Читать книгу Levers of Power - Kevin A. Young - Страница 9

Introduction: Shadow and Substance

In 1931, the philosopher John Dewey lamented that “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.” Government “in general is an echo,” and at times a direct “accomplice, of the interests of big business.”¹ Dewey was writing in the early years of the Great Depression, as unchecked capitalism had plunged the world into crisis and his government was doing nothing to solve the problem. Today, as in Dewey’s time, big business’s control over the US government is an open secret. We have formally democratic institutions, but the 1% exercises preponderant control over government policymaking. Statistical studies show that the preferences of non-wealthy people have little or no influence on policy.² The 99% are well aware of this fact. In polls, over three-quarters of the public consistently says that government is “run by a few big interests looking out for themselves,” namely large corporations and the rich. In the years following the economic crash of 2008, around two-thirds agreed that the government’s response had benefited “large banks and financial institutions,” “large corporations,” and “wealthy people,” and that the rest of the population had benefited “not too much” or “not at all.”³

Critiques of plutocracy—rule by the rich—are not new. Even in Dewey’s time, the insight was hardly original. Marxists and anarchists had long denounced capitalists’ influence over government. Some liberals like Dewey had voiced similar critiques, dating back at least to Adam Smith’s complaint in 1776 that England’s “merchants and manufacturers” were “the principal architects” of economic policy, their interests “so carefully attended to” by politicians.⁴ And as polls suggest, the idea that government is “the shadow cast by big business” is old news to most of the public today.

But Dewey added a further insight: “The attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.”⁵ In other words, electing politicians critical of business will not eliminate business’s power to shape government policy. History supports Dewey’s point. Governments elected with a strong progressive mandate, from Chile in the early 1970s to Venezuela and Greece more recently, have faced massive economic disruption—and often military coups—when their reforms pose a threat to the profits and privileges of capitalists. Less ambitious would-be reformers like Barack Obama have also incurred the wrath of business despite taking enormous pains to accommodate corporate interests.

The Roots of Corporate Power

Why is business so powerful? Most analysts attribute its political influence to campaign donations and lobbying. But campaign finance is just one means by which business influences government. We argue that the problem goes far beyond money in politics, to the very structure of the economy. The political power of banks and corporations ultimately derives from the power that they wield over the economy itself—what some call their “structural power.”⁶ They control most of the crucial resources on which society depends, including investment capital (and thus jobs and loans) as well as food, transportation, medicine, healthcare services, and countless other things. The investment decisions made in corporate boardrooms help determine employment levels, the location of jobs, the availability of loans, the price of critical goods, and the revenues available to government.

The most potent weapon of banks and employers is the capital strike: the withdrawal of investment capital from one or more sectors of the economy, or “disinvestment,” in the form of layoffs, offshoring, transfers of financial capital abroad, the tightening of credit, and other disruptive measures. These actions can be carried out by individual firms or entire industries, or when large investors make a collective decision to disinvest.⁷ Banks wield this power of disruption through their lending decisions, while non-bank businesses do so by opening, expanding, closing, and relocating their factories, stores, or service areas.

The withholding of capital is not always a deliberate strike by capitalists for political purposes; capitalists may disinvest simply because of market conditions, such as low demand for their products—as when automakers cut production and lay off workers when demand for certain automobiles declines. The capital strike is distinguished from these “normal” instances of disinvestment by capitalists’ demands for government policy change and their promises that favorable changes will bring new or renewed investment. In other words, disinvestment constitutes a capital strike when the withholding of capital is accompanied by a promise to invest in exchange for favors from government. The capital strike is not an automatic response to market conditions, but a conscious capitalist strategy for getting what they want from government.⁸

Because business controls most of the resources upon which we all depend, government officials must constantly appease capitalists so they will continue to productively invest these resources. Only the boldest governments are willing to coerce capitalists into investing, since doing so typically invites deeper capital strikes and leads to a showdown in which the state must either expropriate private enterprise (defying accusations of totalitarianism) or capitulate.⁹ Governments everywhere thus invest great energy and public resources in staving off fits by malcontent executives and investors. Most public officials internalize the logic of “business confidence,” which means pursuing policies that will boost business leaders’ confidence in the government and avoiding policies that might invite retaliation. Certain policy options are never even contemplated or discussed given the certainty of fierce business opposition. In this context, businesses resort to overt capital strikes only on occasion. Once the disruptive power of the capital strike has been demonstrated, mere threats often do the trick. The possibility of future capital strikes influences the government in myriad ways, from the appointment of regulators to the laws that Congress makes and the way in which the government enforces, or declines to enforce, those laws.¹⁰

The pages of the business press feature regular examples of this coercion. A manufacturer refuses to invest in the United States until the government cuts taxes and loosens “environmental regulations and hiring rules.” A leader on Wall Street threatens that new government regulations on banks will bring a reduction in their rate of lending and thus a drop in economic growth. Apple’s CEO warns that the $181 billion stored by the company in an overseas tax haven won’t come “back until there’s a fair rate” of taxation on corporate income. Amazon uses its promise to construct a second headquarters to promote a bidding war among 238 cities, with each seeking to outdo the others by lavishing the company with billions in public handouts. Despite holding several trillion dollars in reserves, banks and corporations collectively refuse to make loans or hire new employees.¹¹

In response, both Republican and Democratic politicians seek to encourage corporate investment by enacting pro-business reforms. Presidents of both parties beg business to add jobs while aggressively pushing pro-corporate trade deals and scrapping regulations that protect the public and the environment. To lure capital back from offshore tax shelters, they propose cutting corporate taxes and reject any measures that would punish or coerce business, culminating in a historic slashing of corporate taxes in 2017.¹² These examples from the recent past demonstrate the power of the capital strike in action. They also demonstrate that while one party may be more extreme in its service to capitalists, both parties are constrained by corporations’ stranglehold over the economy.

Business uses a range of everyday tools alongside the capital strike. It has vast resources to spend on electoral campaigns, and its donations dwarf those of all other groups in society.¹³ Campaign donations rarely function as straightforward bribes in which a donation buys a specific policy; their more common function is to secure priority access to the policymaking process.¹⁴ They do so, first, by ensuring that business-friendly candidates get elected. Sometimes the candidates come directly from the business world, sometimes not. In either case, they must prove themselves acceptable to business donors. All candidates at the national level undergo a rigorous screening process by wealthy donors before being presented to the public, as part of what one historian calls “the hidden primary of the ruling class.” Presidential hopefuls typically approach business elites to gauge their support even prior to announcing their candidacies.¹⁵ Once a candidate is elected, the prior donations will be repaid through close consultation with business lobbyists and through the appointment of business-friendly staff, advisers, regulators, and judges. The relationship helps determine what legislation gets introduced, which policies are excluded from consideration, and how existing laws are implemented. Both sides continue to cultivate this relationship over the long term. The donors, however, hold the most power. They are essentially investors who “hold politicians more or less like stocks,” investing in those most likely to yield a return—the ones with a track record of pro-business actions—and dumping those who prove disappointing.¹⁶

If a politician disappoints, and if business fails to get everything it wants from government, the donors have plenty of other weapons of disruption in their arsenal. Threats of capital strikes, and occasionally real capital strikes, help keep politicians and regulators in line. Business also makes full use of the court system, spending immense sums of money on litigation to challenge laws it dislikes. If a law is passed over business opposition, or if zealous regulators pursue disagreeable regulations, business can still greatly weaken or even nullify those actions through an endless stream of lawsuits. For good measure, business often pressures its allies in Congress to cut funding for regulatory agencies, thus ensuring that the targets of business litigation will be underfunded and ill-equipped to defend their actions against deep-pocketed corporations. In this way, many policies become the focus of a never-ending war over implementation, which continues long after the president has signed a new law, and even long after the president has left office.

