Planting Liberally

Join Boston Drinking Liberally for a book event with Justin Krebs, this Wednesday night!

What does it take to be a liberal? Do you need to read the New York Times every morning? Drink shade-grown, fair-trade, organic coffee at your local worker-owned coffee shop every afternoon? Follow a strictly vegan diet? Raise your children in a sex-positive, gender-neutral, non-authoritarian environment? If you've ever been a liberal, voted for a liberal, or hung around other liberals, chances are you've rubbed shoulders with one of these lifestyle choices, or their close cousins. Chances are, you've probably heard snide remarks about these kinds of things - whether from your conservative friends or self-deprecating liberals. In fact, it wasn't that long ago when being a liberal was a lonely hobby in many parts of the country.

That was why, in 2003, Justin Krebs and Matt O'Neill founded the first chapter of Drinking Liberally, a politically-themed drinking club that met once a week at Rudy's, a little neighborhood joint in Hell's Kitchen. Their humble goal was to encourage their pals, their neighbors, and anyone else who happened to stop by, to feel comfortable discussing politics in a social situation, and to get involved in politics. Seven years later, Drinking Liberally has grown far beyond its humble intentions. There are hundreds of Drinking Liberally groups across the country (and a few across the globe). There are Reading Liberally book clubs, Screening Liberally film clubs, and Eating Liberally cooking clubs.

Of course, there are many ways to live out your liberal values besides joining a Drinking Liberally or Reading Liberally group. In fact, there are at least 538 Ways to Live, Work, and Play Like a Liberal, according to Krebs. This book isn't just a laundry-list of tasks to complete on the road to becoming some sort of ideal liberal, though. Instead, it's a creative look at liberalism, a manual for community-oriented fun, and a great way to turn an abstract political ideology into a vibrant and enriching way of life.

538 Ways breaks down its daunting list of liberal lifestyle choices in a handful of chapters, encompassing Everyday Life, Work, Play, Learning, Spending, and Acting. The breadth of suggestions is a striking testimony to the breadth of the liberal worldview. You can live liberally by inviting a neighbor over for dinner, volunteering at a local soup kitchen, investing in a socially-responsible mutual fund, or raising your children in a religion which emphasizes gender equality, to name just a few approaches.

What's particularly great about the book is its emphasis that you don't have to do it all to be a liberal. Indeed, the book suggests all sorts of mutually-contradictory steps you can take - like driving a hybrid car and using public transportation - that would make that impossible. Too often, liberals are bombarded with pressure to check off every imaginable alternative-lifestyle-choice under the sun. Forget that!

Krebs highlights the messy, chaotic, dizzyingly entertaining world-view that is liberalism. One bit I found particularly amusing was his re-telling of the founding of Reading Liberally, the book club program that started as an appendage to Drinking Liberally. At first, the Drinking Liberally crew thought they could have a "book of the month" that every Reading Liberally book club would read once a month. The chapter hosts (including, if memory serves properly, yours truly) rebelled against this tyrannical, top-down approach, instead insisting on the freedom to choose their own books each month. Those same chapter hosts soon learned that turnabout as fair play; in several cities the book club members rebelled against the top-down insistence that everyone in the club read the same book every month. That's liberalism in a nutshell - creative, independent, and utterly unpredictable.

The book also has a lot of great suggestions for anyone who likes to read books, listen to music, or watch movies. It's peppered with lists of the great liberal classics, ranging from Chuck D to The Shock Doctrine. Even the most seasoned and dyed-in-the-wool liberal will find a few things hear she hasn't heard of before.

Best of all, the book includes some helpful tips that might make you a bit healthier, wealthier, or friendlier. It's not that difficult to bring an extra thermos of coffee in to the office, but who among us has stopped to think about it? In an age when jumbo-sized McBanks have the run of the marketplace, patronizing a small local bank or credit union might just help keep you financially solvent. And staying away from red meat - even just one day a week - could help you lead a long and health life.

