 My name is Diane Stewart, I am an employee here at the Economic Policy Institute and want to welcome you to our home and thank you for your interest in this event. I here am the Director of the EARN Network, the Economic Analysis Research Network, as well as Network Engagement at PI. And so this involves the topic we are going to be talking about today is a topic that is very near to my heart to be able to participate and I hope you will find it as fascinating as I did. I want to first, before we get started, to tell you a couple of things. First we are doing a live recording of this event and so just to let you know that you are potentially on candid camera. The also to tell you if the need strikes, the restrooms, you can go back through the reception area and they will direct you. There are restrooms, there is a way to go out that way but you will never get back in so I advise you to go that direction. And then at the end, in case I forget to mention this, there are books that will be available and if you will, if you are interested in a book and would like to have it signed, you can go purchase your book and come back here and the signings will people will be gathered here to get their book signed. So I want to introduce to you the main event today and first I will introduce Gordon Laffer who is the author of the 1% solution how corporations are remaking America one state at a time. Gordon is a political economist. He is associate professor at the University of Oregon's labor education and research center and he is a research associate here at EPI. He is written widely on issues of labor and employment policy and is the author of the 1% solution. He is previously, Laffer has served as an economic policy analyst for the office of the mayor in New York City and is testified as an expert witness before the U.S. Senate, House of Representatives and state legislatures. He is a valued collaborator here at EPI and we are thrilled to see this book come out and expect to work with him very closely on this. Also Christian Dorsey, those of you who are familiar with us know that Christian was until recently the director of external and government affairs here at EPI where he built grassroots awareness of economic policy matters with the goal of educating and mobilizing communities to advocate more effectively on their behalf and to advance EPI's policy initiatives with federal law and policy makers. Today though he also is here as representing people who operate politically in local and state areas. He is a board of supervisor with Arlington County, Virginia and he has been, is missed as what we used to call the voice of God when he did the job that I'm attempting with less alacrity to do today and that is to moderate a panel and with that I do want to first before we start let him use his voice of God to introduce this panel. So this is going to be a dramatic reading from Professor Laffer's book. This then is the legislative agenda of the 1%, a concerted, coordinated, well funded attack by some of the richest individuals in most powerful corporations in the country. Its aims are to concentrate an ever larger share of income and wealth in the hands of the most privileged, eliminate institutions that give working people leverage in the labor market, defund public services, lower expectations of what workers should be able to demand from their employers and citizens from their government and shrink the reach of our democracy in order to lock in place unpopular policies and forestall a populist backlash. And dystopian, I will say, this is, just to give a pitch for the book itself, it is a very wonderful read but I think it's also an important contribution to an understanding of what is, has been happening, what is happening right now in our country and I found it to be a, you know, even if right now after reading that if you don't expect Katniss to walk into the room you would sort of, but it was to me a, in a sense kind of, as we were talking beforehand, it was chilling but it was also inspiring in the sense that it is such a dispassionate kind of description of what we face today and based in just a very thorough factual analysis of not what is being said and not what the apparent ideology is behind what's happening but instead the actual actions of individuals and corporations that are creating the situation that we face today. So with that I will turn it to Gordon to provide his synopsis. Thank you. Thanks everybody for being here and I want to thank EPI not only for hosting this event and not only for producing decades of analysis that me and everybody I know relied on to make sense of the world but specifically also for supporting my research over the last six years without which this book wouldn't have been possible. Liz Rose asked me to talk briefly and instead I'm going to try to talk fast to give you a kind of broad outline of what I think is going on. As probably everybody knows right, the country is facing a crisis of inequality and growing economic hardship for a majority of American workers. The great recession intensified that crisis but the bigger concern is the pattern of gradual but relentless decline for the majority of Americans over the past 40 or 50 years. For the past 50 years the share of income that goes to workers as opposed to investors and owners has been steadily shrinking and in 2010 reached its lowest point ever. Since 1979 real inflation-adjusted wages have fallen and declined for 60% of men, of male workers in America, meaning there's approximately 70 million men now working for less than the equivalent of what their fathers or grandfathers earned. Family incomes as a whole have done better and stayed flat but that's only because people and especially women are working many more hours. The average two-parent family now works the equivalent of seven full weeks a year longer than they did in the 1970s. The flip side of this is unprecedented wealth at the top and there's a million ways to describe this but one of them is Jeffrey Winter, a scholar of oligarchy, now estimates that the 400 richest people in America exercise a degree of societal control that is greater than that exercised by the ruling elite of ancient Rome. When people look at this the most common explanations given for rising inequality are either technology or globalization and both of those things obviously play a part. But it turns out that one of the biggest forces creating these economic problems is a concerted, very well-funded, intentional 50-state strategy by the biggest, best-funded and most powerful political actors in the country which is the biggest corporate lobbies in the country. This means the Chamber of Commerce, the National Federation of Independent Business, National Association of Manufacturers, the Koch Brothers Americans for Prosperity and at the state level this is most importantly coordinated by the American Legislative Exchange Council. This is a very partial list of companies affiliated with Alec and for those of you who may not be familiar with this, let me just briefly explain the workings of Alec. About a quarter of all state legislators in the country belong to Alec. They pay 50 bucks a year in dues. The rest of the expenses are paid by these and other corporations. They meet several times a year in swanky resorts, nicer even than this building, where they meet in committees that are half legislators and half corporate lobbyists and write joint bills together that have to be approved finally by a committee just of corporate representatives and then those bills get introduced in legislatures across the country. The same corporations that write these laws also contribute to candidate campaigns, fund independent expenditures around issue campaigns and fund the state level policy networks affiliated with Alec to produce white papers and talking heads. Alec estimates that they introduce a thousand bills a year and the 200 a year are adopted into law. So this is a very well funded, very well coordinated campaign. A lot of what Alec does is pay to play. So like Coca-Cola is a member they lobby against restrictions on sugary soft drinks. A lot of tech companies are members and they lobby to stop cities from providing free broadband internet to their citizens. But a lot of what they do is also not related to the immediate bottom line of any member corporation. These are things that I think, you know, things more like cuts in unemployment insurance or defunding K-12 education that I think represent something more like class interests. And I think this is part of why it's so important to look at what corporations are doing as opposed to what individuals are doing. There's a lot in the press about the individual billionaires and when you look at individual billionaires they may be motivated by all kinds of wacky ideologies or personal considerations. When we look at this list and the hundreds of other corporations affiliated with Alec, at some point in every one of these companies there was a meeting of the executive committee or the government affairs committee where they decided to put time, money and energy into boosting the Alec agenda. They decided that this was in their rational long-term interest. And I think that this is in looking at these things is where we see what do the biggest corporations and most powerful political actors in the country perceive as is in their long-term self-interest. For us as analysts or activists or public officials or just members of the public the key question to ask is why is this pattern of legislative record the thing that the country's corporations think is in their long-term