The battle over the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection (“Dodd-Frank”) Act of 2010 illustrates how these diverse corporate strategies reinforce each other. First, a combination of Wall Street campaign donations and dire warnings about disinvestment in the wake of the 2008 crash ensured that Obama appointed bank-friendly regulators and advisers, and also guaranteed that Wall Street lobbyists would have direct access to the negotiations over reform. Consequently, the administration’s initial drafts of legislation were far less radical than most people had expected based on Obama’s 2008 campaign rhetoric. Wall Street then used its access within the administration and in Congress to further weaken the bill. The final product signed in July 2010 was mostly congenial to Wall Street, but it did include some potential constraints on banks’ power. So the banks responded by aggressively lobbying around the implementation of the bill (spending even more on lobbying after the bill was passed than they had during the legislative process) and flooding the courts with lawsuits against the financial regulators responsible for implementation. Corporations’ withholding of trillions of dollars from the economy—a capital strike writ large—helped bolster officials’ responsiveness to banks’ demands. Meanwhile, the presence of corporate-friendly personnel in government helped ensure that officials would interpret business disinvestment in the “right” way, as a sign that government needed to do more to boost business “confidence.” Thus, Wall Street had multiple strategies for shaping policy. The power of campaign donations, lobbyists, and pro-business personnel within government was continuously magnified through the structural power of the capital strike, and vice versa.¹⁷

Corporate Disruption in the Obama Era

As the example of Wall Street reform suggests, corporations made full use of all these instruments during the Obama administration. Much of our focus in this book will be on the Obama presidency, not because Obama was any more subservient to capitalists than other presidents, but because there was such a dramatic disjunction between his progressive promises and his actual policies. As a candidate he vowed to confront fossil fuel companies, health insurers, Wall Street banks, and other predatory business interests. In all these areas his promises had overwhelming support among Democratic voters and were also popular with many Republican and independent voters. Yet his policy reforms fell far short of his rhetoric.¹⁸ Particularly puzzling was the fact that some reforms were within reach during the two years of Democratic control of Congress, or achievable using executive powers. The Obama years demonstrate how, despite a president’s resounding electoral victory and a strong public mandate for change, corporations may remain in the driver’s seat.

For instance, Obama had promised urgently needed environmental reforms, most notably to prevent catastrophic climate change. The public was supportive. In 2008, 78 percent favored an international treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and 66 percent favored government regulations that would force utilities to use more clean energy sources. Upon securing the Democratic nomination that year, Obama predicted that his presidency would be “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”¹⁹ Yet his administration’s environmental reforms stopped far short of what was scientifically necessary, legally permissible, and popular with the public. US pledges under the 2015 Paris climate accord were not remotely commensurate with US corporations’ historic responsibility and capability, and were not enforceable—even before Donald Trump withdrew from the agreement.²⁰ The rise of the oceans did not slow, the planet did not begin to heal.

Other progressive reforms were likewise much weaker than most people had expected. On healthcare, 77 percent of respondents polled on the eve of the 2008 election (including 57 percent of those who planned to vote for Republican John McCain) said that the government “should be responsible for ensuring” that everyone’s “basic need for healthcare” is met.²¹ None of the plans debated within Congress or the administration would have met that need. The only policy change that would have, a single-payer system that eliminated the central role of private insurers, was ruled out from the start by the Democratic leadership. The insurers, drug companies, and private providers were invited to help craft the legislation. As a result, the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA) preserved the privileges of the most parasitic healthcare interests.²²

In the case of financial reform, the incoming administration had an even clearer mandate. Unprecedented anger at big banks would have made strong action popular.²³ But no banking tycoons were prosecuted and the 2010 reforms took great care to preserve Wall Street’s profits and prerogatives. Options like nationalization or strict limits to the size of banks were either excluded from the 2010 legislation or weakened as the new law was being implemented. The resulting policies were widely criticized as too weak, even before Trump and Congress rolled back much of the law in 2018.²⁴

In the realm of jobs policy, the administration pushed through a substantial but inadequate stimulus bill in February 2009, and then took little further action. Polls found strong support for more government spending to reduce unemployment. Job creation, not deficit reduction, was the public’s priority. Respondents also consistently said that there was too much inequality in the United States, even while greatly underestimating the actual level of inequality.²⁵ The conservative thrust of fiscal policy under Obama cannot be blamed on public opinion.²⁶

In all these areas, corporations’ power of economic disruption is essential for understanding why Obama’s policies diverged so sharply from his promises. Business used capital strikes, and the threat of even deeper strikes, to scuttle or weaken progressive reform, and to get the administration to pursue pro-business initiatives like free-trade agreements and deregulation.²⁷

Barack Obama entered the White House in 2009 in the midst of the most severe episode of disinvestment since World War II. In 2014, the business press reported that “cash on corporate balance sheets has increased almost 70 percent over the past four years,” that it was not being invested in the economy, and that this lack of investment constituted a collective decision to avoid productive investment: “Companies that are spending their cash have largely chosen to increase dividends and buy back stock” rather than increase hiring, wages, or productive investments.²⁸ That is, business was refusing to reinvest its profits—which owed partly to Obama administration policies—back into the economy.