Having been a liberal for as long as I can remember, I enjoyed 538 Ways tremendously. It was a great reminder of why I'm a liberal in the first place - because liberalism is simply a more enjoyable, more connected, more exciting wordldview and way of life than its narrow and stingy conservative cousin. Pick up this book, and then pass it along to your partner, or your co-worker, or your neighbor - and then start a Reading Liberally book club (or, if you live near Boston, join us this Wednesday) to discuss it!

Disclosure: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from Skyhorse Publishing. Justin Krebs and I went to college together, and I am the host of Drinking Liberally Boston.

Join Progressive Harvard Alums on Facebook today!

If you graduated from Harvard University, chances are you've received ballots for the upcoming Board of Overseers and Alumni Association elections. Chances are, if you haven't tossed the largely bland candidate statements out already, you're probably largely clueless about the candidates. Which candidates are progressive, which are stealth conservatives, and which ones are simply apolitical? It's difficult to tell.

I've had the same questions since I graduated college, and this year I decided to try something in order to help myself cast something like an educated ballot: I started Progressive Harvard Alums, a Facebook group which is, for starters, dedicated to discussing the candidates in this election. To get things started, I just posted a note analyzing the political donor data from opensecrets.org, for each candidate for Board of Overseers; I'll follow up soon with another post for the Alumni Association. After the ballots are cast in this year's election, I hope the group will grow into something a bit more long-lasting and general-interest - a hub for Harvard alums who want to make their university a more progressive place.

If you're a Harvard alum, I hope you'll join the group. If not, I encourage you start your own progressive alum group today! Even if you don't get to vote for university leadership, there are bound to be other ways you can make a difference at your alma mater.

If you're going to be in the Boston area next Wednesday, join Drinking Liberally and Women Action Media! for a book event with Tracy Van Slyke and Jessica Clark! RSVP here.

Beyond the Echo Chamber, by Tracy Van Slyke and Jessica Clark, is a groundbreaking new book for anyone who is concerned with the state of political media, journalism, or civic activism. It's also a useful handbook for progressives who want to be heard and make change, as well as a fascinating perspective on the changes in the world of professional media and journalism.

The book chronicles the rise of the new world of progressive media, circa 2004 - 2008. Having worked together at In These Times, the authors were deeply involved in the story they are telling. The Bush years were a boon to traditional progressive publications like In These Times, which saw their circulation numbers jump. They were also a time of energetic creativity and growth among progressive activists of all stripes, forming all sorts of new organizations that challenged traditional conventions in the media world. Van Slyke and Clark describe some of these organizations and the characters behind the screens, as well as the lessons learned along the way. They conclude with several important strategies that progressive media organizations should consider for their future work.

It may be difficult to remember now, but the 2004 election was a moment of deep introspection for the progressive movement. Probably as a result of the dramatic propaganda campaign that gave us the Iraq War, many progressives finally understood just how seriously inadequate the progressive media infrastructure was, compared to the conservative media machine. A whole host of bloggers, big-shot Democrats, traditional media organizations, and front-line activists got in the act of analyzing the problem and prescribing solutions. The immediate result of all that talk was a bunch of some seriously sweet charts - many of which, like the one at right, are reproduced in Beyond the Echo Chamber. The other, probably more important, result was an outpouring of progressive media activism and experimentation.

There are probably too many important experiments in progressive media and activism to count, but a few stand out. Perhaps the most well-known (and most financially troubled) was Air America Radio. The network was an early attempt to duplicate the success of conservatives in broadcasting their message across the radio airwaves. Lacking sufficient funds and without a deep stable of radio talent, it was never able to get sufficient distribution, and it ultimately failed in January of this year. Nevertheless, it was, arguably, the incubator for Al Franken's successful bid for the Senate, and it certainly propelled Rachel Maddow to MSNBC, and Cenk Uygur and The Young Turks to prominence on YouTube and on Sirius Satellite Radio.