self-interest and what can we learn about that and anticipate coming towards us in the future? This is the part I want to focus on today. So in the past decade really starting in 2011 there's been an unprecedented wave of state legislation that tilts the economy toward the rich and away from normal working Americans. The best known effort of this came in Wisconsin under Scott Walker where the state essentially eliminated collective bargaining rights for all 175,000 public employees. But what happened in Wisconsin was part of a much broader a much broader set of laws that passed. In the five years following Citizens United 15 states passed laws limiting public employee collective bargaining rights, 12 states passed laws restricting the minimum wage, four eased limits on child labor, 19 imposed new caps on unemployment benefits and many many more made drastic cuts in public services including health care, public transit, libraries and education where unprecedented cuts saw the national student-teacher ratio worsen for the first time since the Great Depression. In each place people tended to see these things as coming from some lone legislator or governor in their state and being a response to particular economic challenges of their state. But none of that is true. When you look for instance, these are states that passed law-lowering construction wages either repealing prevailing wage laws or outlying project labor agreements. This is just five years. You don't get a pattern of laws like this because individual legislators in all these states happen to simultaneously come up with the same idea. All of these things are being driven by the national corporate lobbies and then rolled out state by state. But when people tend to see it state by state what the point of this book is to do is to bring all of this together not just all the states but a whole bunch of different issues to say what is the corporate agenda look like when you bring together all the pieces. The book is based on a 50-state, 30-issue, five-year database of all the laws back passed with the backing of these major corporate lobbies. So what I want to talk about is what does the picture look like when you bring all those pieces together? And it's not pretty. To start with as a bit of background I want to talk for a minute about the impact of Citizens United on state politics because most people think of it understandably in terms of federal politics. But there's a sea change in state politics because of Citizens United. There were 22 states that had limits on corporate spending in politics before 2010 that were all overturned by the ruling. As you probably know, officially what Citizens United said is that both labor unions and corporations are free to spend with no limit on politics. But labor unions were not sitting on a huge pile of cash that was just waiting for legal authorization to be flown to flow into politics but corporations were. This shows before and after Citizens United 2008 and 2012 spending on politics and labor spending increased somewhat, but corporate spending increased enormously. And because state legislative seats generally are much cheaper, most state legislative seats can be bought with $50,000, $100,000, the money goes very, very far. So when you look at the big picture of what are all the laws that have been passed with this money. What does it look like? First, there's a few things that we know are not true. One is that the reasons given, the rationales given by legislators and by corporate advocates for the laws that are passed, are not the real thing that's driving the legislation. We know that partly because the economic claims that they make have all been proven false, largely by people sitting in this room. For instance, Alec publishes an annual report ranking the 50 states on how pro-growth their policies are. But it turns out, thanks to good jobs first, that after five years of those ranking, it turns out the states that Alec love actually grew slower than everybody else. And the analysts at Alec and the Chamber of Commerce are not more stupid than people sitting in this room or who work for EPI. They also know that their policies don't really produce economic growth. They know everything that we know, which means this is not the reason that they're pushing these laws. It's also not the way the laws line up. Like if you look at which law was passed and which place, they don't line up with the supposed economic rationale. So for instance, the most severe attacks on teacher tenure and privatization of schooling have not happened in the states that have the worst test scores or highest dropout rates. The harshest cutbacks in pensions have not happened in the states with the biggest unfunded liabilities. And the biggest layoffs of public employees and cutbacks in public services have not happened in the places that had the biggest budget deficits. These things pass not where they were economically needed, but where they were politically possible. It's also not true that this was an attack on union workers or public employees in order to help the hardworking non-union taxpayers in the private sector. And just to give you one example of this, right, there's a famous quote by Scott Walker, we have to eliminate unions because the, you know, fat and, fat and lazy university professors and other public employees are living high off the hog and other people's harder and tax dollars. What did they actually do? There was about $2 billion in tax cuts that were returned to taxpayers in Wisconsin, paid for by wage and benefit cuts and layoffs of public employees. But who did they go to? As you can see, half of them went to the richest 20% of the state. People in the top 1% are getting $2,500 a year, while the bottom 60% of the state is getting $118. This was not taken from the haves to give to the have-nots. This was taken from working in middle-class families and giving predominantly to the privileged and the elite. So if it's not about helping hardworking non-union taxpayers in the private sector and it's not about what they say, what is driving the corporate agenda? One part of this, I think, is a question that's not asked enough is why do big private corporations spend time money and energy attacking public employees in Wisconsin or Ohio? I don't think it's obvious. In 2011, for instance, when Act 10 was passed in Wisconsin, the head of the ALEC committee that did the labor legislation was Kraft Foods. So you think like, what does Kraft Foods have to go after public employees in the Midwest? And I don't think it's just that they want to pay less taxes in those states. I think we live in unfortunately in a season of lies and I would say one of the biggest lies is the idea that the reason unions are under attack is because they're selfish and they only look out for their members and don't affect anybody else. In a way, if that, if only that was true, they'd be under much less attack. And when we look at really why are unions under attack, I think it's predominantly because of their impact on non-union workers. So to take one example of this, right, in places where public employees are one of the major employees in a local labor market, that has an impact on private, you know, has a competitive impact on non-union private employers in the same labor market, putting pressure on them to raise their own wages or benefits level, particularly on benefits around pensions and on job security, even in non-union places through civil service. This is a partial list of metro areas where the single largest employer is a public employer. So attacking public employees in these places is not just about enabling tax cuts for the rich, but also driving down labor standards for non-union workers is not wages so much, but pensions and job security by eliminating that competitive standard from the labor movement. And I also think for non-union workers, there's a goal to eliminate the idea and the aspiration that you could be secure in your job through something like civil service and that you could be secure when you're old through something like a defined benefit pension plan. So connected to this, I think another key question to ask is why do these corporations want to defund public services? What's in it to them? Why do they put time money and energy onto this? Since 2011, we've had drastic cuts in all kinds of public services and the thing that's most striking when you look at the legislative record is that most legislators did not treat this as like oh my god, this is a terrible tragedy. I wish we didn't have to do this, but there's a budget deficit. As soon as the budget is better, we'll restore these. It's very easy, for instance, to write a law that says we're cutting education, but as soon as unemployment is down to x level or state revenues are back to x level, it'll be restored and have automatic restoration. Nobody did that. On the contrary, 12 different states that enacted dramatic service cuts also enacted large new tax cuts for the corporations and the rich. In Ohio, for instance, in the same year that Ohio ended full-day kindergarten, they also repealed the state's inheritance tax, which had only ever affected the wealthiest 7% of families in the country. And not only did they not say things should snap back when the economy gets better, but Alec, the chamber in the big corporate lobbies pushed at the same time for what they call a taxpayer bill of rights, which says that public spending can never increase from this point forward by more than a combination of population growth and CPI, which essentially means per capita public spending can never