B4 celebrity from B1


their honeymoon to stage two serio- comic “Bed-Ins” to publicize the anti- war cause. Lennon also merged his activism


and his music: In 1969, “Give Peace a Chance” became the anthem of the movement after half a million people sung along at a huge demonstration at theWashingtonMonument. That same year he sent back an award he had received a few years earlier from the queen of England, in protest of British support for the Vietnam War. After moving to New York in 1971, he contin- ued his high-profile opposition to the war, and two more songs released that year — “Imagine” and “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)”—expanded his antiwar repertoire. Lennon paid a price for his activities.


We now know from subsequent Free- dom of Information Act releases that the FBI monitored and harassed him. In 1971, President Richard Nixon set in motion a four-year effort to deport him, which failed after the political tide in America turned against the war. In this role, Lennon was continuing


a venerable tradition: the celebrity as a crusader against the wrongs commit- ted by those in power. In the 19th century, the celebrity activistswere not musicians but writers. Charles Dick- ens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and other authors loud- ly supported the abolitionist crusade against slavery. Harriet Beecher Stowe went further and wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to boost the anti-slavery cause — a sort of 19th-century equivalent of “Imagine.” Mark Twain denounced American


imperialismand atrocities in the 1898- 1902 war against Spain and Filipino independence fighters, publishing his savage satirical essay “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” in 1901. In the imperialist claim to spread “civiliza- tion,” he detected “two kinds of Civili- zation — one for home consumption and one for the heathenmarket.” Twain also saw “two Americas: one that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive’s new freedom away from him . . . then kills him to get his land.” Other Twain essays on the same issue were so politically toxic that he could not get them published during his lifetime. Alas, today’s celebrities seldomchal-


lenge power in themanner of Twain or Lennon. Bono’s signature effort in- volves the Millennium Development Goals campaign, a United Nations- sponsored initiative to achieve eight anti-poverty goals by 2015. The cam- paign stresses that 189 world leaders have endorsed the targets to reduce poverty and hunger and to improve health by the deadline. In the course of his activism, Bono


had regular photo-ops and lunches with President George W. Bush, giving Bush amuch-needed publicity boost on U.S. foreign aid and on his campaigns against AIDS. For example, the singer appeared onstage with Bush at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington in 2002 as the president pledged a $5 billion increase in foreign aid. In May of that year, Bono even toured Africawith Bush’s first Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, fully aware that the administration was capitalizing on his celebrity. “My job is to be used. I amhere to be


used,” he told The Washington Post. “It’s just, at what price? As I keep saying, I’mnot a cheap date.” While Bono calls global poverty a


moral wrong, he does not identify the wrongdoers. Instead, he buys into tech- nocratic illusions about the issue with- out paying attention to who has power and who lacks it, who oppresses and who is oppressed. He runs with the crowd that believes ending poverty is a


EZ BD


KLMNO The decline of celebrity activism


SUNDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2010


First, let’s kill all the laws


laws from B1 Unless forced to make tough choic-


es, Congress will keep kicking the can down the road. The looming crisis of the national deficit, for example, is impossible to address without chang- ing existing entitlement programs. But when the co-chairs of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform announced their propos- als last month, including modifica- tions to Medicare, the condemnation fromCongresswas swift. “This propos- al is simply unacceptable,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Even Rep. Paul Ryan, a Republican member of the commission who preaches fiscal disci- pline, refused to vote for the proposals. “It’s not true that bipartisanship is


dead in Washington,” Will Marshall at the Progressive Policy Institute recent- ly observed. “There’s a perfect biparti- san conspiracy to bankrupt the coun- try.” On the other hand, the political


scuffle over ethanol subsidies — with Republican fiscal hard-liners facing off against Republicans from farm states —shows howsunset laws can reinvigo- rate democratic debate. Critics have long questioned billions of dollars in subsidies (last year, $7.7 billion) for a product known to have serious envi- ronmental drawbacks. The issue has come to a head, however, only because ethanol subsidies, like the Bush tax cuts, are set to automatically expire at the end of this year. Sunset laws have been proposed


FRANK BARRATT/GETTY IMAGES


John Lennon and Yoko Ono campaigning in London against the VietnamWar on Dec. 1, 1969. They distributed similar posters in major cities worldwide.