A happier, and in many ways more interesting, story, is the evolution of Talking Points Memo, which grew from a one-person blog into a well-staffed community blog. TPM has seen many successes in its day, but perhaps the most interesting was with the US Attorneys firing scandal, in which TPM rigorously pursued a fishy story from the start. In order to dig deeper into the story, TPM asked its members to do research on potentially politically-inspired firings that would only show up in local papers. A combination of good footwork and journalistic intuition on the part of Josh Marshall, the stunning example of high-impact crowdsourced journalism ultimately led to the resignation of Attorney General Gonzales, who was at one time a rising star in Republican ranks.

One final example, which is either exciting or troubling depending on your point of view, emerged from the Off the Bus project. Established by Arianna Huffington and Jay Rosen, the project was an attempt to turn ordinary citizen-activists into small-time reporters. Volunteers throughout the country attended events on the presidential campaign trail and wrote up reports on what the candidates said; the results were aggregated and curated on the Off the Bus website. The goal was to produce an on-the-ground summary of the presidential campaign, unfiltered through the usual cast of traditional media reporters who traveled with the candidate (i.e., on the candidate's bus). Off the Bus's biggest scoop was a quote caught by Obama supporter Mayhill Fowler, who attended a campaign fundraiser where Obama spoke about people living in economically depressed rural towns who "cling to guns or religion". The quote was a major blow to the Obama campaign, and it also caused quite a stir in the world of journalism, where (according to Michael Tomasky, editor at large of the Guardian American), professional ethics would normally prevent a journalist from quoting a candidate during an off-the-record donor event.

These are only a few of the many fascinating experiments described in Beyond the Echo Chamber. Others include the masterful grassroots work done to defend the Jena Six, and the emergence of Color of Change; the savvy documentary work of Brave New Films; and the multi-platform campaign that was Get Fisa Right. Together they paint a picture of a progressive movement that is creative, energetic, and rapidly evolving to use emerging media technologies.

Making sense of this hodge-podge of stories, Van Slyke and Clark list "six strategies for high-impact progressive media", which are:

1. Build network-powered media, which both facilitates person-to-person organizing and brings institutions together to complement one another's core strengths;
2. Fight the right with bold messaging and by picking on high-profile targets, like Bill O'Reilly;
3. Embrace twenty-first century muckraking, as Josh Marshall has done;
4. Take an active role in legislative fights (or, in their words, "Take it to the hill"), blending activism and journalism;
5. Assemble the progressive choir, creating communities where progressive activists can gather and inciting them to action on key issues, as FireDogLake has done;
6. Move beyond "pale, male, and stale" by actively integrating the non-white, female, and less-than-dead-serious voices into the media landscape, as Cenk Uygur has done.

Having spent a great deal of time reading and thinking about the role of progressive organizational capacity in electoral and legislative campaigns, I've been waiting for a book like this for a long, long time. It's a big-picture look at what we as a movement have done right, and what we've done wrong, over the past few years, and what more we need to do to go stronger in the future. We can learn a lot of good lessons by taking a step back from the daily back-and-forth of political action, and I think that's too rare a practice by far. To be sure, this is only the tip of the iceberg, as we've not yet really harnessed the potential power of mobile technology, we are still struggling with the identity crisis created by the Obama campaign and administration. We need more creativity and more experimentation, and this book is a valuable guide to doing just that.

Disclosure: Van Slyke's organization, The Media Consortium, contracted with my company for a project in 2008. I also received a complimentary copy of the book from The New Press.

In a way, the fact that a public option wasn't included in the health care reform law is a great opportunity for progressives. It would have been preferable to include the public option in the original law, without a doubt. And it would would certainly be nice to pass a public option during a second round of budget reconciliation in this session of Congress - but I'm not holding my breath. Nevertheless, defeat in this session may be a blessing in disguise, since progressive Democrats now have a clear and popular issue they can, and should, rally around for the mid-term elections.

The polling forecast for Democrats in the mid-term elections has been looking rather miserable for a while now, both in the House and in the Senate, and while there appears to be a health care bounce, it's too early to say whether that will be long-lived, or whether it will be enough to revive Democratic election prospects.