increase beyond what it is now. Which means what they said is, let's take the most drastic cuts made in public services, made at the trough of the deepest recession in 70 years, and then lock them in as the high-water mark of the most public services will ever be. Right? Ohio, you will never have full-day kindergarten again. So we need to kind of look clear-eyed at the fact that these cuts were made not as a regretful tragedy, but as an opportunity, as an opportunity to make what these people thought were long overdue cuts. Why do corporations believe this is in their self-interest? I'm going to skip this. Part of this, part of understanding this I think has to do with understanding what's different about corporate politics in the 21st century from things we all may have read and great work that has been done about corporate politics in the 1970s or in the 1940s. One of those things is the degree of globalization in the country. I don't think it was necessarily ever true that what's good for General Motors was good for the country as they claimed in 1953, but it was closer to true when General Motors cars were made by Americans and purchased by Americans. Now a majority of General Motors employees and nearly two-thirds of the cars themselves are overseas, and this is not unique to GM. This is a so the S&P 500 now 48% of total corporate revenues are earned overseas, and this graph shows a number of companies that are active in ALEC and how their overseas revenues have increased over the last 35 years. So we have a situation that is unlike anything we've had before, where these companies are still the key political players. GM is a partner of the Chamber of Commerce, it's a member of ALEC, it's on the board of the National Association of Manufacturers. So these are the most powerful actors in American politics, but their fortunes are increasingly divorced, not totally divorced, but more divorced than ever before from what actually happens to Americans. So we have, for instance, one one critic of them saying corporations are irrational because quote, the corporate community has been unable to provide a solution to the crisis of education. I think what we need to stare in the face is a possibility that it is rational for them, that what's a crisis for us is not a crisis for them because their fortunes are less linked to Americans either as workers or as consumers than they ever have been in the past. I think another thing that defines our time is that the corporate lobbies are deeply pessimistic about the country. They see the US as an economy in decline with no way out, and certainly no way out that they're willing, you know, a path that they're willing to go down. They also know that although many conservative legislators and federal politicians get elected all the time on an issue by issue basis, their agenda is deeply unpopular and unpopular on a bipartisan basis. To give you just, you know, a smattering of these things. A majority of the country favors limiting the income of corporate executives. 75% including Republicans support immediate increase of the minimum wage, support for paid sick days, for schooling. A majority, you know, throughout the healthcare debate a majority of Americans not only supported public option but supported single payer, and half the country thinks our government should redistribute wealth by heavy taxes on the rich. So this frames what is the key political challenge for the corporate lobbies, which is how do you advance an agenda that is going to make the country yet more unequal and make life yet harder for the majority of Americans without provoking a populist backlash. And this strategy also helps frame and helps explain a lot of the legislation that we've seen. There are four, I would say four broad categories of legislative work that has been pursued that I think are part of this political strategy. One is laws that constrain or abolish the institutional vehicles through which working people seek to challenge corporate power, which includes not just anti-unionism but also making it difficult or impossible for people to sue corporations. A second is privatization of public services, which removes focal points around which public demands might coalesce, which erases the notion that the government is responsible for meeting people's essential needs and which heightens the population's dependence on private employers. A third is initiatives to restrict the public's right to vote on redistributive policies. And finally, and I think most subtly, I think that corporate lobbies are engaged in something that you might call a revolution of falling expectations. And I just want to talk about this a little. In the labor movement, it's common for union organizers to talk about wanting to ignite a revolution of rising expectations, where you help workers win a grievance in their department against a bully boss and suddenly they feel a little bit of power and they think, huh, maybe I'll get involved in negotiating the contract for the whole company. And if they win a good contract, they might feel like maybe I'll get involved in trying to change who the mayor is. And as people win a little, they keep raising their sights higher and higher. High expectations are dangerous for the corporate lobbies agenda because they're so pessimistic about the country. And I think what they're engaged in, you know, on a personal level, if I come to feel like my kids in a class with 35 kids, but at least it's not 45, and all the librarians have been fired and they only have music and phys ed nine weeks a year. This is my daughter school, but at least they have it for nine weeks a year. Or I only have catastrophic health insurance, but at least I have it and so far I'm not sick. Or I don't have any paid vacation, but I have five personal days if my kid gets sick and maybe I'll have time off between this job and the next job. The more we ratchet down our expectations of what we think we have a right to demand, either of our employers or of the government, it's good. This helps normalize downward mobility and helps avoid the problem of populist backlash. If I think I have a right to a public library with free internet service, a right to get to work on public transportation, a right to affordable healthcare, or a right to decent education for my kid, this is the dreaded entitlement mentality that I think the corporations are working hard, hard to kill off. Doing away with these things, both lowers expectations and increases buddy's dependence on private employers. Anything can't get as a right citizenship, I can't get internet, I can't get transportation, I can't get health care, also makes me that much more dependent on a job with a private employer. So when we look at things like cutting education funding, I think it's not just about fueling tax cuts for the rich, it also serves to lower expectations. And using vouchers to blur, for instance, in education, to blur the line between public and private education isn't just about siphoning off public money into the private sector, it's also about erasing the idea of education as a public good that the government is responsible to providing and that we have a right to demand simply by being citizens. So in these ways, I think the corporate agenda that they're pushing leads inevitably not only to an economic agenda, but also to a shrinking of democracy. And by this I mean not just the obviously the voter repression stuff that has been going on in many states, but democracy is not just about who can vote or if the elections are fair, but what can you vote on? If we had a democracy where we had completely free and fair elections, but we're only allowed to vote about the color of the flag, it's not so good, right? And what they've been doing is taking more and more things and putting them outside the bounds of democratic control. Since 2011, for instance, nine states have preempted the right of any local government or local citizens through ballot initiative to raise their minimum wage. Iowa just last month became the first day to actually go backwards, which not only preempted that, but undid four counties that had previously raised their minimum wage. Thirteen states have preempted the right to pay sick leave. So where I live in Portland, Oregon, people voted, we want to have paid sick leave, we have paid sick leave. That's illegal in 13 states. Over time, preemption has become increasingly broad. Michigan in 2015 adopted a bill that its opponents labeled the Death Star, which prohibits cities or counties from adopting any regulation governing wages, benefits, paid or unpaid leave, scheduling or work hours, or recovery of wage theft. And Iowa just replicated this last month. Now, Arizona's 2013 omnibus preemption bill even prohibits establishing a right to meal breaks or rest periods for employees. So this, I think, is inevitably where their agenda leads. And just to say a couple more dystopic words, not in terms of economics, but in terms of democracy, what would our democracy look like if we adopted all the policies that Alec and the Chamber of Commerce say are critical for pro-growth? We would live in a place where citizens can vote to prohibit the use of project labor agreements, but not to require that they remain an option, where we can vote to turn a public school into a charter school, but not to run a poorly performing charter school back into a public school, where we're free to adopt local right to work ordinances, but not to raise the minimum wage or establish a process to recover stolen wages, where individuals can sue for being made to paid union dues, but not