Long after the Great Recession officially ended in 2009, banks and nonfinancial businesses were still hoarding trillions—yes, trillions—of dollars in cash. By Obama’s last year in office, a total of around $9.25 trillion was “lying fallow,” as business observers reported: $1.94 trillion in nonfinancial companies, $2.15 trillion in bank reserves, $2.5 trillion in overseas tax shelters, and $2.66 trillion in zero-yielding money market funds. To put that figure in perspective, $9.25 trillion could end world hunger by 2030 while also funding twenty years of “Green New Deal” investments to transition the US economy away from fossil fuels—with more than $1 trillion left over.²⁹ Capitalist hoarding on this scale is historically unprecedented. And it was not simply dictated by market conditions or the financial theory taught in business schools, which advises businesses to keep about 2 percent of their revenues as cash—as opposed to 31 percent, in Apple’s case, or almost 50 percent, in the case of General Motors. Investing the money virtually anywhere would have yielded higher profits than companies were making on the hoarded cash. While traditional economic considerations played a role in the initial accumulation of this stockpile, the decision to forego profitable investment outlets for years on end, and to use the hoarded cash as a bargaining chip to get favors from Washington, was largely political.³⁰

The Obama administration hoped that by pursuing pro-business policies it could boost business confidence in the White House, leading executives to release their hoarded cash in the form of new hiring and loans. Reporting on Obama’s February 2011 address to the US Chamber of Commerce, the Wall Street Journal described his speech as “a call to business leaders to use the $2 trillion in cash on their balance sheets to ‘get in the game’ and start adding jobs in the U.S.” Obama recognized that corporations’ disinvestment was a conscious choice, meaning that they might change their minds if he delivered the policies they wanted. As the Journal reported, his speech was a call to Chamber members to “stop hoarding cash and start hiring in return for tax breaks and other government support for exports and innovation.”³¹ By promising tax breaks, subsidies, and deregulation, Obama was trying to negotiate a relaxation of the strike. Notably, the policies he was offering had little to do with boosting consumer demand, which was ostensibly the primary reason for continued hoarding. None of these policy reforms would increase demand. They were designed to address not the economic causes of the problem but the political causes: corporations’ low confidence in the administration.

In order to boost business confidence and therefore end the capital strike, the Obama administration granted the dominant corporations in each sector virtual veto power over the reforms that might affect them. This dynamic was captured in a 2010 comment by former vice president Al Gore, bemoaning the failure of climate change legislation in the Senate. “The influence of special interests is now at an extremely unhealthy level,” Gore said. “And it’s to the point where it’s virtually impossible for participants in the current political system to enact any significant change without first seeking and gaining permission from the largest commercial interests who are most affected by the proposed change.”³² The following year, the White House scrapped a proposal to limit emissions of ozone, a key ingredient in smog. White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley explained to public health advocates that a “consensus with industry” could not be reached.³³ As a general rule, no significant reform would succeed unless the “most affected” business interests granted “permission.”

In many other areas, proposed reforms were so watered down through corporations’ input that they became nearly meaningless. A 2016 law requiring the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to test and regulate toxic chemicals found in consumer products only passed because, as the New York Times reported, Democratic leaders in the Senate “worked closely with the American Chemistry Council,” the leading industry lobby, “to come up with language that would win the support of the industry.” Doing so meant that the EPA’s rate of testing for some 64,000 toxic chemicals would be significantly reduced in the bill’s final version, to what the Times called “a fairly slow pace” of “20 chemicals at a time, with a deadline of seven years per chemical.” At that fairly slow pace, it could take 22,400 years to test all the chemicals—meaning that the vast majority of toxic chemicals would be sold and used without EPA testing. As an added gift, the new law would also prevent individual states from requiring timelier testing.³⁴

The power of the capital strike in these cases was amplified by business campaign donations. Corporate money helped ensure that the White House and Congress would interpret corporate threats in the right way: giving in rather than defying the polluters and poisoners. Corporate cash had helped to elect Obama and to disqualify challengers to his left. Long before the 2008 election, media profiles had noted the “deeply conservative” inclinations of Obama “the conciliator,” qualities that corporate donors liked and sought to reinforce with their checkbooks.³⁵ Donations also helped ensure the appointment of pro-business advisers, including a slew of economic officials with close ties to Robert Rubin, the former chairman of Goldman Sachs and Treasury Secretary who had led the deregulation of Wall Street in the late 1990s. On Obama’s new National Economic Council alone, Lawrence Summers came from the hedge fund D. E. Shaw, Michael Froman from Citigroup, and Diana Farrell from Goldman Sachs.³⁶

By appointing Rubin’s henchmen, Obama was not only repaying the donations, but also seeking to boost business confidence and spur new investment. The Rubinites, in turn, would be keenly responsive to business demands and threats of disinvestment in the future. It was a vicious cycle or a virtuous one, depending on one’s perspective. Chief of Staff Bill Daley, who had insisted on a “consensus with industry” before any new ozone regulations could go through, was a direct transplant from the corporate world. He came to the White House from JPMorgan Chase and also served on the boards of military contractor Boeing and a leading pharmaceutical company. His appointment was meant to signal the administration’s commitment to business confidence. Obama’s announcement touted “the breadth of experience that Bill brings to this job,” including the fact that “he’s led major corporations,” giving him “a deep understanding of how jobs are created and how to grow our economy.” The Chamber of Commerce president heralded the appointment as “a very, very strong choice.” Unsurprisingly, one of Daley’s favorite strategies for growing the economy would be eliminating regulations on business.³⁷

This example suggests the mutually reinforcing nature of corporations’ various strategies for influence. Daley’s appointment and the policies he pursued were meant to cajole business investment, in addition to advancing his own class interests. Corporations’ control over the economy worked hand-in-hand with other tools.

Obama was not unique. Business clearly called the shots under George W. Bush and has even done so under the erratic narcissist Donald Trump. He may proclaim himself a “hard-driving, vicious cutthroat” leader unfettered by “special interests,” but Trump is still strongly bound by capitalist constraints.³⁸ On the few occasions when he has challenged certain business interests, he has been met with powerful resistance. The same fundamental patterns characterize US politics regardless of who is in office.

The Disruptive Power of Government Institutions

The Obama era also demonstrated that business leaders are not the only elites with the power to thwart policies they dislike. Sometimes, the key interests blocking progressive change are powerful state institutions like military leadership, anti-immigration agencies like the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), or local and state police forces. These institutions do not wield the economic power that business does, but they do exercise great control over the process of policy implementation. They too possess various means of disrupting the operation of government and society, and as such they are in a position to thwart policymakers’ attempts to cut their budgets or infringe on their privileges. Their permission is typically necessary for successful reforms in their policy domains or even for holding their members accountable when they commit crimes.³⁹ And, like the capital strike, disruptive behavior by these institutions exerts long-term impacts on policymakers’ behavior. Just as most policymakers develop an ingrained sensitivity to business confidence, they learn to cultivate the confidence of these powerful government bureaucracies.

