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election outcomes. We need to break out of the money-politics-media trap. The second is that government be able to translate increased revenues into effective public services and infrastructure. We need, in short, a return to civic virtue, in which Americans recommit to contributing to the common benefit and to cooperating for mutual gain. Yet we won’t even get started if the public’s confidence in Washington remains so dreadfully low. Reform of government is a vital component of any successful economic reform. The challenge of government reform is the topic of the next chapter.

CHAPTER 12.

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Government

We have seen that winning campaigns and holding power require money and lots of it. Turning money into power and power back into money are Washington’s two main industries. The big corporations and the politicians play the leading roles. The corporations finance the campaigns and then lobby for corporate deregulation and the contracting out of core government functions. The politicians squeeze money from the corporations in return for political services.

In 2010, the conservative members of the Supreme Court “discovered” a new constitutional right of corporations to plow their shareholders’ money into political campaigns without legal limits, special internal controls, validation by shareholders, or any obligation of disclosure, in a decision called Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens harshly criticized the conservative majority for ignoring common sense as well as a hundred years of settled law:

Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it … The financial resources, legal structure, and instrumental orientation of corporations raise legitimate concerns about their role in the electoral process.1

The role of big money in politics has completely sidelined competent public administration. Government has been outsourced to private contractors, the ones who pay the campaign bills for Congress and the White House, which sign the checks for the contracts. As a result of deregulation and outsourcing of federal functions, we live through one abject failure after the next.

The list of recent government failures is long and growing. The intelligence agencies failed to anticipate 9/11. The Bush administration launched a war over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. The Iraq and Afghanistan occupations were totally botched, brought down by ignorance, lack of planning, and corruption of U.S. contractors. Hurricane Katrina shattered our confidence in our emergency response system. The banking crisis shattered our confidence in financial regulation. The banking bailout destroyed any remaining sense of fairness between Wall Street and Main Street. And now we face budget deficits unprecedented since World War II, but continue to grant massive tax breaks to the richest Americans.

Can government do better? Of course it can, as it does in many other parts of the world. But to do better, Americans need to be crystal clear about what is going wrong so consistently. I propose that the federal government adopt Seven Habits of Highly Effective Government:

Set clear goals and benchmarks.

Mobilize expertise.

Make multiyear plans.

Be mindful of the far future.

End the corporatocracy.

Restore public management.

Decentralize.

Set Clear Goals and Benchmarks

There is a lot to be said for stating our goals clearly. John F. Kennedy, one of America’s most inspiring leaders, explained it this way:

By defining our goal more clearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all peoples to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly toward it.2

Great leaders set great goals. When Kennedy called for America to send a man to the moon and back within the 1960s, he gave a remarkable explanation for why he called on America to make such an arduous and challenging effort:

[W]e choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,