for being unjustly terminated, and where legislators can vote to establish new tax breaks with a simple majority, but need two-thirds to fund preschool. With each bill like that that's adopted, corporate advocates are constructing a system of selective democracy in which the ability to address economic inequality through democratic means is increasingly constricted. So after getting such a dire talk, I thought you might want to look at sunflowers for a minute they're nice, no, no, but they're nice. So, you know what I would say hopefully is, you know, we live in the America of Trump, Ryan and McConnell, but we also live in the same country where Bernie Sanders almost won and won unprecedented support for progressive demands, including the support of many conservative voters. Many of you may have seen this slide that, you know, Americans across political parties both think the country is more equal than it is and wish that it were even more equal than it, than they think it is. There's one reporter summarize this slide as saying that Americans actually live in Russia, we think we live in Sweden and we wish we lived in a kibbutz. But what's critical is this is not a partisan issue. Even in places where people vote for candidates for all kinds of reasons and in places where people regularly elect very right-wing candidates on many economic issues and many public service issues they still have progressive views. In 2014, for instance, voters in Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota, all deep red states approved ballot initiatives to raise their state's minimum wage. In both South Dakota and Idaho, voters overturned by ballot initiatives laws that their legislators had passed that undid teacher tenure required merit pay based on test scores for teachers and required kids to take online courses. In Arizona, one of the most conservative legislators in the country that is regularly held up by Alec in the chamber is a model of pro-corporate legislation. Last fall, at the same time that they voted to elect Donald Trump as president, they voted by a much wider margin to raise the minimum wage and to establish a right to paid sick leave across the state. If you do the math, even if you assume that everybody who voted for Hillary Clinton and Jill Stein voted for this, there still had to be at least about 200,000 people who voted for Donald Trump and voted to raise the minimum wage and establish a right to paid sick leave. So I think that on an issue-by-issue basis, when we can campaign on that issue, there is broad opposition to the corporate agenda and fertile ground to move ahead. So I would just say this is the battle ahead of us between what popular opinion is in terms of economic justice and the power of corporations, especially in the state legislatures. I just think that it's not hopeless, but we have to go into it with clear eyes about who really is the opposition and what's really driving them. So thank you. I guess it's my turn and I just like to begin with an appreciation for Gordon for the many years of work in this area and culminating in this book and to EPI for providing a forum to really look at something that not enough progressives in my opinion look at, the impact of these changes on areas other than the federal level. And I know it's really popular for progressives to revel in every gaffe, misstep and crisis that comes out of the Trump administration and even the wider world is becoming aware of just how disastrous this is and there may be this smug propensity to say, you know, I told you so, but at the same time doing so to the exclusion of looking at what's happening at the state level really cements what has for decades been a concerted effort that has delivered body blow after body blow victory after victory that has come at the expense of the great majority, the 99 percenters and the masses. So I really appreciate this opportunity to really talk about that and really to figure out where we go from here. So that we're not just solely focused on the federal arena. Now certainly federal fights are important, but as Gordon outlines the diminished capacity in the states or a shift in what used to be and what should be public functions to the private sector serves to reduce faith in government and to diminish expectations. And that is the true aim of these corporatists and they are winning and we can't continue to help them win by focusing solely on the federal arena and not being cognizant of the impacts on the ground. So let me look at, you know, few areas of the book that I found particularly enlightening. Gordon does a great job of talking about the policy ideas and the agenda of the corporatists that is at times incoherent, irrational and hypocritical and that is true if you think about it in the policy sense, thinking that policy is designed to deliver benefits that deliver the common good or for the common wealth. But when you think about it through the lens of power, consolidating wealth and power, it does make a lot more sense as you outline. The financialization of business over creating value over the long term is clearly about creating a pool of winners, opening up public markets in areas like prisons and education, to the private sector is all about capturing a greater piece of economic activity for private gains. This is serving to consolidate wealth and power and shrink the number of people who actually get a taste of the pie. It's a pretty clear, transparent, easy thing. They're trying to win at all costs. And part of that winning comes from destabilizing those who could stop them. And that's really what the anti-union agenda is about. That is what the diminishing of capacity is all about. You know, if you can create greater opportunities for you to win and you can minimize the ability of your opponents to stop you, you are on the path to total victory. It's easy. It's easy to see. It's pretty transparent. But we have been ineffective in fighting it. And I'd like to speak a little bit about unions and the attack on unions and what that looks like. You know, when you consider that an environment, an area where people are experiencing rising wages, that translates into economic power. That's a threat to the corporates. When you think about an agenda that produces family friendly policies, provides an opportunity for parents to have vacation time and sick time and care for their children or care for their elders or care for other loved ones, that creates the kind of quality of life that may give you time to become civically engaged. That is a threat to this attempt to consolidate power. So, you know, the attack on unions is very convenient. It resonates to a lot of people, but it's solely aimed at purposes that achieve this 1% goal. And, you know, in state legislatures, where this has become, you know, very much a route. I'd like to just offer a few perspectives of how I think it came to be. Gordon mentions this in the book, but the preeminence of Alec at the state arena, not just on Republicans, but also on Democrats, cannot be overlooked. You know, the reasons for it are pretty clear. State legislators, they don't make a whole lot of money. They certainly don't have a staff, and when they get together for their annual or biennial sessions only for a few months out of the year, they have a short time period with which to create and try to pass legislation. So, you know, any group that's able to provide them models that they can introduce and then champion is a great value added for them. And while that is true, it also has a countervailing force that I don't think we appreciate. While Alec and groups like it are able to help them with their legislative agenda, it is the people for whom they are beholden to to get elected. And often those people are very much not interested in the kind of activities that they're pursuing when they go to their particular legislatures. However, there's not a great deal of attention at organizing people locally to make sure their legislatures are actually doing their bidding when they go to session. I think there is a real opportunity there to counteract what's happening on Alec's end with the real mobilization of local and community support. And this is where I am very hopeful, Gordon, because you know, as we've seen over the last couple of years with race consciousness which is bubbled up from the community and local level, people becoming woke. You know, we've seen with Trumpism people becoming woke on political levels and on these overall economic issues, on these overall you know, 99% 1% issues. There's a real opportunity to organize people at the local level and to get them working in a way that actually counteracts what has been happening on the state level for many decades. I'll just give a little personal aside with my current work and I'm pleased to see my colleague from the Arlington County Board Libby Garvey who's here in the audience. If any more of our colleagues join us this is a public meeting. So are you kidding me? That's right, no more. No more. Thank you. So on the local level we represent Arlington Arlington County which if you're familiar with it is sometimes known as the People's Republic of Arlington that's you know, that's mostly because relative to the Commonwealth of Virginia we are quite the progressive jurisdiction. Yet we also work in a what's called a Dylan's rule state which means limited home rule which is true for every municipality in the Commonwealth so we have a state which is dramatically more conservative and limiting of local prerogatives than in many others. Yet we are still able to work within the confines of those