But whatever happens to Congressional Democrats, fighting for the public option in the mid-term elections is a good short-term strategy for progressives. What's more, it may yield significant long-term benefits as well. More in the extended entry.

Short term - an easy sell, a tight spot, and maybe some better policy

The public option has always been one of the most popular provisions of the health care reform bill. Notwithstanding the Senate vote-counting, opinion polls regularly showed the public option with plenty of popular support, even in the midst of last summer's heated conservative protests. Much was made of a poll last fall which showed plenty of trouble for Blanche Lincoln if she voted against the public option, because Arkansas voters wanted it. Of course, the popularity of the public option makes perfect sense, given the historic, third-rail popularity of Medicare - the public option is just a more universally-accessible version of Medicare. Alan Grayson's let-anyone-buy-Medicare bill would just take that idea to its logical conclusion; it's also a handy bill for progressive Democrats to rally around this year.

It should be easy to sell the public something we know they already want, but running on the public option is even easier than that, from a campaign mechanics point of view. Removed from the broader goal of health care reform, the public option policy is easy to explain, and the benefits to voters are immediately apparent. The message is clear: if enough progressive Democrats are elected, then everyone will have the choice to buy into the public option (or Medicare). The ability to buy into Medicare should be a tantalizing promise for anyone sick of health care insurance bureaucracy, worried about unemployment, or considering leaving their current job to strike out on their own; in other words, it should be enormously popular.

What's more, running on the public option puts both Republicans and corporatist Democrats in an unfavorable position. Republicans are universally opposed to the public option, and requiring them to oppose it during election season should dampen the built-in advantage they will have for being the opposition party during a recession. Corporatist Democrats, who are opposed to the public option but afraid to say so directly, are stuck with a variety of poor messaging choices. They can ignore the public option alternative altogether and try to defend the health care law as it stands; they can try a host of lame excuses; or they can lie outright about their support for a public option.

Taking the offense on the public option also allows progressive Democrats to avoid a defensive posture, which is, oddly enough, what seems to be evolving as the message after this week's victory. Democrats appear poised to defend the health care law, with messages that run the gambit from publishing lists of benefits the law confers right away (and by contrast drawing attention to the benefits the law does not confer immediately, most notably a public option), to noting the law's roots in conservative think tanks (and thereby undermining the message that this law is a Democratic victory, and that Democrats deserve re-election by extension.) Democrats will certainly be forced into a defensive posture on the economy, and while there are some signs of improvement, we are still a far cry from recovery; economic misery is likely to be a hot topic in the elections, regardless of how the economic indicators pan out. (Indeed, running on the public option can be paired well with an approach that takes the offensive on jobs.)

To be sure, running on the public option is not without its risks. There is a very real danger that voters are experiencing "health care fatigue" after a long, drawn-out battle, which, we've just been told, is over and done. More than that, the public option issue is close enough to the third rail of Medicare that candidates will have to be careful not to appear to be endangering Medicare; questions about Medicare solvency and the cost and logistics of expanding the problem will have to be answered. Finally, candidates standing up for the public option may well face a donor blackout, or other forms of blowback, from Obama and the DNC, and potentially from other Democratic interest groups.

The best outcome of the 2010 elections would be a Democratic Congress with a majority progressive faction, and with progressives in key positions of leadership. Obviously, the idea of running on the public option is designed to deliver that outcome. But even if it fails numerically, the public option campaign could still succeed by creating ripple effects in 2011-2012.

To begin with, the public option campaign may create enough pressure to actually pass the legislation in the next session of Congress. We came very, very close to enacting a public option this year, with a solid bloc of supporters in the House and majority support in the Senate. We lost the fight for a whole variety of reasons, but the point is that one or two primary defeats, or even one or two solid but unsuccessful primary challenges, may well be enough to frighten wavering votes in the next session.

Furthermore, the public option campaign could be an effective shot across the bow of the Obama administration and Democratic leadership. It would send a message that economically populist federal policy can be successful at the ballot box. That, in turn, could create a more explicitly jobs-oriented recovery, and it might even be enough to help the White House break loose of its disturbing taste for policy-by-corporate-agreement. With any luck, we could have a more equitable and broadly shared recovery by 2012 - just in time to rescue the Obama administration from itself.

