Can Gaining a Settlement Actually Cost You Money?

There is a case presently before the Supreme Court that raises fundamental questions of greed, the law and fairness.  An employer-funded health plan wants to force an employee to reimburse medical bills it has paid from out of the employee’s auto accident settlement, knowing that after paying the legal fees the employee would actually end up losing money as a result of the settlement.  The Plan nevertheless wants its money, and has taken its case to the Supreme Court in an attempt to get it.

Mr. McCutchen was an airplane mechanic for 18 years before being struck by a teenage driver, leaving him permanently disabled.  His medical bills were $66,866.  His health insurance, which was set up by his employer, paid those bills.  Mr. McCutchen also suffered more than a million dollars in other damages.  He collected $110,000 in settlements from the auto insurance carrier of the teenage driver and from his own underinsured policy, which was all the money available to him under those policies.  His legal fee relating to those settlements was $44,000, leaving him with a recovery of $66,000.  The Plan now wants to be repaid – in full – the $66,866 it paid in medical bills out of the settlement, without paying any share of the legal fees.  If the Supreme Court allows it to do so, Mr. McCutchen would actually end up losing $866 as a result of his effort to recoup some of the massive losses he sustained from the accident.

The contract under which the Plan paid the medical bills states that the Plan can do just what it is proposing to do.  Of course, Mr. McCutchen did not negotiate that contract, any more than you or I negotiated the contract with our health carrier.  In any event, this issue of the right of an insurance company to be reimbursed from a third party is not new: It happens all the time in auto accident cases and many other contexts.  In those other contexts, courts have consistently limited reimbursement rights – regardless of what the contract states – in various ways that ensure a fair allocation of the settlement proceeds.  But the Plan in this case is subject to the federal ERISA statute and the Supreme Court has never before addressed this issue under the ERISA statute.

As a legal matter, this is an interesting issue about whether the equitable rules that typically limit reimbursement rights regardless of the terms of the contract apply under the ERISA statute that governs this case.  As a matter of the way we collectively live our lives, this is a case of an entity with power and money pursuing every last penny from a man who has already suffered catastrophic losses, and was only able to recover a woefully inadequate settlement to offset them.  It is simply unconscionable to me that anyone would seek to enforce a contract that would leave a catastrophically injured man financially worse off than he would have been if he had not tried to recover some of his losses.

Believe it or not, the insurance company won its case in federal district court.  The circuit court in the McCutchen case overturned the district court decision and now, not to be deterred, the plan has gone all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court asking for its money.  If the Court rules in favor of the Plan, Mr. McCutchen – and millions of other Americans – may have to honor unconscionable contract provisions, even if it means they have to dig into their own pockets to do so.

Hunting the Great Wooly Mammoth, or What Paul Ryan Keeps Talking About

            I find myself back in the Paleolithic age.  Sort of. In my own way I have become a nomadic hunter, roaming the frozen tundra of New England in search of the big kill. Interestingly, my new way of life is helping me to understand the mindset of modern Republicans.  But mostly it has just helped me to see the difference between those who are merely allowed to hunt and those who dominate the landscape.

            My life as a court-appointed defense lawyer was, naturally, all about playing defense.  The best I could do was take a good case to trial, shred the prosecution’s evidence, create reasonable doubt in the minds of a jury and secure my client an acquittal.  Satisfying?  Yes.  A vindication of my client?  No doubt.  But keeping my client out of jail did not keep him from the ordeal of the trial.  Nor did it bring justice to those who actually committed the crime, or help the victims of the crime, or even do anything to ensure that our country would abandon its obsession with prosecuting and jailing people (the criminal system is asymmetrical: if I lose, my client goes to jail, if the prosecutor loses, he just goes on to his next case).  And win or lose, as an hourly wage earner, I did not get the thrill of bringing in a good case or securing a judgment from which I would earn a big check.

Suing insurance companies that just won’t do the right thing is something altogether different.  What I do now feels like hunting.  With good cases, life gets very exciting.  I get up in the morning, go to the office and take up the trail where the tracks left off.  An insurance company is a powerful and cagey beast, a worthy adversary for even the greatest modern hunter.  Sometimes the trail is long; sometimes the beast eludes me.  But each win is truly exhilarating, especially because it is one of a series of intermittent bounties rather than a prescribed take collected at steady intervals.