restraints to deliver a fairly progressive municipal government for our constituents and they are not only supportive of it they embrace it overwhelmingly. We're going through our budget season and we've recently had public hearings on budget issues and we went to our community asking for an increase in the property tax rate. We asked for an increase in taxes. Now normally you would expect that this would bring out the the woodwork of people protesting with their pitchforks and in our public hearings we had about 60 people show up to say you need to be spending more money on this priority or this program or on this service and then when we discuss the tax rate what do we have Libby? Three people? Three people show up to say ah you shouldn't raise our taxes they're too high. So just to give you a sense of of where local communities are often where they often are it's it's at a place decidedly different than where we see state legislatures going and as people become more woke we need to foment that at the local level and make sure that they are able to use their their local governments to exercise that consciousness and that we support the organizing at the local level because that can in fact be the bench for statewide office holders who can begin to counteract what we've seen over the last few decades. So you know I think Gordon you have painted quite the bleak picture I mean there's no way you can read this book and be happy after afterwards despite your flowers but it's not hopeless it it really isn't there are there are opportunities that I see and uh you know if if we all begin to expand our focus beyond just simply national politics and recognize the value of organizing at the community and local level and realize that policies at the local level can begin to stem the tide of what has gone against us for so long we will have a chance to create a new narrative over the course of the next few years despite what happens here in Washington and despite the disaster that is Donald Trump so I'll I'll stop there and and look forward to the discussion. So one of the things that I felt in reading this book given that my job is basically to think about how we can reverse what Gordon is talking about as the revolution of falling expectations by work in the states I found that that was really that was one of the things that I found really fascinating was was kind of a subtle way in which Gordon's book sort of deconstructs the idea that what we are facing at the state level is a pure ideological construct and that there are that there is this driving force that has this consistent ideology behind it and that that has been that the strength of that ideology and the fervor of people's belief in it is part of what is given strength to the efforts on the right really the book kind of takes that apart piece by piece and shows that it's very much more of an effort to to take power away and to to make people feel like they have should that they that to have that lowered expectation about what they can expect from their employers what they expect from their government the and what I though that also seems pretty dystopian as I kind of went through the book I came to the end of it and felt like that in some ways it was nice to have the ideological notion kind of taken apart if you really are can be clear eyed and look at what the motivations are for what is happening in the states then it can help clarify what it is that you need to do to counter it and the counter of it almost as I went through the book and had this sort of dystopian experience I ended up in the end looking at the agenda that's played out and the ways in which has been played out and thinking that that the best thing we can do is think of the inverse of that as our agenda and to be building the expectations back up of people of what they should be expecting for themselves for their families and for their rights as citizens they and so you know the work though isn't that's not an easy task obviously and it but it does require that sort of building of the sense that their their chain that change can happen that people are able to act and to feel like they've made a difference and I think that beyond that one of course one of the clear things and one of the things that you mentioned that has that shows the power of that are the minimum wage campaigns are the paid sick campaigns and those were very powerful not only for the fact that they that they were winnable and that they actually happened but in the fact that it generated all of this energy in the communities and in the states it made people feel like they could be successful that they had a voice and and that you know and obviously then the the backlash of states preemption efforts to preempt the ability to do these things at the local level is dispiriting at the very least but but it does show what can happen as does what's happening right now I think when you look at indivisible the organization that sort of who's brief on how you deal with congress spurred this incredible amount of activity around the country and has really given people the sense that they have a purpose and that they can accomplish something even in fairly dire circumstances and those are the things that we have to to really build up and in the states what that means is that we have to be able to give people a blueprint that helps them take action feel powerful feel like they can create the lives that they want to have the states that they want to have but mostly to rebuild those expectations that that were that Gordon talks about not to assume that they can be ratcheted down over time but instead that help people see that that the power is theirs and that we have to build it what I think we want to open up conversation with our audience and I'm sure that you have a lot that you'd like to bring up so we will I don't know how we're doing that we have there we are we have a microphone at that will come to you when you raise your hand okay back there we're starting we're starting with that Gordon first year you're the invaluable indispensable person at the labor movement and our allies have gotten so much help from in the last six years in the the Scott Walker era of American history and I'm so pleased that you've got you got a book out now that we can we can support so I want to go to this the question about individuals and corporations you made an illusion to so much attention having been devoted to certain ideological individuals like the co-brothers etc etc and you want to draw attention to the corporation involvement and all this but I would like to know if you if the book has or if you know a way to sort out and that this is important for our strategy the extent to which the moving forces here are the chamber are institutional the chamber of commerce and and its ilk as opposed to individual because I mean obviously the co-brothers own a corporation so you could count their money in the corporate side if you're trying to draw that distinction Diane Hendricks is head ahead of a a corporation all these people Sheldon Adelson leads a corporation but there we've we've put a lot we've had a lot of success attacking Alec trying to get corporations to dislodge from Alec very creative work done by the Alec Exposed Coalition but the same tactics don't work with Diane Hendricks right at the Bumford and Merury people in North Carolina these people are really dug in so what's the what is actually the the the proportion of the funds that go through the Republican State Leadership Committee into into politics that comes from these highly motivated right-wing nutball billionaires as opposed to the money that comes from the corporations class conscious corporations who are backing Alec and funding legislators as well what's the how to break it down okay um so first of all I you know for the most part I would take the word nutball out of our analysis right nutball is we have no analysis and we can't predict this and and I'm not saying that there's nobody like that but um so for one thing right you know in one way what I would say if somebody is ideologically driven there are people who give money to causes that are unrelated to their business interests right there are some people who are giving money to marriage equality who are giving money to climate change for giving money to to pro-life or pro-choice that's unrelated to their business interest right that's an ideological giver that's a small minority even of the billionaires but I want to I want to say a couple words about the Cokes because the Cokes often get described as ideological and get opposed as if the chamber of commerce is business rational and the Cokes are ideological and I think that's wrong if you look at what the Cokes actually do and it's it's a lot of things right they're also institutional Americans for prosperity they have multiple organizations big political operation they never do anything that is not about their business interests they never do anything that is opposed to their business interests there are several examples of them doing things for instance one of the key examples is their support for TARP for the the bank bailout toxic assets relief program right which is completely against everything they say about libertarian ideals and the free market and they were against TARP until the day that the market went down dramatically and their own interests were threatened and the next day they changed position and all of a sudden the Cokes and Americans for prosperity were for TARP they did not like Mitt Romney but the biggest phone bank center in the country was run by Americans for