The fulfillment of key Obama campaign promises was made subject to approval by elites in the affected state agencies. In the case of the Guantánamo Bay torture camp, which candidate Obama had vowed to close, leaders in the military, intelligence, and law enforcement establishments played key roles in defining the administration’s policy. Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force was composed of “senior military officers, federal prosecutors, FBI agents, intelligence analysts and officers, military prosecutors and investigators,” plus a range of legal personnel. The Obama administration shelved its initial plan to transfer Guantánamo prisoners to federal prisons within the United States because local officials were adamantly opposed.⁴⁰ Thus, the administration ceded decision-making power on a key campaign promise to military, law enforcement, and local officials. And what the administration didn’t grant willingly, those agencies took without asking: despite the administration’s announced policy, the Pentagon worked behind the scenes to systematically obstruct the transfer of Guantánamo prisoners to foreign countries.⁴¹ Military and intelligence officials helped determine many other aspects of foreign policy, as well. Tactics like “enhanced interrogation” and assassination via the use of drones continued, and in the latter case increased, under Obama.⁴²

Different state institutions possess different degrees of disruptive power. The Pentagon wields much more power than an agency like the EPA, for several reasons. It controls a gargantuan budget; it is directly in charge of implementing much of US foreign policy; and its firmly entrenched leadership is only loosely subject to politicians’ control. Military leaders often have close ties to defense contractors who share their interest in ever-expanding Pentagon budgets and wars, which reinforces the commanders’ sway in policy discussions.⁴³

The EPA’s position is qualitatively different. Its budget is not commensurate with its enormous legal responsibility. And to the extent that the EPA seeks to protect the public against polluters, it draws ferocious corporate opposition that the military, law enforcement, or other conservative state agencies do not encounter. Anti-pollution measures may get a little support from renewable energy companies, but they lack the same degree of corporate backing that these other agencies enjoy. Only when the EPA acts in clear service to polluters, as it has under Trump, do its initiatives win strong business support.

Discussions of the power of state institutions often refer to a “deep state.” The term can be misleading, however, insofar as it implies a far-reaching conspiracy of state officials acting in concert to thwart the aims of elected politicians. The disruptive power of state institutions is usually more mundane, deriving from each entity’s ability to shape the enforcement of policies within its own domain. Disruption does not typically require secret coordination across agencies or a centralized cabal of conspirators.

Why Do the 99% Get Anything, Then?

Skeptical readers may accuse us of overstating the power of US elites. What about all those instances of successful progressive reform, when new laws or regulations or court rulings have benefited the public while apparently overcoming business opposition? How can we explain the restraints, however modest, that have been imposed on US military violence overseas or on police violence in US cities? Even if elites usually get what they want, they don’t always.

Indeed, any analysis of power must also explain the limits of that power. Elites face constant challenges. Most importantly, they must contend with competing elites and with popular forces.

Not all industries or corporations have the same interests. They tend to agree on basics like tax cuts for the wealthy and the deregulation of business, but other issues may divide them. For example, employers who fund employee health plans have an interest in containing the skyrocketing cost of healthcare, while the drug manufacturers and insurance companies naturally want to maximize their own profits, which means increasing the cost of health plans. Business may also face resistance from state elites. Judges or regulators may side with the public against polluters. The Pentagon may oppose the expansion of coastal oil drilling for fear that drilling would disrupt offshore military exercises. Conversely, state elites often find that businesses oppose policies that hurt their bottom lines, as several of our case studies will demonstrate.

Disagreement among these business and state actors often frustrates the efforts of individual institutions and industries. Sometimes that disagreement even opens the door to progressive reforms. The Obama administration’s 2010 healthcare reform and its overhaul of banking regulations both resulted largely from these disagreements among elites. Some business sectors wanted to rein in the health industries and the mega-banks because they themselves were being hurt by their unchecked greed and recklessness. Health costs were threatening employers’ profit margins, while the Wall Street crash of 2008 hurt many industries. This business discontent helped generate pressure for change, leading both political parties in the 2008 election to promise healthcare and financial reform.

A divided elite also increases the likelihood that popular pressure will be successful in changing policy. Intra-elite conflicts are not always a prerequisite for popular forces to have an impact—and social movements can actually create intra-elite conflicts, as we will discuss later—but they do raise the chances of success.

Popular disruption can take many forms. On the more dramatic end of the spectrum, workers may go on strike, consumers may boycott companies, soldiers may refuse to fight, young people may decide not to enlist in the military, and people everywhere may stage sit-ins, blockade streets, and engage in other kinds of overtly disruptive behavior. These disruptions increase the costs of the status quo from elites’ perspective, especially when the actions directly undermine business profits or the functioning of state institutions like the army. The elite institutions most affected by that disruption will often press others to capitulate, as when Southern capitalists pushed Southern politicians to concede to black protesters’ demand for desegregation.

Less overtly disruptive are lawsuits against corporations and state institutions. Being taken to court can increase the costs to elites, both in terms of money and public image. Lawsuits can also shift the legal and political terrain on which elites and social movements operate. The Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, making school segregation illegal, was the culmination of years of prior lawsuits. Although the ruling went almost entirely unenforced for over a decade, it was a significant morale-booster for the civil rights movement and altered the terms of the struggle between black activists and white supremacists in the years ahead.

At the less dramatic end of the resistance spectrum are acts like voting, working on an electoral campaign, and calling one’s legislators. These are generally less powerful than other forms of resistance, though they too can help put pressure on corporations and state elites. Corporations do not have total power to decide who wins an election; they might have preferred Republican candidates John McCain or Mitt Romney over Obama, but Obama was deemed more appealing to voters and therefore more likely to win, and thus attracted more corporate cash.⁴⁴ Election outcomes, in turn, play some role in setting the general policy agenda. For instance, both the Democratic and Republican candidates in the 2008 election spoke of reforming healthcare and Wall Street, but the eventual details of those reforms were probably more progressive given that it was the Obama administration presiding over them. Likewise, the judges appointed by recent Democratic and Republican presidents have differed significantly in ideology. The fact that the two parties have different electoral bases requires victorious candidates to take at least some action on certain campaign promises once elected. As a result, there is some difference in policy between Democrats and Republicans, even if the difference is exaggerated by most commentators and by both parties themselves.

But, while elections may help put progressive reforms on the table, they are rarely the most important variable in determining policy. Much more important are the disruptive forces that constrain politicians of both parties into supporting particular interests. We have mentioned the disruptive power of business and state elites, but popular forces also possess tremendous power of disruption.⁴⁵ That power often lies dormant, but the potential is always there. The presence, intensity, and duration of popular disruption is often the most decisive factor in shaping policy. When mass resistance is disruptive and sustained, it greatly expands the potential for progressive reform, often forcing new policy options onto the table. It can compel politicians to pursue legislation they dislike, and can shape how that legislation is implemented. When mass resistance is absent or merely episodic, business and state elites will call the shots. Non-elites may get a few crumbs as a byproduct of intra-elite conflicts or elections, but any progressive reform will be much weaker and more subject to reversal. A major reason why Obamaera progressive reforms were so tepid is that the Obama years lacked the sustained mass disruption present in other eras of US history. There were some notable examples of mobilization like Occupy Wall Street and black resistance to police violence, but they were not nearly as disruptive as the movements of the 1930s and the 1960s. In the chapters that follow, we draw from both the Obama era and from twentieth-century examples to indicate when and how progressive movements have had the greatest impact on government policy.⁴⁶

A Counter-Intuitive Strategy for Social Movements

Our central argument in this regard is that mass resistance is most effective when it directly targets corporations and state agencies. By threatening the profits or the functioning of those institutions, popular disruption can compel their leaders to accept progressive changes in government policy. Since these elites are usually the key roadblocks to change, and since they possess enormous power over what the government does, it makes more sense to target them than to focus on elected politicians. Their responsiveness to movement demands doesn’t spring from their goodwill, but from a rational cost-benefit analysis of their interests. If subjected to mass pressures that disrupt their profit-making or their institutional functioning, these leaders will naturally seek to cut their losses. Conceding to movement demands often becomes the lesser-evil option. If movements can force a change in these elites’ cost-benefit calculations, progressive government action then becomes much more likely.

