Beyond Accupy

Since I was passing through India on a reporting project, I decided to drop in on Anna Hazare, the anticorruption campaigner whose admirers speak of him as the reincarnation of Gandhi. Kisan Baburao Hazare (“Anna” is a Marathi honorific meaning “older brother”) has been a figure in provincial Indian affairs for decades, but he galvanized attention this year when his threat to fast to the death shamed the government into endorsing reforms. I wondered what Hazare, as an exemplar of a venerable style of civil pressure, made of Occupy Wall Street.

Back home, the Occupiers have been pandered to (“Love your energy!”); patronized (“Here, I’ve drafted you a list of demands ...”); co-opted by unions, celebrities and activists for various causes; demonized by the right; arrested and tear-gassed in some cities; and taken lightly by the likes of me. They have been a combination national mood ring and political Rorschach test. Perhaps by consulting someone who is a serious candidate for the pantheon of protest, I thought, I could sharpen my own understanding of what the Occupy project means.

About the time I put in my request for an interview, Hazare, exhausted by his latest hunger strike and weary of the media melodramas that have bedeviled his team, announced that he had taken an indefinite “vow of silence.” This raised questions in my mind — Was he planning to continue his protest as a mime? — but of course I had little hope of getting answers from him because ... well, you see the problem.

So I went to visit his associate, Kiran Bedi, who battled for reforms as India’s first policewoman before joining Hazare. Bedi speaks with the intense energy of a high-voltage circuit. No vow of silence for her. And it turned out the subject of Occupy Wall Street has been very much on the minds of Team Anna.

For those who haven’t been following the story, Hazare, 74, is a small landowner’s son with a seventh-grade education, a middle-class background by Indian standards of the time. He first gained some attention by using his army pension to help turn his ancestral village in Maharashtra into a model of rural development — building schools, organizing a dairy cooperative, fighting caste discrimination and alcoholism. One of his early successes as an organizer was a state law that required a vote on banning alcohol in a village if 25 percent of the women — the suffering wives of the indolent and abusive drunks — demanded it.

In his younger days he was given to vigilante tactics — smashing illegal stills, flogging drunks — but in his 60s he adopted the time-honored Indian pressure tactic of the indefinite fast, which, when it works, succeeds through a combination of public fascination and official shame. The political fast has a rich history in societies like India and Ireland that have some experience of starvation and an acute public sense of honor. I can’t imagine it catching on in America, especially if our national compassion is reflected in the likes of Ron (“Let Them Die on the Hospital Doorstep”) Paul and Herman (“If You’re Not Rich, It’s Your Own Fault”) Cain. But in India it is an effective form of coercion. One poll found 87 percent public support for Hazare’s 12-day August fast, and his hunger strikes almost always end in concessions.

Obviously, India is not America, but both countries were born in popular protest (against the same empire) and I found it instructive to examine my Occupying countrymen from this vantage point.

Like Occupy Wall Street, Hazare embodies a national frustration with broken democratic institutions. Indeed, India’s government makes our paralyzed Congress look nimble. Like Occupy, Hazare’s grand grievance is the wholesale diversion of wealth from the middle class and poor to the unworthy few — in India’s case through payoffs, patronage and thievery, in America’s through tax and regulatory policies that have expanded the gap between the richest few and everyone else.

In many telling respects, however, that’s where the similarities end.

“When we started the movement, it was like Occupy,” Bedi told me. “But we went beyond Occupy.”

For starters, while Occupy Wall Street is consensus-oriented and resolutely leaderless, Hazare is very much the center of attention. There was an anticorruption movement before Hazare, but it was fractious and weak until he supplied a core of moral authority. When he announces his intention to starve himself, he parks himself on an elevated platform in a public place, thousands gather, scores of others announce solidarity hunger strikes, and TV cameras congregate, hanging on his every word. Hazare and his entourage can seem self-important and high-handed, but he is a reminder that leadership matters.