prosperity even when you look at things like there's a lot of a lot of a lot written about the export import bank and they were on one side and the chamber of commerce was on the other and when you look at what is the export import bank actually fund that was a conflict of different corporate interests of of corporations having different interests it was not a conflict about this ideology versus that ideology so there may be nutballs I guess I've not eliminated entirely but shrink it down a lot and I don't think the Cokes are in that category I think the Cokes are more radical than the chamber of commerce that in the way that they essentially both want the same thing they want no unions no regulations and low taxes but the Cokes are more ambitious and think you can get there in leaps and bounds and the chamber of commerce is a little more incremental but I think when you look at the Cokes and you say on the one hand how can we understand what they're doing on the other hand how can we anticipate what they'd be doing and how can we think of a strategy to oppose that I think they function the same way as as rational corporations do I also you know this is not to add like depression on depression but I feel cautionary about the successes in getting companies to disaffiliate from Alec I think it's important but I think it's also important to know companies have disaffiliated from Alec and a lot like 40, 50, something like that very successful they've disaffiliated over the the murder of Trayvon Martin over climate change maybe over a couple of things no company has dropped out of Alec because of the minimum wage or anti-unionism and I assume that all those companies that dropped out of Alec for those other reasons are still funding all the stuff through other channels I mean Alec is a very important vehicle but it's a vehicle and if we get them out of Alec and they're still funding it through the chamber or through the the freedom partners of the Cokes brothers we need to understand what we've done and the limits of what we've done thank you all this terrific panel Mr. Laffer I think you made a really key point when you pointed out that the interest of the corporations have diverged from a national interest I was lucky enough I was I worked 15 years on the Senate Banking Committee staff in the 80s and 90s and what I saw was the movement from stakeholders to shareholder capitalism which was a key event because the corporations used to feel they had some responsibility to their workers to the to the responsibilities to their workers to the communities to their country and their shareholders now it's all shareholders now once you get that framework then they drove the globalization process it did just happen there were public policies put into place that drove that and I was there I used to go to the meetings of the GATT which became the WTO and all that so here I think you've got to get after corporate governance as a key issue and you've got to change the behavior you can use the tax code why not give low taxes the companies that produce in America and higher taxes if you want to be appled to all your production in China but you also need to get after the corporate governance and the Senate Banking Committee and Sherrod Brown can play a key role if we can win control of the Senate so I I agree with all that you say I'm on the Central Committee of the Democratic Party of Virginia so I see this at the state level but I think you've got to go back and deal with some of these things at the national level as well I agree and thank you and I've and I you know I've not just you know one of the things that I didn't mention but that is in the book is that I agree that financialization is another one of the processes that has fundamentally changed corporate interest and how those play out in state legislatures to be for shareholders for short term as opposed to longer term has really changed what corporate interests are now from what they were 40 years ago so I have a quick question about your slide about who's in Alec why is the Gates Foundation in Alec well I does somebody know the answer I could I mean I know that Microsoft certainly stands to make a lot of money off of the privatization of of education and the replacement of human teachers with technology which is one of the things that that Alec is pushing I don't know if there are other things like the Gates Foundation contrary to the rations asking Gates I don't I don't know the answer to this question but I but but you know I would just say you know I think that we have to start by asking the right questions right which is so what that puts us is okay there's some reason why the Gates Foundation believes it's in itself interest however it perceives that to be supporting Alec and what is that right but that's got to be the starting point I also had a question about the list of corporate membership and Alec a number of years ago well when Bill Moyers was still on television he did a story on Alec and listed their corporate members and then he and then he specifically mentioned that one of the things they were pushing were stand your ground laws and that after the Trayvon Martin death that a number of corporations disaffiliated and I think he mentioned some of them I can't remember them so I'm just wondering is your list kind of Alec at the crest of its membership or have you taken into account the people who have disaffiliated it's the four I included companies that recently disaffiliated so it's it's both recent and current members and if and the you know the the place that has the best information on this is the center for media and democracy that tracks Alec and they have a list of all both current and former but disaffiliated companies do they also list individual state legislators who yes who belong yes Mark Mark Schmidt uh America I wanted to sort of take a little crack at the why do people join Alec question because I've done a little research on this over the years I feel like I measure how old I'm getting by I think I'm on the third round of this discovery of oh my god there's this thing called Alec and then everybody forgets it again but one of the things I found in interviewing Alec people is they do not present a strongly ideological face either to legislators or to corporate donors and they're very very blunt about that like we do not have you know they don't have they don't start from an agenda they start from here's a table you want to be at and why not be at that table and that's their pitch to legislators and that's their pitch to corporations and their and staff are tell me they're quite disciplined about that now the result is what it is it's obviously what it is if you if your table is five lobbyists and five legislators you know what you're going to get but I think it's an important lesson to progressives when you say okay there's this intense ideological behemoth over here we need this equally intense ideological behemoth for people want to say we're progressives we're going to kick their but actually you want to create something that is equally open and has that kind of why not be at this table kind of quality to it for a whole set of ideas that you generally that you generally like so that's a lesson that I've taken from looking at that question of why do people become part of that like thank you I really appreciate this panel part of the whole woke process that we're going through I'm sometimes I think that those of us who are really woke and starting to understand it we're probably about one percent I mean how many people have time to come and sit here and and and read a book and listen to this it's great how can we spread the message and I'd like to hear from both Mr. Laffer and and my colleague how can we spread this message and I and get it out into the country because I think the message should be fairly simple and fairly basic and I'll just toss out one idea that my daughter and I had driving across the country there are all those empty billboards out there couldn't we get this on a billboard somehow yeah I'll give a few perspectives I think the country is a lot more woke than we often give it credit for you know you see it bubble up unfortunately it's not consistent but you know with the women's march for example that was a you know and almost felt like a spontaneous local community uprising it was in response to a cataclysmic national event but a lot of the organizing principles and a lot of the issues that people brought to the front of the very things that we're talking about so people feel this it's it's intrinsic to what a lot of people want and expect Libby we see it locally you know the the diminished expectations that we kind of feel nationally are not necessarily in place locally where people damn sure demand low class sizes in their schools and investment investments in library and all the good government municipal services but somehow there's that disconnect between what people demand locally and then what they settle for nationally and bridging that comes from not just sort of spreading the gospel but I think by empowering these local efforts to be a lot more robust and to encourage you know these these grassroots community efforts to a greater degree than ever happens I'd love to see you know a lot more efforts made at at figuring out how to get maybe this conversation Gordon delivering a synopsis of his book as part of meetups and webinars which are you know circulated all throughout local communities in ways that we saw during the women's march for example where there was great community-wide education so yeah we can we can pay for