In modern Republican parlance, I am now one of the ‘makers,’ a person who earns a living by owning or operating a firm rather than working for a paycheck.  (The fact that I don’t produce anything tangible is not a disqualifier: the ‘makers’ on Wall Street don’t make anything either, other than a mess of the global financial markets).  I am engaging in free enterprise for profit, creating work for paralegals, administrative help, website designers, office supply providers, court personnel and others along the way.

And I must admit, it feels kind of cool.  Like the difference between renting a house and owning one, the feeling of working for one’s self is qualitatively different from and infinitely more satisfying than the alternative.  Enterprise, as the Republicans romanticize it, is precisely this risky, exhilarating, profitable experience, and we must keep taxes low and regulators in check so that the robust and courageous among us have a vast and free landscape in which to engage in their various enterprises.

So now that I know what all of the Republican fuss is about, what do I think?  Well, I cannot deny that there is something of a thrill to the modern hunt.  For me at least, something deep inside responds to the risks of enterprise, and my being thrives when the challenges, risks and rewards are great.  It is wrong, though, to elevate the animal instinct to hunt over our more human instinct to care for our own.  It is more wrong to support a socioeconomic policy premised on the worry that stifling the makers might hurt the rest of us.

Every system has its hunters, whether communist, socialist, capitalist or dictatorship.  Whether a system is run by business leaders, politicians, or a military strong man, it is all the same: someone is always making a killing.  One system may stifle the enterprising aspirations of the many more than another, but that is simply the way the leaders have set the landscape so that they can make bigger and bigger killings for themselves.  The only real question is whether we are part of their hunting party or caught in their crosshairs.

Lawyers and Mentors

Today I agreed to write a recommendation to Georgetown Law School for Vince Novelli, a senior at Trinity and a recipient of the same scholarship that I had as an undergraduate there.  Vince is a natural leader, the kind of person who connects with everyone while maintaining a strong sense of himself and his goals.  Writing his recommendation will be easy.  I spoke today with another former scholar, Brett Jackson, who is also applying to law school.  Brett and I have worked together on many projects relating to the scholarship, he in his role as an on campus mentor to the current scholars and me in mine as a member of the scholarship committee.  He speaks his mind, has good ideas when he does so, and has a natural ability to get things done.  Although very different from Vince, he will also flourish as a practicing lawyer.

When I applied to law schools in 1994, attorney Victor Keen (whose class at Trinity founded the scholarship) wrote a recommendation for me to his alma mater, Harvard.  It was a piece of writing whose concision and precision made an impression on me that has lasted to this day.  Later, he put me up in his Manhattan loft when I visited NYU and Columbia.  By the time I enrolled at Penn, Victor had moved to Philadelphia.  During my time at law school, we spent many Sundays running along the Schuylkill River, discussing my classes and his work as a corporate tax lawyer.  Victor demonstrated in his own unselfconscious way the reasoning skills and sound judgment that a lifetime of lawyering tends to produce, and became an example that I emulate to this day.

When I look at my life as a lawyer, the one stretch during which I felt lost and did not find success was a time when I did not have a mentor.  It was impossible for me to connect with the dedicated lawyers with whom I was working during that time, because my deeply held beliefs were at odds with the kind of work to which they had dedicated their professional lives.  When I picked up again after that difficult time, attorney Tom Waldron was there with friendship and some much needed perspective about being at peace in a system of justice born of conflict and resolved by conflict, if of another kind.  These days Terry Low is my partner, a deeply experienced lawyer whose judgment and counsel provide cover as I build my private practice in a new and complex area of law.

Developing as a lawyer, in other words, is an intensely interpersonal endeavor.  Victor used to tell me that becoming a lawyer changes you, but that it was the kind of change that you could monitor in yourself, maybe even evaluate whether or not you liked the changes.  In my experience we can only do this by establishing relationships with other lawyers that are more than simply professional.  We need to see what a good lawyer looks like, thinks like, writes like and acts like, day in and day out, until being a lawyer becomes a part of our own identities.  Just working with other lawyers is not enough; we stumble blindly without privileged access to a more experienced lawyer’s way of being in the profession.

