Ezra Klein, in a really nice piece on our failing political institutions (via newsweek)Sen. Michael Bennett, a Democrat from Colorado, is an expert at assessing and repairing failing institutions. He began in the world of corporate debt restructuring and recently ran Denver’s public schools. The difficulty with saving troubled organizations, he says, is that the creditors and interests fight over the remains rather than banding together to nurse the body back to health. “Every one of those negotiations was about getting people to see their self-interest in moving the institution forward,” he recalls.
Last year he was appointed to the United States Senate. After a year in the body, what he sees looks uncomfortably familiar: a culture of mistrust in an institution that requires radical transformation. Stakeholders ferociously trying to eke out every last advantage, and in doing so, destroying the very thing they all have a stake in.