billboards or we can also just use the power of technology and the grassroots and just transmit transmit fine in many areas of the country you can win a state legislative seat with 3000 to 5000 votes and yet according to ballot access news about 33 percent of all state legislative district elections during the 2012 election had only one candidate per seat in the race how do you explain the lack of resistance in the electoral arena at the state level okay you know I think there's a couple reasons why this agenda has moved so so heavily in the states you know state legislatures generally don't have filibuster so it's a lot easier to pass things but also that money goes money goes further not just because it's cheaper but because nobody there's almost no name recognition there's a few years ago Marty Gillins who's a political scientist at Princeton came out with this study where he compared congress and senate and how do federal officials vote compared to public opinion and what he found is that an acceptor in very rare circumstances only the top 10 only the richest 10 percent of people's opinion matters if there was a policy issue where the bottom 90 percent of the country thought one thing and the richest 10 percent thought thought something else federal officials vote with the 10 percent he said the one time this is not true is during presidential election years because people are paying attention so what you need to pull people to a more progressive direction is more people paying attention so when you think about state legislatures less than one quarter of Americans can name who their state legislator is I don't know how many people in this room can and this room is probably more politically attuned than most places so that means one of the things that counteracts the power of money is the power of reputation and name recognition and that doesn't function at the state level also redistricting has been even more you know gerrymandering redistricting has been even more intense at the state level than the federal level which means not only affects who gets elected but affects the ability of corporate lobbies to threaten people when they're in office to vote the way they want so for instance in Michigan the right to work Bill in Michigan was opposed by the Senate majority leader who was a Republican who was a pro labor or a moderate labor Republican and he got taken into a back room with a bunch of donors and said either you support this or this is going to be your last term in office and when you're in a situation where there's so little name recognition you don't have a base to counteract the power of money and your district has been gerrymandered so that the Republican vote is the only the Republican primary is the effect the equivalent of the general election those threats are very effective so I don't know to getting back to the question I would be interested to see where are the one thirds of districts where nobody ran my guess is that they're mostly in districts that are very heavily gerrymandered where there's almost no point in running from the other party but this also gets to why the corporate lobbies are so much more powerful in the states and even while you see like states like Virginia or even more North Carolina that in federal elections are toss ups and in the state legislature are radically right wing right it doesn't quite reflect the the politics of the population because a different dynamic is working at the state level and just to give a real concrete example using Virginia we are a state that solidly went for Hillary Clinton it is really no longer purple it's more blue and you know that's because our population centers are overwhelmingly ridiculously democratic yet our general assembly is so tilted towards Republicans that it will take decades even with nonpartisan redistricting to see a dramatic change where you have an actual democratic majority in our state legislature and it is solely because people fell asleep at the switch while you know Republicans in in legislatures redistricted and gerrymandered so that these majorities were solid and would be for for a generation I have a just a kind of a follow-up to a couple comments my name's Meredith you you mentioned how financialization has sort of changed corporate interests at the state level can you give an example of that kind of to sort of follow up on the the piece you just I mean even a simple thing when you say you know would a corporation support more taxes to fund education or infrastructure or something like that if everybody who's managing the corporation is operating on an extremely short time horizon right which is just about shareholder returns or stock price in the next two years right which changed with financialization as did the tenure or turnover of CEOs and corporate leaders that also affects what they perceive as their self-interest lines up with policy options as one example I have a sunflower to offer you please first I want to thank you for this extremely cogent and clear presentation my name is Hank Prensky I'm with a group called Get Money Out Maryland we're seeking the 28th amendment to the constitution to overall citizens united and end the corrupt influence of big money in politics I may scare some people but please hear me through we start off with six people in a living room four years ago we now have the democracy amendment resolution in front of the state house of delegates and the state senate this is the last week in the legislative session in the state of Maryland if we can affect the speaker of the house Michael Bush and the president of the senate Michael Miller they will allow because they have inordinate power they might allow the committees that heard these bills to take a vote in which case we have majorities of both committees cosponsoring our legislation and it'll go to the floor of the house and senate we could become the sixth state to demand an amendment to the constitution through the article five method of state legislatures two ways to amend the constitution they're exactly co-equal and parallel either the congress by two-thirds majority proposes amendments or the state legislatures by two-thirds majority proposes a convention of the states to propose amendments not a runaway convention not a constitutional convention a convention for the purpose of proposing amendments we need your help today tomorrow until next Monday the last day of the legislative session if any of you are from Maryland I will give you cards as we leave to simply sign our petition online and to call the speaker of the house and the president of the senate five states have done this already Vermont, California, Illinois, New Jersey and Rhode Island have all demanded the article five convention we believe that this is a powerful tool as you mentioned earlier Mr. Laffer to get victories to get success in the hands of local people when I walk into a state legislator's office and walk out with their co-sponsorship signature on a piece of paper I feel like I have exercised American democracy and I have we also have our new congressman Jamie Raskin from the 8th district of Maryland pardon me sir we need to move on to and the senator from Maryland Chris Van Hollen who used these words this is an issue of utmost excuse me of urgent national importance to amend the constitution this is what we're doing and we need your help good luck more than luck it's serious involvement this gentleman at the back here has been trying to yeah Larry Chekko and I've actually written for income inequality which is an offshoot of VPI and I I hear a lot and this has been a great conversation I'd like to simplify it a little bit and I think what we've lost we've lost the narrative let me give you a couple of examples for 40 years we've been told that if you feed the rich it's all going to trickle down the only thing that's trickled down is misery but people still buy into that they still will vote for people who will reduce taxes for the wealthy thinking that it's going to come down to them number one but part of the narrative that really needs to be out there is McDonald's and Walmart two of the people who are listed on your on your list there actually give seminars to their employees saying if you can't make it on the wages we're giving you here are programs that you can go to government programs that you can go to people that you and I are paying we're underwriting the cost of the Walmarts we're under the cost of all the shareholders in in the McDonald's it's ridiculous if anybody would like this I've written about this if anybody would like the article I'd be happy to send it to you thank you thank you hi thanks for the presentation I was wondering if there are any companies that are appearing to be ready to be mobilized as a counterweight to the Alec agenda now in this environment some companies who may start to be recognizing the value of public goods education infrastructure those sorts of things um yes I know there are some and I think there are several organizations even that like give out awards to to good companies who do that so I don't have the list maybe somebody here does I just I feel cautious about going down the route of looking for good companies I think that not only because they're few and far between and they're always going to be few and far between I think we need to take seriously that what they perceive is in their self-interest is probably right they're probably not stupid about what's in their self-interest their public you know publicly traded corporations are legally required to act in the self-interest of maximizing shareholder