A lawyer who wants to be special at her craft, capable of elegantly engaging the legal system on behalf of her client, must internalize the myriad and interconnecting facets of lawyering.  She must intuitively grasp not only the law and the facts but also the agendas and perspectives of the other players within the system, to say nothing of the effect of the litigation on her client’s broader life and business goals.  At this level of complexity, we can only ever hope to master our trade by entraining ourselves with our more advanced fellow professionals.  Of course, this is true of many other human endeavors, which I suspect also require the kind of close co-practicing that mentorship entails.  What is striking, though, at this point in my life as a lawyer, is that the nature of the endeavor I have chosen shapes my way of approaching both the human and non-human elements of any given task before me, legal or otherwise.

I will write Vince a recommendation worthy of Victor and my other mentors, and watch him and Brett develop as a people and as lawyers from a vantage point of extreme privilege.

 

11 Rules for the Rest of Us

            There is a post entitled “Bill Gates’ 11 Rules of Life” making its way around the Internet.  The post states that Mr. Gates offered these “11 Rules” at a high school graduation some years ago, and proceeds to list the rules.  Whether Mr. Gates created these rules or not (urbanlegends.about.com says not), the post has gained traction as worthy advice to young graduates from a successful American.

The “11 Rules of Life” basically state that we should accept that life is unfair and not expect things to be handed to us.  Although appealing on some gut level, the rules are ultimately a kind of philosophy of the privileged that leads hard-working people to think and vote against their own self-interest.  What young people need to learn today is not acceptance but critical thinking, especially about why life is unfair and what ordinary Americans are handed in life.  To that end, I offer an alternative to the “Gates” rules, which I will call “11 Rules of Life for the Rest of Us.”

Gates Rule 1: Life is not fair — get used to it!

Rule 1 for the rest of us: Life is not fair – do something about it!  Your voice in the political process is diluted at the polls and the information that you get is distorted by the media.  Your elected leaders answer to donors and lobbyists, not to you.  Investigate things for yourself and then go above, below, around or through your elected leaders in furtherance of your beliefs.

Gates Rule 2: The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 2 for the rest of us: Base your self-esteem on your right to create a world worth living in.  You were born into a world owned and run by others, and you see the poverty, insecurity, greed, war and destruction they have wrought.  Work to create a sustainable world where everyone has a place, so that you don’t have to accomplish something on the backs of others in order to have self-esteem.

Gates Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 3 for the rest of us: You will NOT be a vice-president until you go to college and graduate school, paying for both with tens of thousands of dollars in loans that you will have to pay back, with interest, before you can comfortably buy the status symbols of success.  Your parents could graduate from high school, find a job with a living wage and get on with their lives.  You will begin life in debt and may never catch up or get ahead.

Gates Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 4 for the rest of us:  If you think your teacher is an autocrat training you to obey your future boss, wait till you actually get a boss.  Public schools educate their students in the interest of the common good so that everyone has the opportunity to be an informed citizen.  But in the work world, ‘democracy’ ends at the office or factory door.  Those who have the wealth get to make the decisions, and those who live on wages must submit to their rule.  (As the comedian George Carlin pointed out, this inherent tension is the reason that public schools will never foster the kind of critical thinking that may lead to people changing the rules to benefit the common good and not private interests).

Gates Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping — they called it opportunity.

Rule 5 for the rest of us:  Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity, but it will leave you beneath the poverty line.  Jobs ‘flipping burgers’ pay minimum wage, and minimum wage has never amounted to a living wage.  “Based on a typical, 2,000-hour work year, the 1968 inflation-adjusted minimum wage would equate to an annual salary of $17,080 per year, versus $14,500 for today’s minimum wage.”  (see: www.epi.org/publication/state_of_working_america_preview_the_declining_value_of_minimum_wage/).  The idea that there is an inherent dignity in all kinds of work is real.  The idea that flipping burgers represents an opportunity for anything except subsistence is not.