Long term - forging a progressive identity and preparing for mandates

Even supposing that the public option campaign doesn't get much traction in 2010, progressive Democrats should still continue to press for the policy into the future.

The most immediate reason for pursuing the public option is that it can help progressive Democrats defend themselves against what is sure to be considerable ire once the individual mandates take effect. Government mandates to purchase a private product are never a good idea, and that is doubly true when the private product is largely unpopular, bureaucratic, and inefficient. The public option is the proper counter-balance to individual mandates, since it allows individuals to obey the law by participating in a program over which they have control and ownership. If progressives are unsuccessful in enacting a public option by the time the individual mandates kick in - and let's hope that doesn't happen - then at least they can point to a long history of advocating for a more rational and equitable system.

Furthermore, advocating for a public option might be our best bet to addressing the solvency problems for Medicare. Expanding Medicare's insurance pool to include a larger, younger, and healthier base could be just the right step needed to prevent the system from going bankrupt. As a flagship progressive program, shoring up Medicare should be a top long-term priority for progressives.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly from a movement-centric point of view, the public option allows progressives to define an identity distinct from that of Barack Obama. The fact that Obama is widely (though incorrectly, in my view) identified as a progressive is a major problem for the progressive movement. If you don't like him, the problem is obvious: Obama is co-opting our identity and mucking it up with corporatist policies.

But even if you do like Obama, this fusion is a problem, because it means that progressivism is largely defined in terms defined by the Obama administration. The widespread description of the health care bill passing as a progressive victory should be a warning sign for everyone: the passage was a major victory for the Obama administration and Democratic leadership, and there was progressive policy in the bill, but it certainly was not a progressive victory, because it didn't contain the signature item on the progressive health care agenda (i.e., the public option), and because it dealt a severe setback to reproductive health and choice for women. The only way to say that this fight was a progressive victory is if you believe that any Obama victory is a progressive victory or, to put it another way, that the progressive movement is just a subset of the Obama administration. Even if you are happy about having the progressive movement defined as an arm of the Obama administration, which is the logical conclusion of this kind of assertion, you have to worry about what's next for the movement. What happens after the 2016 election, when Obama will have to leave office? Or what happens if some major scandal causes popular support for the administration to collapse? We'll be stuck with an identity crisis just as profound as the one conservatives faced as the Bush administration was falling apart.

The public option, and economic populism more broadly, is one solution to solving this problem. By fighting vociferously for a public option, even in defiance of the likely blowback from the White House and DNC, we will be establishing an agenda item that is ours and ours alone. To use Rick Perlstein's metaphor, we will be laying down a "marker" - promising the public that if progressives get enough power, then the public is guaranteed to be "paid" with a public option.

It's possible that we will not be able to enact a universally-accessible public option for ten or twenty years - and maybe longer. The opposition to it from the health insurance industry is fierce, and the health care law will make that industry even more powerful and more profitable. But we need to build the pressure for this policy, and to gather as much electoral force behind it as possible, right away. There is sufficient support in Congress right now that a slightly more Democratic caucus in the next session might push us over the line; and even if we fail in the next session, it is long past time to build a distinct, robust, economically populist identity for the progressive movement.

Tonight I attended an Organizing for America phonebank. Together with other Massachusetts volunteers, I called voters in Maine to encourage them to call Senators Snowe and Collins and ask them to vote for a public option.

The event had all the trappings of a election-focused phonebank, except that our end goal was a bit different, and our failure rate (measured in refusals, and judging only from my own limited experience) was a bit higher. As I dialed, it occurred to me that effectively, we were learning to do something that the progressive movement knows very little about - lobbying Congress via mass mobilization. I thought I'd put down some notes about the lessons that I hope we'll learn from this effort, and my long-term view for this new style of governance.