return and I think we need to look other places rather than looking for you know benefactors or ally not to say that I wouldn't take those allies but I think it's a mistake to focus a lot of energy I'm looking for the good billionaires or the good companies and that we need to look for the people whose interests are whose self-interest are not not acting against their self-interest but acting with their self-interest in promoting a more just economy amen I mean I think part of what Gordon is really elucidated in his book is that we have had this general shift from to put it bluntly people power to corporate power and if we continue to look for corporations to lead us out of the morass we are diminishing the ability of the great majority to actually have agency to change direction and I think what you're tapping into is there is this real opportunity for us to become aware and mobilized and to exercise our power and to more acutely to observe when there is an attempt to diminish and take that power away so that we don't just blindly let it happen part of the great story of a lot of this is that a lot of these legislative changes have happened with people just generally being unaware or not understanding the consequences or not being moved enough to believe that those consequences would have any real impact and this is giving us a clarion call to say wake up, wake up because if you continue to rely on the Costco's of the world to make everything better it's not actually going to jibe with where you want the world to go Hi, Greg Leroy from Good Jobs First great book, Gordon so many dots connected here the thing that really resonates with me is that recurring theme you laid out of disinvestment corporate disinvestment of America more than 30 years ago as a plant closing activist I wrote something called the early warning guide to plant closings which was a grassroots guide to teach people how to detect disinvestment of their workplaces mostly private disinvestment moving product lines out failing to maintain things transferring managers but also tax dodging appealing your property tax assessment trying to get corporate tax rates is how I sort of accidentally backed into economic development incentives I think that's a really powerful frame that you should this is such a dense book you did it so much more tightly in the presentation I would really encourage you to and you may already be doing this thinking about byproducts right popular education breakouts op-eds infographics and I would really urge you to hone and tease out that theme as a plant closing slow motion bleeding early warning signs of these companies growing their profits overseas and actively disinvesting in public goods this would be the last question I'm just wondering we've seen a lot of movements come and go Occupy Wall Street you know seemed very powerful in the beginning kind of petered out the hold what we're doing right now could have the same effect once the Trump thing passes who knows what the future holds in that area so it seems to me that we do need real intense organizing at the local level and where's the money going to come from for that because we have two problems right now we have a democratic party that basically has allowed its state and local structure to go to seed going to take an enormous amount of money to rebuild that we have a crisis in the labor movement Gorsuch on the court we're going to end up with a really bad situation where unions are going to be even more marginalized than they are now unable to you know fewer members unable to raise more political dollars where do we go I mean you've kind of ruled out looking for corporations and billionaires so where do we go for the money to rebuild our infrastructure at the state and local level which to me is desperately needed well first crack at that thanks I mean obviously I don't have the three-point plan or I wouldn't have waited until now to to roll it out you know the the only thing I can say is that or the only thing I've seen is that is that there's very fruitful ground for organizing around issues I think at the local level and at the state level you know partly because there's so few people are paying attention so few people know who legislators are most people don't even know which party controls this the you know is the majority party and people are not they're not going to become they're not going to come to pay more attention to the personalities or even to the parties but the same people do pay attention to minimum wage to sick leave and to a variety of other issues and you know not to make too much of it but the the ability of the Sanders campaign to raise so much money from online and from small donors and from non-traditional sources it's obviously it's hard to figure out well how could you do that in 500 legislative races around people who are not as charismatic probably not but if they're I think if it's framed not around personalities but if we say okay here's who we're running it's not because they're Democrats or Republicans it's because they're for these three things which are simple and easy to understand has much greater potential to mobilize people I don't I mean I'm worried about the same thing as you do a lot of the best things now are funded by the labor movement which certainly looks like there's going to be a lot less money in the future I don't think we can think about you know when people often say well we should do what Alec does it's like well it's one thing to say we should write the laws and put them in legislators hands that we could do what we couldn't do is back it up with all the millions and millions of dollars that backed it up we're we're not going to have that amount of money we have to find something that captures people's imagination enough to work with less money than they have and I would just say there have been lots of efforts that have unfortunately not been sustained but to you know find local candidates to equip them to train them to fund them knowing full well that a little bit goes a long way to ensure that you deepen the bench there have been efforts to you know bring even diminish labor organizations together with other worker center organizations and pull their resources and pull their volunteers to you know canvas on causes and for candidates and these things tend not to be sustained they tend not to be over invested it's almost like we and I'm speaking as a large progressive we you know kind of get excited about things for a minute and then we move on to another thing and I think one thing we can learn from the right is that if you have a sustained focus and you don't look for results with each success of election but you take the long view this is how you you begin to change so we we first have to change a little bit in terms of how we approach things but then recognizing that a little bit truly does go a long way to change things on the local level you don't need a grand you know you don't need a grand effort you just need a sustained one and I don't really know how to change that mindset you know among my people you know it's just it just seems something that we we have really not learned despite all evidence that that's really where we need to orient ourselves so I think you're absolutely right I think it's it's as clear as day but how we get there seems impossible to me I guess one last thing I would add is that you know it two months after this Citizens United came down in January of 2010 within two months a bunch of new vehicles including Carl Rove's organization a bunch of other organizations were created to recruit all the new money that was available and one of them was the thing the Chamber of Commerce put together they called Project RedMap which was Redistricting Majority Project which poured money into things and enabled them to Republicans to take wall-to-wall control in 11 new states and they particularly focused 2010 because it's the year of the census and it's the year of redistricting both at the state level and at the congressional level so I would think when we look at 2020 we should be however much money we have we should be thinking about how many states can we target to actually flip because those are the legislatures that are going to redraw the districts I'm sorry okay so I think that we one of the things that I would say about that last question as well is that that we should look to what has happened in the 5 for 15 campaigns in the paid sick campaigns where yes there's been money in them but the money has not been nearly as substantial as the money that we are talking about on the other side but there what there was was that spark of people seeing the possibility of acting of having success in their own interest in the interest of their communities and and a feeling like they had been you know that the that they that the expectations that they outstripped all expectations about what people thought could be accomplished I think building on that notion and giving people bold ideas that are achievable where at least some incremental at least change can be achieved where they get that feeling of success and where you begin to build constituency that feels empowered is our best bet which I think is consistent with what both of you were saying but I think that it has that but there is a cross state kind of strategy that has to be taken into account with this where you begin to see something moving all over the country that begins to build the sense of power you begin to reinvigorate the notion that we can make a difference thank you all for being here books may be purchased outside and then brought back in