Second, the Occupiers are a composite of idealistic causes, many of them vague. “End the Fed,” some placards demand. “End War.” “Get the money out of politics.” Much of the Occupy movement resides at the dreamy level of John Lennon lyrics. “Imagine no possessions. ...”

Hazare, in contrast, is always very explicit about his objectives: fire this corrupt minister, repeal that law bought by a special interest, open public access to official records.

His current mission is the creation of a kind of national anticorruption czar, a powerful independent ombudsman. The measure is advancing, and Team Anna hovers over the Parliament at every step, paying close attention to detail, to make sure nobody pulls the teeth out of it. Instead of a placard, Bedi has a PowerPoint presentation.

Occupy Wall Street is scornful of both parties and generally disdainful of electoral politics. Team Anna (yes, they call themselves that) likewise avoids aligning itself with any party or candidate, but it uses Indian democracy shrewdly, to target obstructionists. Recently Hazare turned a special election for a vacant parliamentary seat into a referendum, urging followers to vote against any party that refused to endorse his anticorruption bill. Hazare has also called for an amendment to the election laws to require that voters always be offered the option of “None of the Above.” When it prevails, parties would have to come up with better candidates.

“What really changes them,” Bedi said of recalcitrant politicians, “is the threat of losing an election.”

The Occupation has at least a strong undercurrent of anticapitalism. Not in India. An attempt to spark an Indian offshoot of Occupy Wall Street — a Facebook campaign branded with pictures of Che Guevara — went pretty much nowhere. Capitalism is one thing most Indians believe in; indeed, as my colleagues in the Delhi bureau have been illustrating in a fascinating series of articles this year, the entire economy is a great capitalist workaround. Hazare’s aim is to stop a political class from usurping the fruits of capitalism.

“We’re not anticapitalism,” Bedi told me. “We’re pro-integrity.”

I UNDERSTAND that it is not the job of a protest to draft legislation, to elect candidates, to agree on a 10-point plan for fixing what ails us. But that does not mean the job of fixing what ails us is any less urgent or admirable. At some point you need the unglamorous business of government, which entails not consensus but hard choices and reasoned compromise. The job of protest is to mobilize a mood — but to mobilize it with purpose.

“Occupy has been, to my mind, an engaging movement, and it’s driving home the message, to the banks, to the Wall Street circles,” Bedi said. “That’s exactly the way Anna did it. But we had a destination. I’m not aware these people — what is their destination? It’s occupy for what?”

I’m prepared to celebrate when the Occupiers — like the lone hunger artist of India — accomplish something more than organizing their own campsite cleanup, demonstrating their tolerance for tear gas, and distracting the conversation a little from the Tea Party. So far, the main achievement of Occupy Wall Street is showing up.

A Duty of Effective Counsel

The vast majority of criminal cases are resolved by plea bargains: 94 percent in state courts, 97 percent in federal. For defendants, accepting a prosecutor’s plea deal is less risky than going to trial and possibly being convicted on a more serious charge with a stiffer sentence.

Defendants offered plea deals need effective counsel to ensure that their decisions are well founded and voluntary, not coerced. Under the Sixth Amendment, theSupreme Court said last year, a plea is legitimate only if a defendant has had assistance of counsel while considering it.

In a case before the court on Monday, Galin Frye of Missouri clearly lacked effective counsel at a crucial stage in the felony case against him for driving with a revoked license. The state presented his lawyer a choice of pleas: Mr. Frye could plead guilty to the felony and the prosecutor would ask the judge that he serve 10 days in jail; or he could plead guilty to a misdemeanor, with a request he serve 90 days, although his sentence could be a year.

The lawyer did not tell Mr. Frye about the offer. Three months later, after the offer expired, Mr. Frye pleaded guilty to the felony and was sentenced to three years in prison. A month later, with Mr. Frye in jail, his new lawyer learned about the plea offer. Mr. Frye said he would have taken the misdemeanor deal. He made a motion in a Missouri court to withdraw his guilty plea, which was denied. The Missouri Court of Appeals reversed that ruling.