This argument is counter-intuitive. The conventional wisdom among scholars and activists is that “collective action will be most productive if it focuses on elected officials,” either by pressuring them or trying to elect new ones.⁴⁷ After all, modern corporations, militaries, and law enforcement agencies were consciously designed not to be accountable to the public, so how could they be more subject to public influence than elected officials are?

Nonetheless, some of the most successful progressive movements in US history have focused their energies mainly on non-electoral targets. Auto companies in the 1930s grudgingly accepted the unionization of their workers because they faced unprecedented strikes and disruptions on the shop floor. Most labor organizers spent far less time trying to get Democrats elected than on organizing their fellow workers to bring their workplaces to a halt. Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932 and reelected in 1936, but workers only succeeded in winning effective unionization rights when they completely disrupted industry and forced the bosses to concede those rights. We examine this process in Chapters 1 and 4.

Similarly, racially segregated businesses in the South opted to integrate because a mass movement directly threatened their profits. Many organizers consciously sought to change politicians’ behavior by disrupting business. Martin Luther King Jr. himself concluded that protests should target Southern businesses, since “the political power structure listens to the economic power structure.” If the movement could threaten business leaders enough to “pull them around,” they would in turn “pull” the political leaders in the South.⁴⁸ As in the 1930s, mass pressure catalyzed changes in the calculations of institutional elites, leading in turn to progressive changes in government policy. We analyze the strategy and impact of the civil rights movement in detail in Chapter 4.

The immigrant rights struggle offers a more recent example of this dynamic. In 2010 the state of Arizona became infamous for passing legislation, SB 1070, that legalized racial profiling against Latinos. In response, national organizations began promoting a boycott of the state’s businesses, and numerous individual consumers joined in. In March 2011, dozens of corporate executives wrote a letter to Arizona state legislators asking that they refrain from passing additional anti-immigrant bills. The problem, they explained, was that the boycotts were so “harmful to our image” that “Arizona-based businesses saw contracts cancelled or were turned away from bidding,” and “sales outside of the state declined.” The threat to their profits led them to insist on a change in public policy. Within a week of receiving the letter, the Republican-controlled legislature rejected five bills designed to further criminalize immigrants.⁴⁹ As this example suggests, targeting corporations can be a fruitful political strategy even when those corporations are not the main culprits. Arizona-based companies were not the driving force behind the racist policy, but they had the power to stop it.

In each of these instances, ordinary people took advantage of the levers of power that are available in all systems dependent on human participation. People whose cooperation is essential to an institution have the ability to stop the institution from functioning, and can thus wield tremendous leverage by collectively withdrawing their cooperation. This form of power has been given various names: structural power, positional power, or interdependent power.⁵⁰ Perhaps the two clearest examples are workers going on strike and consumers boycotting a company. In both cases, the small fish take advantage of the shark’s dependence on them, frustrating the shark’s goals. In so doing, the disruptive small fish can alter the shark’s behavior toward them as well as the shark’s stance on government policies.

Another key to success for the movements we have mentioned was their ability to exploit, or even create, divisions among elites. After US autoworkers forced General Motors and Chrysler to allow unionization in the late 1930s, the notoriously anti-union Henry Ford and leaders in other industries soon followed suit. Black protesters in the 1960s disrupted business, which then confronted the more militant racists in the Southern political establishment. Immigrant rights activists responded to Arizona’s SB 1070 with a similar strategy, forcing business leaders to rein in the white supremacists in the state government. In each case disruption gave rise to counter-coalitions of elites that neutralized the influence of the elites responsible for oppressive policies. In the 1930s and 1960s these intra-elite divisions also left a meaningful long-term residue in the structure of the government. They allowed for the formation or strengthening of state agencies dedicated to restricting the power of elites: the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the civil rights enforcement apparatus of the Department of Justice.⁵¹ In both cases, the agencies imposed significant limits on the freedom of other elites, including the president. Election outcomes and electoral coalitions were of secondary importance in determining policy.⁵²

Explosive disruptive behavior is not the only way to foster these divisions. Intra-elite conflicts are often the result of years or decades of low-grade disruption that eventually convinces one or more elite sectors to favor concessions to the movement. The Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision did not result primarily from the initiative of antiracist Supreme Court justices, but from two converging sources of pressure that impelled judges and politicians to concede to black demands. One source was the long history of black resistance, which reached a tipping point in the years following World War II. The juggernaut that became the civil rights movement began with decades of individual resistance to the Jim Crow system, punctuated by innumerable local protests in cities and even in the most violently oppressive cotton plantations, accompanied by growing denunciations of segregation and terror in the black press.⁵³ The nationally visible part of this rising protest was the thirty-year legal campaign by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), built on the high-risk action taken by hundreds of courageous black plaintiffs. These lawsuits challenged first the unequal conditions of segregation and, by the early 1950s, segregation itself.⁵⁴ Though often unsuccessful in the short run, the lawsuits and the broader black resistance to segregation helped to cultivate sympathizers within parts of the US judiciary. The lawsuits were not directly disruptive in the same way that boycotts and sit-ins were, but they created a latent division within the elite power structure. Portions of the judiciary slowly lined up against local governments and even against the executive branch of the federal government. At key moments they would become an important resource for civil rights activists, especially by constraining Southern law enforcement’s freedom to impose draconian punishments on protesters.

A complementary source of pressure came from outside the United States. Widespread international condemnation of US racism worried postwar politicians, who feared that the nonwhite peoples of the “Third World” would not only reject US racism but also embrace socialist revolution. In 1952, this concern led the Truman administration to urge the Supreme Court to rule against school segregation.⁵⁵ The domestic and global challenges to segregation were mutually reinforcing: each inspired the other, and together they pushed some government officials to confront segregationists in the interest of preserving domestic stability and US global dominance. In turn, the Brown decision helped energize the more overt black disruption of the early 1960s that would be necessary for the ruling’s implementation.

Social movements are most successful when they can find ways to exploit these tensions within the ruling class, by unleashing disruption that targets the right pressure points. Getting some elites to intervene on behalf of the movement does not mean that organizers need to politely request their help—indeed, that approach is usually a dismal failure. Confrontation and disruption are more likely to “pull around” elites, who then intervene to stop the disruption by urging other corporate and state elites to concede to the movement. Disruption can take diverse forms, from workers shutting down a workplace to lawsuits. Different categories of elites may be susceptible to different forms of movement pressures, as these examples suggest.

