Quotes from Sarah Chayes

The whole thing was a lavishly funded laboratory experiment in the Reagan-era unfettered pro-business principles that the Clinton administration was validating. Harvard, with its liberal reputation, added to the validation. Simultaneously across Asia and Latin America, similar experiments were being launched. Unfortunately, the grotesque virus that resulted did not stay sealed inside the post-Soviet laboratory.

Trump has taken mafia government to heights unrivaled in this country's history. His swiftness to trade U.S. policy concessions for personal advancement will be the most shameful legacy of his presidency.

Consider the implications. Last time humanity was locked onto this course, it led to the collapse of the global economy and two world wars—and genocide, starvation, plague, and the detonation of nuclear bombs that wiped some 200,000 human beings off the earth and gave us the power to end our species. What manner of calamity lies ahead of us now?

Objective thirteen on the Knights of Labor's 1876 platform was "to secure for both sexes equal pay for equal work." Women were seen and heard on the front lines, and were revered by embattled workingmen.

That is a wonderful state of affairs for kleptocrats. Waving a red or blue flag, they hold on to camps of ardent loyalists while betraying them to serve the network instead. Most Americans disapprove of policies that benefit the superrich at everyone else's expense. Both parties pursue such policies. We find reasons to vote our colors anyway, or opt out of the conversation.

This effervescence was on boisterous display in the big cities, magnets as they were for talent and ambition of all kinds. Here, labor unionism most closely overlapped with a second current of defiance against the Gilded Age system: revolutionary political movements such as socialism of various stripes, or anarchism.

When the hydra manipulates our loyalties, let's recognize the tactic. We might explore how the networks of a previous era, bent on personal enrichment, deliberately invented and kept enflaming the same identity categories we fixate on today. We might explore how those outside our camp, and their ancestors, were mauled too.

Members of today's kleptocratic networks who incorporate companies under fictitious or borrowed names are using a modern screening allegory on law enforcement and the public. Only initiates learn where the money comes from, how much there really is, and how much is being stolen from fellow citizens in the form of unpaid taxes. One entity has been particularly effective in its use of secrecy: the Koch network.

If these men wished to influence ideas and public policies, why the secrecy? Isn't that what people do in a democracy? In a 1997 speech, Charles Koch provided an answer: "We are greatly outnumbered." Meaning, most Americans don't want what they want. Democracy can't work for them.

To cement the solidarity of their hunting parties, says Boehm, so all members would keep participating in the arduous and risky expeditions, members shared equally whatever meat they bagged—no matter who had delivered the death blow that day, or who had fashioned the spearpoint.

The group within the cloak of secrecy is superior to the rest. Those not eligible for initiation are at best inferiors. They may be the enemy.

The euphoria lasted only days. Chicago's elites had been beefing up public and private security forces for years. On May 3, police shot strikers at the gates to the McCormick harvester factory.

There is no magic formula, no step-by-step method for bringing the hydras that are laying waste to our societies under control.

Like a drug, money can make its addicts betray almost anyone.

For example, executives and HR departments should not offer the vice president of Enron a string of government jobs in the public-private international development and infrastructure industries after his company's debacle.

A ratchet-up would be to expel violators like him from powerful jobs they currently hold if the wrongdoing continues or their contracts come up for renewal. The next notch would be to take their freedom—that is, to investigate, prosecute, and send them to jail. That option terrifies the dominator coalition. Why else would it have worked so hard for thirty years to eliminate it?

Militant political religion as the only alternative to corruption. That was just the nexus I had seen in the Taliban's appeal in Afghanistan, and in the frequent presence of extremist insurgencies in other acutely corrupt countries. Public integrity, the proposition seemed to be, could only emerge through the rigid purity of religious practice—imposed by law if need be, or savage violence.

A third principle comes not from ancient Greece, but from the Farmers' Alliance. It is the importance of ideas, the need for independent analysis, developed and transmitted in a constant exchange with and among neighbors, and the need to teach it actively. Too much dogma, unquestioned across the political spectrum—such as that unlimited growth is a sign of health—serves to reinforce the business model of the kleptocrats, or to distract us from it.