Prologue - Progressive electoral campaigns

With the benefit of hindsight, I think we can look back at 2003 - 2008 as a period when the progressive movement learned to do something that no one had ever done before - create a modern, distributed, broad-based, successful electoral campaign infrastructure. The campaign machinery that progressives developed in that period was not the same media-obsessed, telegenic campaign of the Clinton years; nor was it only the product of offline, on-the-ground machine-based organizing that elected Democrats from Roosevelt through Johnson. Instead, progressive electoral campaigns in this era blended together offline organizing, broadcast media, and online organizing and activism.

But as distinctive as the role of online organizing was in progressive electoral campaigns, I think it was overshadowed by the broad-based, one-on-one, ground-game approach of those campaigns, which online organizing enabled. The ground game is nothing new in campaigning, but the degree of stranger-to-stranger contact in this wave of campaigns was unprecedented. Calling strangers on the phone, driving across state borders to knock on doors in a foreign neighborhood, and going to a house party without a familiar face in the crowd were not rare experiences for a lot of progressives. To be sure, there is a lot to criticize in some of these tactics, and friend-to-friend contact is far superior in many cases, but I think this brazen notion that a progressive campaign could just attempt to contact everyone was the defining characteristic of progressive campaigns.

Along the way, the progressive movement learned a lot about how to conduct such a campaign, and a lot of new tools and tactics were developed and perfected. The online house party, friend-to-friend fundraising, and modern voter file database systems were among the most important advances in this style of campaigning.

Learning How to Lobby

Now that we have consolidated power at the federal level, it's time to govern. The lion's share of governance work is lobbying Congress, but we have, essentially, no experience whatsoever in how to do that.

Allow me to qualify that. We have no experience whatsoever in lobbying Congress, from a position of strength, with the benefit of online organizing. Since 2000, our lobbying position has essentially been a defensive crouch, and the years 1995 - 2000 weren't all that hot either. The last time Democrats held so much power at the federal level, Google did not exist and the White House made a splash by giving President Clinton an email address.

Lobbying Congress from a position of strenght means we need to encourage Senators to vote for something, not against something. Lobbying with the benefit of online organizing means that we have the capability to include vast numbers of people in the lobbying process, in a way that is entirely unprecedented. Just as progressives learned how to massively expand the battleground and to engage lots and lots of people in an electoral campaign using web-based technology, I think progressives need to learn how to massively expand the conversation around important pieces of legislation, and to engage lots and lots of people in the effort to lobby Congress.

To be sure, progressives have lobbied Congress in the past. But to date, these efforts have largely been focused on the small lobbying effort that progressive interest groups can afford, and the public pressure we can bring to bear in the media and with rallies. We are, essentially, lobbying Congress like it's 1999.

There have been some very tentative steps taken towards incorporating online activism into lobbying efforts. Some of these, like the endless petition emails, are not particulalry inspiring or effective. Some of the most recent steps are, I think, extremely exciting and signs that we are slowly but surely learning how to lobby in an entirely different way. I'll mention them further on.

I think we are headed towards a new kind of lobbying effort, whose basic approach is to perpetually engage as many people as possible in making their views on important legislation heard, using all the traditional means of contacting Congress - office visits, phone calls, letters, rallies, letter-to-the-editor campaigns, and so on. And to make that effort possible, we will need to learn a few important lessons.

Lobbying vs. Electioneering

Deval Patrick first started talking about converting his volunteer corps into a citizen-lobbyist corps in late 2005. Unfortunately, that effort turned out to be a flop. I don't want to delve into Massachusetts politics circa 2006, but suffice it to say that lobbying is very different than electioneering, and I don't think Patrick or his organization gave enough thought and deference to that problem.

From a mobilization point of view, running an electoral campaign is relatively straightforward. There's a clear objective (get more votes than the opposition); the tactics are well-known and performance is readily tracked (make phone calls, knock on doors); there is a clear deadline; and for high-profile campaigns, there is a built-in supply of volunteers, and, in many cases, there's a physical location where volunteers can actually show up and work. That's not to say that running a campaign is easy, but the structure of an election makes mass mobilization relatively simple.