The state brought the case to the Supreme Court, arguing that Mr. Frye should serve the sentence he was given because he voluntarily pleaded guilty. It contends that since there is no right to a plea bargain, the lawyer’s failure to communicate the offer did not deprive Mr. Frye of any constitutional right. The Supreme Court should reject this bad analysis, which the Justice Department unwisely supports. The lawyer’s inexcusable failure to inform Mr. Frye of the plea offer affected the legal process and deprived him of a critical choice.

A few states require that plea offers be made in the presence of the defendant, but Missouri did not have that procedural safeguard. The Constitution’s guarantee of effective counsel requires that a defendant be informed of important developments. That protection means little if it does not include a right to know about plea offers.

Flat Taxes and Angry Voters

By wide margins, Americans are now telling pollsters they want a tax system that raises more money and is more fair by asking the rich to pay more. They are connecting the dots between the lavish high-end tax cuts of the past decade and today’s serious problems — including widening inequality and mounting deficits — and demanding change. The Republican presidential candidates aren’t listening.

Take the flat tax plan of Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. For all his talk about how it would make filing easier — that is dubious — what it would really do is give high-income Americans a big tax break, while almost everyone else could expect relatively modest tax savings or none at all.

In his plan, taxpayers could choose to stick with the current system or use the flat tax, under which wages and salary would be taxed at 20 percent, versus a current top rate of 35 percent for the affluent. Investment income and multimillion-dollar estates would be untaxed, versus a current top rate of 15 percent on most investments and 35 percent on estates.

In a recent interview with The Times and CNBC, Mr. Perry said “I don’t care” about criticisms that the plan is a giveaway to the rich. He expressed the magical belief that more and bigger high-end tax cuts would spur economic growth and generate significant new tax revenues.

That’s a fairy tale, of course, and one that the conservative Republicans who vote in primaries love to hear. The rest of the country is feeling a lot more skeptical.

According to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, nearly 70 percent of Americans say that Congressional Republicans’ policies favor the rich and that they oppose lowering taxes for large corporations. Two-thirds polled say that wealth should be distributed more evenly; a similar share wants to increase taxes on millionaires, not cut them. In a previous Times/CBS poll from August, a majority of Americans also wanted to use tax increases to close the deficit, rather than rely only on spending cuts.

Mr. Perry has not provided the details necessary to independently analyze the plan’s impact, but economists of the right and left agree that it would be a huge revenue loser. Mr. Perry’s main prescription for dealing with the deficit is to slash government spending down to a level last seen in the 1960s — before programs like Medicare, Pell grants and Head Start had kicked in and long before the baby boom generation was facing retirement.

Of course, Mr. Perry isn’t the only Republican contender calling for cutting taxes on the rich and gutting the government’s ability to pay for important programs. Herman Cain’s “9-9-9” plan is a variant on the flat tax; Newt Gingrich supports a flat tax roughly similar to Mr. Perry’s.

Mitt Romney has not endorsed a flat tax, and in 1996, when Steve Forbes, then a presidential candidate, floated one, Mr. Romney derided it — justifiably — as a “tax cut for fat cats.” But he is in favor of extending the Bush-era tax cuts and cutting taxes on investments and on corporations. And to tame deficits, he has called for hard spending caps, a tool that could lead to indiscriminate and overly harsh cutting.

President Obama has a better plan, but it is only a start. He has called for closing some corporate loopholes, ending the high-end Bush-era tax cuts and capping the value of tax deductions for high-income Americans. Importantly, he would use the new revenue to both finance needed government spending and reduce the deficit.

The country also needs a comprehensive reform of the tax system, one that strengthens progressivity and raises more revenue from a mix of sources. All of the needed revenue — to meet health care needs; to improve education, infrastructure and security; to foster new technologies and protect the environment — cannot be raised from rich Americans, nor from the income tax alone.

It is encouraging that after reflexively rejecting tax increases for so long, more Americans are recognizing that, in fact, incessant tax cutting is largely to blame for the nation’s fragile condition, and that new taxes are part of the solution. If only more politicians would catch up.