Gates Rule 6: If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 6 for the rest of us:  If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes.  Instead, accept that they may lead to your financial ruin, unless you are a Wall Street banker, in which case the rest of us will bail you out and you won’t learn from them.  Wall Street bankers made mistakes that wrecked their corporations and the economy in 2008.  They whined to the government, which bailed them out on the backs of the American taxpayers.  Not five years later, banks are bigger than ever, Wall Street bankers are richer than ever, and one of the banks just suffered a $3 billion plus loss making the same kind of ‘mistake.’  Meanwhile, if you make the ‘mistake’ of buying a home during the next real estate bubble, you will likely lose it, and your life savings, when it bursts.  You will likely never recover from that one mistake, and unlike a Wall Street banker, you won’t have the money to get Congress to listen to you whine, let alone bail you out.

Gates Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 7 for the rest of us:  Before you were born, the world wasn’t on the brink of environmental disaster the way it is now.  It got that way because those in power put an economic system in place that requires more and more profits and an ever-growing economy.  They still talk about this unsustainable system in terms of jobs, economic growth, free enterprise and lots of other cool euphemisms.  Your parents may not be parasites, but the rain forest needs saving from the parasitic system that is threatening it and all of us.

Gates Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT.  In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 8 for the rest of us:  Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT.  The best indicator of whether you will be a winner or loser in life is your parents’ economic position.  No matter how MANY TIMES you hear leaders talk about education and opportunity, the fact is that upward mobility is lower in America than in most developed countries. As a result, a child’s economic position is heavily influenced by the economic position of his parents.  (See Wikipedia on Economic Mobility).  There are winners and losers in American life, but the biggest factor determining which one you will be is completely beyond your power to change.

Gates Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

Rule 9 for the rest of us: Life is not divided into semesters anywhere in the world.  You don’t get summers off because employers are not interested in helping you.  That is why governments provide vacation time to employees, at least in every other country worth mentioning.  Even Chinese workers are guaranteed at least 5 days of vacation time.  Iranian workers get a mandatory 4 weeks.  Here in America, though, there is no statutorily required vacation time.  None.  In every other comparable country, you have a right to FIND YOURSELF.  Only in America is it considered a privilege.

Gates Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 10 for the rest of us: Television is NOT real life.  On television people always have jobs or don’t seem to need them.  In real life there are more people than jobs, so no matter what we do, millions of us will always be unemployed.  Television is distraction, so of course there are no shows about the crushing economic and psychological effects of unemployment, or the perpetual anxiety most of us feel at the thought that we might lose our job at any moment.

Gates Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

Rule 11 for the rest of us:  Be nice to the nerds you know, but chances are you won’t end up working for one.  It is a nice myth that Mr. Gates is just a nerd who became rich because he liked computers instead of football.  But it is more determinative of his success that he is white, male, straight and of European descent, and that he comes from a wealthy family (his grandfather was a national bank president, his father was a prominent lawyer and his mother was a director of a financial holding company).  He was also born at the exact right time and place to become who he is (See Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers on this point).  The nerds you know are not nearly as well heeled or as well placed, and they will probably end up working for Bill Gates or someone like him, just like you.

The Newest Conversation, The Latest Money & The Foundations of Self-Governance

We do not live in a democracy.  A democracy is a system of government wherein each person has full and equal power to participate in every decision affecting the state.  In ancient Greece, the only democracy in all of history, every free man (an admittedly small subset of the population) had the right and the responsibility to govern the state.  Though we may never see another democracy, social media-driven protest may provide for more representative government, though the Supreme Court has unleashed forces pulling us in the opposite direction.

Democracy is not an all or nothing proposition.  Even in ancient Greece it was impossible for every free man to participate in every single decision.  Capacity was limited where they conducted the business of the state, so only a certain number of free men were able to participate on any given day.  This points up the obvious fact that there is not, and never can be, a true, full, perfect democracy in the real world.  A state the size of ancient Greece could not manifest that ideal, let alone a modern state the size of America.  The real issue, then, is not whether we live in a democracy or not, but rather how close we are to the ideal of full and equal participation in our collective decision-making.  Understanding democracy this way, as an ideal of self-governance, sets in our minds a sense of the power that each of us rightly possesses in principle, so that we have a standard against which to measure our actual level of self-governance.