Figuring out whom to target, and with what tactics, can be difficult. The most successful movements have exhibited a strategic flexibility that allows them to try new things when the old methods are not working. The degree of flexibility depends a great deal on how the movement is structured: do organizations allow for both strategizing and direct action by the rank-and-file, or are strategizing and decision-making reserved for the top leaders? Do organizations regularly engage their members in reflection on the successes or failures of current strategies? Greater internal democracy facilitates learning and adaptation. Democracy may involve contested elections or formal factions within a movement, but it must also be embodied in other organizational structures that allow for autonomy and experimentation by the membership.⁵⁶ The boycott campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s were often initiated by local black organizers, not national leaders, and would have been impossible without the active participation of rank-and-file black supporters. The boycotts also show that democracy and differences of opinion within a movement need not stop a movement from uniting around a particular strategy. The Southern black movement was quite decentralized and ideologically diverse, but it was able to unify at many critical moments.

Disruption, Reform, and Beyond

In the rest of the book we analyze the forces at work in the various steps of the policymaking process, from the election and appointment of officials, through the crafting of legislation, to the implementation period in which laws are interpreted and enforced (or not enforced, as the case may be). Our examination of this process is not comprehensive. Some types of policies are ignored, and some parts of the process are treated in more depth than others. We focus most attention on aspects that receive insufficient attention in other accounts. But we do assert that our conclusions are valid beyond just the cases we examine. By focusing on some of the most important policy changes of the past century, we have tried to avoid cherry-picking examples that fit our argument.

In analyzing the origins and shaping of legislation, we focus primarily on Obama-era initiatives. We consider a variety of legislative proposals, including both progressive reform initiatives and pro-business ones. The dominant forces in the legislative phase tend to be the elite institutions that are “most affected by the proposed change” (in Al Gore’s words). We stress the role of disruption, real or potential, in influencing this process. At times mass pressure plays an important role, particularly in the initiation of legislation. That pressure is usually most effective when social movements threaten the stability of the “most affected.”

In the second part of the book we examine the often-neglected but crucial phase of policy implementation. Policy is determined not just by the laws themselves, but by how the executive branch with its myriad departments and agencies decides to apply them. We trace the roles of the “most affected” elite institutions in shaping implementation, and then turn to instances in which mass disruption has played a determining role in how laws are implemented. We discuss the workers’ movement of the 1930s, black struggles for civil rights and economic justice in the 1960s, and the US withdrawal from Vietnam. In each case, progressive changes in policy implementation resulted from disruption directed at the “most affected” institutions. This chapter may be of particular interest to readers involved in social movements.

In the Conclusion we offer some further reflections on social movement strategy. Here we highlight the inadequacy of reforms alone. While this book focuses on the prospects for winning reforms, reforms are inherently tenuous since they leave intact the basic institutions of elite power: corporations and conservative state agencies. Progressive government laws and institutions that arise as a result of mass disruption will endure for a time after the disruption ends, but over the long run they will be subject to erosion, as the weakening of the NLRB, EPA, and 1960s civil rights legislation demonstrates. Furthermore, reforms by definition do not address the root of the problem. Forcing a business to recognize a union, desegregate, or allow some holes in the glass ceiling is a major accomplishment, but changes of this type do not eliminate the power of private business owners to make decisions that affect everyone else. We may compel the government to end its occupation of a foreign country, but how can we prevent it from invading another in the future? To address these problems, we need to do away with the private and public institutions that are structured to allocate power and wealth to the richest 1% in society. We need to replace them with institutions that answer to the needs and desires of the 99%.

This revolutionary change is not on the immediate horizon. Many more people must first come to believe that achieving a truly humane and democratic society requires a new set of economic and political institutions, not just a new set of politicians—a fundamentally different substance, not just a different shadow. We propose that targeting powerful institutions directly is not only a good way to win reforms, but is also conducive to building the mass movements that can achieve that revolutionary transformation.

_______________

1 John Dewey, “The Need for a New Party,” in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 6, 1931–1932, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 163.

2 Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 3 (2014): 564–81.

3 Pew Research Center, “Beyond Distrust: How Americans View Their Government,” November 23, 2015: 35; and “Most Say Government Policies Since Recession Have Done Little to Help Middle Class, Poor,” March 4, 2015: 1. To avoid clutter, we omit URLs for online sources when they are easily locatable via search engines or available by subscription only.

4 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Bantam, 2003), 841.

5 Dewey, “The Need for a New Party,” 163.

6 This argument draws upon the work of many prior analysts. For more detail and citations to relevant studies see Kevin A. Young, Tarun Banerjee, and Michael Schwartz, “Capital Strikes as a Corporate Political Strategy: The Structural Power of Business in the Obama Era,” PAS 46, no. 1 (2018): 3–28; Beth Mintz and Michael Schwartz, The Power Structure of American Business (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Structural power is often neglected, however, perhaps because it is not easily quantifiable. It forms part of what David Lowery calls “the dark matter of influence”—hard to measure but omnipresent. “Lobbying Influence: Meaning, Measurement and Missing,” Interest Groups and Advocacy 2, no. 1 (2013): 8.

7 Some analysts argue that conflicts among corporations prevent them from acting in unison. However, this argument neglects the many mechanisms, from overlapping boards of directors to social clubs, through which businesses can make collective decisions. See Young et al., “Capital Strikes.”

8 Expressing a common view, Charles Lindblom argues that business disinvestment is “an automatic punishing recoil” that follows from any threat to maximum profitability. “The Market as Prison,” Journal of Politics 44, no. 2 (1982): 325. In contrast, the leading US business magazine acknowledges the major subjective element in investment decisions: “Our review of data going back to 1950 considered a host of variables related to investment, including the output gap, business confidence, capital depreciation, and interest rates. It showed that business confidence, or what John Maynard Keynes liked to call ‘animal spirits,’ along with the basic laws of supply and demand, are more important drivers of investment.” Tim Mahedy, “A Lot of Huff for a Little Puff,” BW, March 11, 2019: 31.

9 Some revolutionary governments have opted to radicalize when faced with this choice, for example in Cuba in 1959–1961 or, to lesser extents, Chile in 1970–1973 and Venezuela in the mid-2000s. On Venezuela see Oliver Levingston, “Venezuela: The Political Economy of Inflation and Investment Strikes,” Links, February 10, 2014.

10 For a more detailed theory of capital strikes and business confidence see Young et al., “Capital Strikes.”

11 Emerson Electric CEO David Farr quoted in Elizabeth Williamson and James R. Hagerty, “The New Political Landscape: Executives Await Friendlier Climate,” WSJ, November 4, 2010: A6 (first quote); Financial Services Forum CEO Rob Nichols quoted in Donna Borak, Victoria Finkle, and Joe Adler, “Consensus Is Elusive on TBTF, Big-Bank Subsidies,” AB, April 23, 2013; Jena McGregor, “Tim Cook, the Interview: Running Apple ‘Is Sort of a Lonely Job,’” WP online, August 13, 2016 (second quote); Julie Creswell, “Cities’ Offers for Amazon Base Are Secrets Even to Many City Leaders,” NYT online, August 5, 2018; Richard Lachmann, “Amazon Is Waging Class War,” Jacobin, February 20, 2019.

