the full essay here.