This is especially important at this time in our history, when two divergent forces are straining the bonds of our representative government.  On the one hand, instant, worldwide communication now gives citizens a much, much greater ability to influence our elected leaders through mass protests.  There is a new conversation emerging between the government and those who express themselves politically in the streets and by using social media.  Like never before, the government must react and respond in real time to the political expressions designed to influence them.

On the other hand, the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United has opened the door to an unprecedented influence of money in politics, unprecedented even by the standards in America, where the disproportionate influence of the wealthy and powerful is built into the system and exploited as a matter of course and right by those in a position to do so.  We now have a class of super-wealthy individuals and corporations with an essentially unfettered ability to influence elections and elected officials.  At the same time that ordinary citizens are feeling more power than ever to express themselves, by way of protest and the use of social media, the wealthy and powerful have gained the ability to influence political outcomes to an extent never before seen in America.

Regardless of the political decisions facing us at any time, there is always, always a foundational question: who gets to make those decisions.  Democracy may be an unattainable ideal, but self-governance is the cornerstone of political freedom.  We cannot continue to think of ourselves simply as ‘self-governing,’ or as a ‘democracy,’ without understanding how much power each of us, or each group of us, has over the decisions we collectively make.  This knowledge is crucial to understanding why our government makes the decisions that it makes.  It explains the emergence of mass protests and the use of social media as a means of influence, because every protest is at its foundation an expression of disenfranchisement by the protestors.  It also gives us a framework for understanding the effect of money and influence on our leaders and our government.  Ultimately, it is the key to an America where the broadest possible number of people collectively shares political power.

 

 

 

 

Family, Lawyers Beat Odds, Earn Big Win

           Walter Jajuga was thinking of his three children when he opted into a Prudential group life insurance policy at his company back in the 1980’s.  When he became disabled in 1997, he applied for a number of disability benefits, including a waiver of the premium on that group policy, which would allow his children to collect on the policy even though he stopped working.  He was found to be disabled by his employer, by the social security administration, and twice by Prudential itself (in connection with other benefits he had with them).  What he did not learn until years later, just before his death, is that Prudential had denied the waiver application on the group life insurance policy, and failed to give him notice of its decision.  When he died, Prudential refused to pay out the life insurance benefit to Mr. Jajuga’s children.  After fourteen years, three administrative proceedings, a lawsuit in federal district court and an appeal to the First Circuit in Boston, Mr. Jajuga’s children will receive their inheritance, with interest, thanks to a team of local lawyers who took on the insurance giant and won.

            When attorneys Terrence Low, Anthony Canata, Andy Kralios and Susan Sachs teamed up last fall to take the case to the First Circuit, the odds of winning – and getting paid – were slim.  But they believed in the case and relished the idea of taking on Prudential and its team of lawyers from all over the country.  So they began meeting every week in the wood-paneled conference room at Attorney Low’s office, researching, writing and editing a brief that would make their case to the lofty Justices of the First Circuit in Boston.

Attorney Low explained, “I put together a team of lawyers that I thought were smart, dedicated and willing to take on a case because it was the right thing to do even if we didn’t have much chance of success.  Judge Ponser is very well respected, and with good reason.  Getting the Circuit Court to overturn his decision was a long shot.”

The team met every week to discuss their progress over sandwiches from the Cornerstone Café, editing the brief, discussing the best ways to make their argument and grappling with the details that go into a complex legal brief for submission to one of the highest courts in the land.  “It was practicing law the way you hope to practice it when you decide to go to law school,” Attorney Canata said.  “You have a case you believe in where the odds are against you and the issues are complex, but you get to work with some dedicated people and try to make a difference.”