12 Elizabeth Williamson, “Obama Says Tax Breaks Should Now Spur Hiring,” WSJ, February 8, 2011: A4; White House Office of the Press Secretary, “Press Conference by the President,” November 3, 2010; Jackie Calmes, “Obama Offers to Cut Corporate Tax Rate to 28%,” NYT, February 22, 2012: B1; Elizabeth Williamson and Jonathan Weisman, “Obama Courts Business Support,” WSJ, January 19, 2011: A4; Jon Schwarz, “Hillary Clinton Hints at Giant, Trump-Like Giveaway to Corporate America,” Intercept, June 27, 2016.

13 For instance, in the 2018 elections the finance, insurance, and real estate industries alone contributed almost eight times as much to parties and candidates as labor unions did. Even in the 1970s, when organized labor was much stronger than it is today, the business press noted that, unlike labor unions, corporate lobbyists for the Business Roundtable enjoyed “direct access to the highest levels of the federal government” (“Business’ Most Powerful Lobby in Washington,” BW, December 20, 1976: 60). Unless otherwise noted, all campaign finance and lobbying data cited in this book come from the Center for Responsive Politics, opensecrets.org.

14 Dan Clawson, Alan Neustadtl, and Mark Weller, Dollars and Votes: How Business Campaign Contributions Subvert Democracy (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998).

15 Laurence H. Shoup, “Election 2008: Ruling Class Conducts Its Hidden Primary,” Z Magazine, February 2008: 31 (quote); Brian Schwartz, “Wall Street Executives Are Hearing from Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and Other Democrats as They Gauge Interest in Possible 2020 Presidential Campaigns,” CNBC.com, January 8, 2019. See also G. William Domhoff, The Powers That Be: Processes of Ruling-Class Domination in America (New York: Random House, 1978), 129–67.

16 Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 42.

17 Here we are speaking to a classic debate about the roots of business’s political leverage. Whereas instrumentalists emphasize the origins of individual policymakers, structuralists argue that state institutions and capitalist control of the economy constrain all state officials, irrespective of their platforms or intentions. Both schools are right: individuals and structural relationships both matter. Our contribution to this debate lies in our synthesis of the two camps’ insights, our emphasis on the structural power of disruption wielded by capital, and our argument about how mass resistance can alter the balance of forces among elites. For a concise example of the debate see Nicos Poulantzas, “The Problem of the Capitalist State,” and Ralph Miliband, “Reply to Nicos Poulantzas,” in Ideology in Social Science: Readings in Critical Social Theory, ed. Robin Blackburn (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 238–62.

18 On the Obama administration there is a vast literature of very uneven quality. Some highlights include Paul Street, The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2010); Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank, eds., Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2012); William F. Grover and Joseph G. Peschek, The Unsustainable Presidency: Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Beyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Paul Street, They Rule: The 1% vs. Democracy (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2014); Noam Chomsky, Who Rules the World? (New York: Metropolitan, 2016).

19 “Obama, McCain Supporters Largely Agree on Approaches to Energy, Climate Change,” worldpublicopinion.org, September 23, 2008; “Obama’s Nomination Victory Speech in St. Paul,” huffingtonpost.com, June 3, 2008.

20 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report (Geneva, 2014); International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2016 (Paris, 2016); Adrian E. Raftery et al., “Less Than 2°C Warming by 2100 Unlikely,” Nature Climate Change 7 (2017): 637–41; Climate Action Tracker, “Paris Agreement in Force, But No Increase in Climate Action,” November 2016; Clifford Krauss and Keith Bradsher, “Climate Deal Is Signal for Industry to Go Green,” NYT, December 14, 2015: A1.

21 “Obama, McCain Supporters Agree Government Responsible for Ensuring Basic Healthcare, Food, and Education Needs,” worldpublicopinion.org, October 13, 2008. See also the numerous poll results collected by the Western PA Coalition for Single Payer Healthcare: wpasinglepayer.org/learn-about-single-payer/poll-results-on-single-payer.

22 Kevin Young and Michael Schwartz, “Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: How Corporate Power Shaped the Affordable Care Act,” NLF 23, no. 2 (2014): 30–40.

23 Lindsay A. Owens, “Confidence in Banks, Financial Institutions, and Wall Street, 1971–2011,” Public Opinion Quarterly 76, no. 1 (2012): 142–62.

24 For some of the critiques see Young et al., “Capital Strikes,” 21–22n3.

25 Christopher Howard and Richard Valelly, “Deficit-Attention Disorder: What Voters Really Think About Deficits, Debts, and Economic Recovery,” The American Prospect, November 2010: A8–10; Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely, “Building a Better America—One Wealth Quintile at a Time,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, no. 1 (2010): 9–12.

26 Of course, many analysts refuse to be bound by the evidence. In 2010 sociologist Neil Fligstein argued that “the Obama administration seems to want to attack the problem of income inequality,” but the “public has never been that concerned about inequality.” Obama himself gave the same excuse for not pursuing a meaningful jobs program: “It’s not where the electorate is.” Neil Fligstein, “Politics, the Reorganization of the Economy, and Income Inequality, 1980–2009,” PAS 38, no. 2 (2010): 239–40; Obama quoted in Michael Grunwald, “Why Change Won’t Sell,” Time, September 10, 2012: 47.

27 We use “free trade” as a shorthand, but the term is misleading on two counts: 1) such agreements actually restrict trade in ways that benefit corporations, for instance by tightening restrictions on intellectual property rights, and 2) the agreements are usually focused more on securing international investment privileges than on trade per se.

28 Matthew Philips and Peter Coy, “Choosing Profits over Productivity,” BW, May 19–25, 2014: 13.

29 Each requires around $4 trillion. Jeff Cox, “US Companies Are Hoarding $2.5 Trillion in Cash Overseas,” CNBC.com, September 20, 2016; Joseph D’Urso, “How Much Would It Cost to End Hunger?” World Economic Forum, July 16, 2015; Robert Pollin, Heidi Garrett-Peltier, James Heintz, and Bracken Hendricks, Green Growth: A U.S. Program for Controlling Climate Change and Expanding Job Opportunities (Center for American Progress/Political Economy Research Institute, 2014), 19.

30 Adam Davidson, “Why Are Corporations Hoarding Trillions?” NYT Magazine, January 24, 2016: MM22; David Cogman and Tim Koller, “The Real Story Behind US Companies’ Offshore Cash Reserves,” mckinsey.com, June 2017. These and other observers have offered economic explanations, arguing for example that shareholders look favorably on large cash reserves, or that new capital investments made no sense given hoarders’ abundance of existing technology and the shortage of investment outlets that would deliver the very high profit rates (often 30 percent or more) to which they were accustomed. These arguments are plausible, but they neglect the political usage of the hoarding. Even if businesses had some “economic” reasons for hoarding, their motives were also political. They used their disinvestment from the US economy to try to obtain corporate tax cuts and other pro-business policies, manifested for instance in their incessant reference to their hoarded cash when making demands on government.