matter of technical expertise — doing things such as expanding food yields with nitrogen-fixing leguminous plants or solar-powered drip irrigation. These are fine moves as far as they


go, but why have Bono champion them? The technocratic approach puts him in the position of a wonk, not a dissident; an expert, not a crusader. (Little wonder that he hasn’t cranked out a musical hit related to his activ- ism. It’s hard to imagine “BeautifulDay When We Meet the MDG Targets by 2015.”) Can you imagine Lennon pass- ing himself off as an authority on the intricacies of Vietnamese politics and history?Hismessagewas simpler: This war is wrong. Bono is not the only well-inten-


tioned celebrity wonk of our age — the impulse is ubiquitous. Angelina Jolie, for instance, is amember of theCouncil on Foreign Relations (seriously) in addition to serving as a U.N. goodwill ambassador. Ben Affleck has become an expert on the war in Congo. George Clooney has Sudan covered, while Leonardo DiCaprio hobnobs with Rus- sian President Vladimir Putin and other leaders at a summit to protect tigers; both actors have written opin- ion essays on those subjects in these pages, further solidifying their expert bona fides. But why should we pay attention to


Bono’s or Jolie’s expertise on Africa, any more than we would ask them for guidance on the propermonetary poli- cy for the Federal Reserve? True dissidents — celebrity or not —


play a vital role in democracy. But the celebrity desire to gain political power and social approval breeds intellectual


conformity, precisely the opposite of what we need to achieve real changes. Politicians, intellectuals and the public can fall prey to groupthink (We must invade Vietnam to keep the dominoes from falling!) and need dissidents to shake themout of it. True dissidents claim no expertise;


they offer no 10-point plans to fix a problem. They aremost effective when they simply assert that the status quo is morally wrong. Of course, they need to be noticed to have an impact, hence the historical role of dissidents such as Lennon who can use their celebrity to be heard. We’re hardly starved of moral chal-


lenges for our leaders today, in an age that has witnessed Abu Ghraib, Guan- tanamo and enduring wars with un- clear objectives and the clearest of casualties. On Bono’s signature issue of poverty, for instance,why not call out a fewof the oppressive regimes that keep their people impoverished—as well as the leaders, in the United States and elsewhere, who have supported them with economic andmilitary aid? (Bono has acknowledged that “tinpot dicta- tors” were a problem for aid efforts in the past but has not confronted today’s despots and their enablers in rich nations.) We need more high-profile dissi-


dents to challenge mainstream power. This makes it all the sadder that Bono and many other celebrities only re- inforce this power in their capacity as faux experts.Where have all the celeb- rity dissidents gone? It’s not a compli- cated task. All Lennon was saying was to give peace a chance. william.easterly@nyu.edu


from time to time, and they were a domestic priority for President Jimmy Carter. “Too many Federal programs have been allowed to continue indefi- nitely,” he wrote to Congress in 1979, “without examining whether they are accomplishing what they were meant to do.” But that effort stalled and, 30 years


later, accumulated law has become a defining problemofmodern democra- cy. To an amazing degree, our govern- ment’s choices are dictated by political leaderswho are long dead.Health-care programs and Social Security—eating up about 70 percent of each year’s federal revenue — don’t even come up for annual authorization and are not limited by a budget. Many programs outlived their usefulness decades ago: NewDeal subsidies intended for starv- ing farmers now go mostly to corpo- rate farms ($15 billion annually), and inflated union wages on government contracts (more than $11 billion per year), another relic of the 1930s, have the effect of limiting public works and employment. The political debate skims the top of


this vast legal pile, though most of the problems are embedded in the struc- ture underneath. Take health care: The Republican House leadership vows to repeal or cut back the recent “govern- ment takeover,”which it calls unafford- able. But the unaffordability of Ameri- can health care—which costs twice as much as care in other developed countries, with worse outcomes — is mainly caused by preexisting pro- grams. In this bureaucracy, every in- centive is misaligned. Elaborate reim- bursement guidelines encourage ex- pensive procedures,with no incentives for physicians to be prudent. Patients with insurance see health care as an entitlement, allowing hypochondriacs to clog doctors’ waiting rooms. But neither party, we now know after the lengthy debate on health-care reform, will take the political risk of challeng- ing these wasteful practices. Daily regulatory choices are also


immobilized by the buildup of too many laws.The important safeguard of environmental review, for example, has evolved into a kind of perpetual process machine. A wind farm was recently approved off the Massachu- setts coast after 10 years of study by 16 different agencies. Now the project is stalled by a dozen lawsuits claiming, yes, inadequate review.Rebuilding this country’s fraying infrastructure is basi- cally impossible, at least in a timely way, because no official has the author- ity to say “go.” To overcome delays such as these, Congress needs to reconsider how its laws requiring environmental study work in practice. The intransigence of old laws is