Their teamwork paid off in January, when the First Circuit overturned Judge Ponser’s decision and ordered Prudential to pay out the $300,000 life insurance policy at issue.  In announcing the decision, the Circuit Court cited Prudential’s violations of ERISA regulations, chastised it for ‘conjuring’ up new defenses in litigation, and found for Attorney Low’s client in part based on the ‘unexplained inconsistency’ in the company’s disability determinations – all arguments put forth by the team of lawyers from Springfield.  “It was a great decision from our perspective,” said Attorney Kralios.  “We felt vindicated when the Court said that we were right about the law, and went on to make the findings of fact that we thought were there from the beginning.  These kinds of cases are extremely difficult to overturn on appeal.”

With their first circuit win in hand, the attorneys returned to the local, Springfield District Court, this time to ask Judge Ponsor to award attorney fees and interest on the $300,000 policy benefit.  Judge Ponsor granted their motion in its entirety, allowing the Jajugas to collect the entire benefit, with interest, and ordering Prudential to pay the attorney fees that otherwise would have come out of the benefit.

For the Jajugas and their attorneys, the win set right an injustice fourteen years in the making.  But it also may help other, similarly situated plaintiffs to prevail.  In reaching its decision, the court rejected Prudential’s argument that the insurance policy at issue had a different definition of the term ‘disabled’ than the policies in which it awarded benefits.  Attorney Sachs, a lawyer who takes on these kinds of cases frequently, believes that the decision may put insurance giants on notice that they cannot blithely dismiss their own, or another agency’s, findings of disability when making disability determinations.  Attorney Sachs summed it up best: “We were right, and we prevailed in a way that left nothing to interpretation.  And that is a really gratifying feeling for a lawyer, one of the best a lawyer can have in the practice of law.”

The End Of Free Market Politics

The rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement signals the end of free market economics as the driving force in American politics.  Since Milton Friedman’s free market ideas starting becoming economic policy during the Nixon administration, we have largely seen political questions through the lens of economic policy, specifically free market policy.  For a generation our political leaders have deregulated in the name of economic prosperity and our national health has been measured in terms of overall economic growth.  We see now, however, that though our economic policies determine the health of our economy, the health of our democracy depends on the fairness of our economic policies.

If you have read The Shock Doctrine, you have followed the tragic arc of Friedman’s “Chicago School” economic policies.  The myth is that selling off the common assets of a nation to private enterprises and deregulating finance and business leads to efficient economies and material progress.  The reality is that the rich and powerful use Chicago School economics to justify the transfer of public wealth into their pockets and to justify their conducting business without regard for the public good.  The system begins from a corrupt concept, namely that the expansion of private property and the deregulation of finance and business are morally neutral decisions.  It leads, inevitable, to a culture of corruption, because it is in the nature of unregulated businesses to exploit for profit when nobody is watching.

It is obvious to anyone who has been paying attention that Chicago School economic theories make for disastrous moral outcomes.  What is also true, however, is that such morally abhorrent policies can only come into being in a country where the rich and powerful unduly influence political and economic policies.  In terms that any free market proponent would understand, no country of millions would support a system that enriches the few and impoverishes the many if everyone had equal influence over economic policies and if everyone was acting in a rational, self-interested manner.  To successfully implement an economic system with such unfair outcomes within a ‘democracy,’ then, there must be undue influence over the elected leaders by the few who stand to be the winners.  In other words, the system must be corrupt.

It is no surprise, then, that 30 years into its experiment with free market economics and deregulation, Americans have lost faith in their political and financial leaders.  The growing political unrest is not so much because our economic policies have derailed the economy.  It is rather that the rich and powerful have derailed our democracy, a fact that has come to light during the financial crisis.

Democracy implies, at the very least, that each and every citizen has a full and equal share in making the decisions that affect our lives.  In a healthy democracy, the economic policies must logically benefit a majority of the people.  An economic policy that results in a wildly skewed distribution of wealth in favor of the very rich indicates either an ignorant electorate or a corrupt system, or both.  The answer to our current crisis in American politics is not higher taxes, growing the economy, increased government spending or corporate tax cuts to provide or spur economic growth.  The only real answer is to fix our corrupt democracy.  The only way to ensure a moral economic policy is to guarantee each and every citizen a full and equal share in deciding our political and economic policies.