31 Elizabeth Williamson, “Obama Says Tax Breaks Should Now Spur Hiring,” WSJ, February 8, 2011: A4 (emphasis added); Grover and Peschek, Unsustainable Presidency, 123–5.

32 Quoted in Ryan Lizza, “As the World Burns,” TNY, October 11, 2010: 83.

33 Laura Meckler and Carol E. Lee, “White House Regulation Shift Is a Political Bet,” WSJ, September 12, 2011: A6.

34 Coral Davenport, “Senate Approves Updating of Rules on Toxic Chemicals,” NYT, June 8, 2016: A14.

35 Larissa MacFarquhar, “The Conciliator: Where Is Barack Obama Coming From?,” TNY, May 7, 2007: 52.

36 See for instance Matt Taibbi, “Obama’s Big Sellout,” Rolling Stone, December 10, 2009: 43–5, 47–50.

37 “Obama’s Remarks Introducing His New Chief of Staff,” NYT online, January 6, 2011; Chamber president Thomas Donohue quoted in Eric Lipton, “In Daley, a Businessman’s Voice in Oval Office,” NYT, January 7, 2011: A1. On Daley and deregulation see Chapter 3.

38 Donald J. Trump, Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2011), 13; Ian Schwartz, “Trump: Chamber of Commerce Controlled by Special Interests That Don’t Care About You,” realclearpolitics.com, June 29, 2016.

39 Like capitalists, the most powerful state institutions can usually shift the costs of their crimes onto others. For example, murders by the police or military almost never result in criminal convictions or penalties for the perpetrating institution. The monetary settlement, if any, is made at the expense of taxpayers, with the institution increasing its future budgetary requests accordingly or in some cases even pushing politicians to raise taxes. For an example of the latter pattern in Cleveland, see Tim Jones, Mark Niquette, and James Nash, “Bad Cops Are Bad Business for Cities,” BW, March 7–13, 2016: 32.

40 Guantánamo Review Task Force, Final Report (Washington, DC: 2010), 3; AP, “Graham Doubts Civilian Trials for 911 Suspects,” November 28, 2010. Congress later prohibited the transfers.

41 Charles Levinson and David Rohde, “Special Report: Pentagon Thwarts Obama’s Effort to Close Guantánamo,” Reuters, December 29, 2015.

42 On the military’s significant degree of autonomy see Richard Lachmann and Michael Schwartz, “The Life and Times of ‘Who Rules America’ and the Future of Power Structure Research,” in G. William Domhoff et al., Studying the Power Elite: Fifty Years of Who Rules America (New York: Routledge, 2017), 75–8.

43 For example, generals can look forward to lucrative post-military employment in defense firms, which undoubtedly affects their behavior while in the military. See Bryan Bender, “From the Pentagon to the Private Sector,” Boston Globe, December 26, 2010: A1.

44 In the 2012 election, many business donors’ “best argument” for supporting Obama over Romney “boiled down to the simplest one: Obama was going to win.” Nicholas Confessore, “Obama’s Not-So-Hot Date with Wall Street,” NYT Magazine, May 6, 2012: MM50.

45 Our emphasis on mass disruption is informed by the work of many scholars and organizers. Key studies include Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Vintage, 1971); William A. Gamson, The Strategy of Social Protest, 2nd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1990 [1975]); Michael Schwartz, Radical Protest and Social Structure: The Southern Farmers’ Alliance and Cotton Tenancy, 1880–1890 (New York: Academic Press, 1976); Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: How They Succeed, Why They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1979); Frances Fox Piven, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). The influence of Marxism, anarcho-syndicalism, black freedom struggles, and other theoretical traditions will also be apparent in much of our analysis.

46 We limit our focus to progressive movements because right-wing movements’ paths to influence tend to be different. To a far greater extent than progressives, corporate and right-wing forces can rely on elite actors inside and outside the state to promote the policies they desire. See BW, “Business’ Most Powerful Lobby.”

47 Edwin Amenta, Neil Caren, and Sheera Joy Olasky, “Age for Leisure? Political Mediation and the Impact of the Pension Movement on US Old-Age Policy,” ASR 70, no. 3 (2005): 522.

48 Interviewed by Donald Smith in November 1963, quoted in David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: Vintage, 1986), 226.

49 Drew Brown et al., to Russell Pearce, March 14, 2011, nytimes.com; Richard A. Oppel, Jr., “Arizona, Bowing to Business, Softens Stand on Immigration,” NYT, March 19, 2011: A15.

50 Schwartz, Radical Protest, 172–3; Luca Perrone, “Positional Power, Strikes and Wages,” ASR 49, no. 3 (1984): 412–26; Piven, Challenging Authority, 19–35.

51 Our analysis throughout this book recognizes the importance of “state capacity,” a concept long stressed by Theda Skocpol (e.g., Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold, “State Capacity and Economic Intervention in the Early New Deal,” Political Science Quarterly 97, no. 2 [1982]: 255–78). However, Skocpol’s work overstates state agencies’ autonomy from class interests, particularly business and social movements. As we show in Chapter 4, the development of the NLRB and the DoJ civil rights division into real enforcers was the result of movement-induced disruption, which compelled economic elites to support or acquiesce to the agencies’ empowerment. Successful enforcement of labor and civil rights laws depended less on the prior existence of “knowledgeable administrative organizations” within the state (ibid., 260) than on the sustained movement disruption that created those organizations, emboldened them, and pushed capitalists to empower them.

52 Our argument here differs from Piven’s theory of “dissensus,” or the rupture of electoral coalitions as a result of mass disruption (Challenging Authority). She views electoral realignments as a key variable in producing policy change. We think that targeting corporations and other non-electoral institutions often leads to changes in government policy with or without altering those alignments, and that, in any case, targeting non-electoral institutions may contribute indirectly to electoral realignments. People who are organized in progressive social movements like the ones analyzed in this book are highly unlikely to vote Republican, given the experience and education they acquire through their participation. We elaborate on the role of elections in the chapters that follow.

53 See for instance Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). For a classic personal account see Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (New York: Knopf, 1974).

54 James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 21–45.

55 Mary L. Dudziak, “Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative,” Stanford Law Review 41, no. 1 (1988): 61–120. Eisenhower was opposed to the decision, but his Assistant Attorney General Lee Rankin did submit a brief urging the Court to overturn school segregation. Earl Warren, The Memoirs of Earl Warren (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1977), 291; Patterson, Brown v. Board, 63.

56 For related conceptions of movement democracy and its strategic importance see Schwartz, Radical Protest; Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin, Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Marshall Ganz, Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Joshua Murray and Michael Schwartz, “Moral Economy, Structural Leverage, and Organizational Efficacy: Class Formation and the Great Flint Sit-Down Strike, 1936–1937,” Critical Historical Studies 2, no. 2 (2015): 219–59.