caused, in part, by a flaw in our constitutional system. The founders made it hard to pass legislation, divid- ing power among different branches of government, but they apparently failed to consider the forces thatwould entrench the final product. In the Federalist Papers, James Madison hoped that factions would balance each other out in lawmaking. Once a measure is passed, however, anarmy of interests immediately builds a fortress of relationships around it. Not one word of law can be changed without a majority of Congress running a gantlet of special interest influence. That’s why fixing old laws is unthinkably difficult. An omnibus sunset law would dis-


PATRICK OLUM/REUTERS In 2002, Bono, center, and then-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, left, met with elementary school students inUganda.


lodge the status quo by requiring that every statute expire at some point, unless it is reenacted. Laws with budgetary mandates, such as subsi- dies, should probably have shorter fuses than broader regulatory laws, such as antitrust statutes. It would be much harder for Congress to overtly support a wasteful subsidy than to passively let it continue. Our democra-


cywould be revitalized if therewere an opportunity to debate howlaws actual- ly function. However unsatisfactory the current debate over tax cuts, at least there is a debate. The practical challenge of systemat-


ically reviewing the huge body of existing law is enormous, of course. Most members of Congress can’t even read all the way through the new laws they pass, such as the 2,700-page health-care bill or the 2,300-page fi- nancial overhaul act. How could they possibly go back and make sense of hundreds of thousands of pages of old ones? There is one common technique


that has been used in successful legal overhauls, from Justinian’s recodifica- tion in ancient times to theNapoleonic code that is the basis of modern European civil law to the uniform commercial code adopted in the Unit- ed States in the 1950s. The technique is this: radical simplification. Simplification of law has many vir-


tues. It allows legislatures to pass measures of a general nature, setting goals and operating principleswithout trying to anticipate every regulatory situation. Think of the Constitution or the straightforward recommendations of the deficit commission. The current convention of law-as-instruction-man- ual suffers the idiocies of central planning, forcing everyone to go through the day with their noses in rule books instead of using their common sense. It also spawns such complexity that overhauling the vast accumulation of lawwould be hopeless —like trying to prune a jungle. Simplification offers the only practi-


cal way for Congress, or special over- haul commissions it might appoint, to start mucking out the statutory sta- bles. Laws that run several thousand pages should be rewritten in 50 pages or less. Only then will members of Congress actually understand what they’re voting on, and the rest of us understand what’s expected of us. There have been a few recent efforts along these lines — most notably Al


The failure of American government is institutionalized in a giant legal heap that precludes anyone, including the president, from making sensible choices.


Gore’s ReinventingGovernment initia- tive in the 1990s, with which I was involved. But none proposed the one measure that would force legislatures to confront tough trade-offs: giving every law an expiration date. The failure ofAmerican government


has almost no connection to what either party talks about or plans for the future. It is institutionalized in a giant legal heap that precludes anyone, in- cluding the president, from making sensible choices. Americans know that the govern-


ment is broken. According to a recent Clarus Research Group poll, 80 per- cent agreewith that conclusion. By the same overwhelming majority, Ameri- cans also agree that the government “needs a basic overhaul” and should undertake “an annual ‘spring cleaning’ to eliminate unnecessary regulations and red tape.” Our founders never intended de-


mocracy to be a one-way ratchet, making laws but almost never unmak- ing them. Thomas Jefferson famously advocated small revolutions fromtime to time, believing that they are “as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. . . . It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.” This is the medicine that America very much needs today.


phoward@commongood.org


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132  |  Page 133  |  Page 134  |  Page 135  |  Page 136  |  Page 137  |  Page 138  |  Page 139  |  Page 140  |  Page 141  |  Page 142  |  Page 143  |  Page 144  |  Page 145  |  Page 146  |  Page 147  |  Page 148  |  Page 149  |  Page 150  |  Page 151  |  Page 152  |  Page 153  |  Page 154  |  Page 155  |  Page 156  |  Page 157  |  Page 158  |  Page 159  |  Page 160  |  Page 161  |  Page 162  |  Page 163  |  Page 164  |  Page 165  |  Page 166  |  Page 167  |  Page 168  |  Page 169  |  Page 170  |  Page 171  |  Page 172  |  Page 173  |  Page 174  |  Page 175  |  Page 176