By contrast, lobbying is devilishly tricky. The substance of the bill is constantly changing; there are a lot of hurdles, in the form of committee and cloture votes, and therefore many objectives; the tactics are rather muddled (even calling a Congressional office can be rather intimidating); the deadline is anything but clear, as floor votes can be delayed for any number of reasons; the media profile of a legislative item is lower than that of an electoral campaign; and there is usually no physical location where supporters of a bill can gather to support it.

What's more, the lobbying strategy is fluid and very tricky to pin down. In an election, the strategy is simple: get a lot of votes. But in a lobbying effort, the strategy is not at all obvious: should we try to persuade Republican senators to switch, as OFA is doing? Or should we try to create a Progressive Block in the Senate?

What we're learning

Luckily, I think we are already learning to adapt to this new terrain.

To begin with, we've learnt that a broad-based progressive lobbying campaign needs a clear goal, or a "line in the sand" beyond which compromise is not acceptable. Moreover, this line in the sand must be clearly grounded in progressive principles, in order to motivate the progressive base to get behind that goal. Because legislative battles have a lower media profile than elections, and because most people are not used to the concept of being called in order to support a piece of legislation, and because it's possible to water down a bill and kill it with a thousand paper cuts, the elevator speech for a piece of legislation is vital. We need to be able to explain to prospective supporters what we want and why we want it, and to have that explanation make perfect sense, in something like thirty seconds.

With regards to health care, we have done a reasonably good job, although improvements are possible. Our line in the sand is the public option, and there is impressive unanimity across progressive groups about that goal, but we could improve our communication about it. To begin with, "public option" is not self-explanatory; it only makes sense to someone who has been following the debate closely. Moreover, the reason we support it is muddled. The script I received tonight from Organizing for America, although not without its merits, claimed that we want a public option in order to provide "competition for the traditional health insurance companies". That's classic conservative framing, and it's not at all inspiring or easy to defend. (Who cares about competition when you just lost your COBRA, or you have a relative in intensive care and have no idea how you'll pay for it?) What we are really talking about is a public health insurance plan, and we want it because it will allow anyone to buy quality, affordable health insurance.

Another lesson learned is that the numbers we are shooting in a lobbying campaign are different than those we need for an electoral campaign. Success in federal elections is measured in the millions of votes. Success in a lobbying campaign is measured in the hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of phone calls. Consequently, we probably do not need the same scale of stranger-to-stranger contact that we need in an electoral campaign; a lobbying campaign should start as a base mobilization exercise, garnering phone calls from core progressive supporters and all of their friends and relatives.

On the flip side, the universe for a lobbying campaign is much broader. The only thing required to lobby Congress is a phone line, and preferably an address in the representative's district or senator's state. There is no voter registration deadline or age limit. That means that stranger-to-stranger contact doesn't need to proceed from voterfiles. Instead, it can use targeted commercial mailing lists, or relevant government databases. For example, it might be an interesting exercise to call through the business owners listed in an incorporation list retrieved from a secretary of state's office, in order to get support from small business owners. (Although actually, incorporation lists are rather over-used; other lists might yield better results.) For similar reasons, there are limitless possibilities in online outreach. For example, it wouldn't be too difficult for HCAN to craft a Google Adwords campaign targeted at people looking for information about health insurance plans online, and to encourage those people to call their senator to support a simpler approach to insurance.

Finally, lobbying is, in some ways, a considerably more tangible and concrete effort. An election is a mashup of a cult of personality and a six-degrees-of-separation story about progress ("if you elect me, and we keep our majority, and the speaker allows the bill to come to a vote, and we can convince the Senate to pass the bill, and we get it out of conference...."). But a piece of legislation can have immediate and dramatic effects on someone's life, and the storyline is much simpler and more direct. Such a storyline can become the exposition that comes after the elevator speech for a bill.

The cutting edge

Although we are still taking baby steps in our attempt to facilitate broad-based citizen lobbying, I think there are some very exciting new tools which will be key in making this effort possible:

 

• Advomatic's Click to Call tool, which allows organizations to deploy an easy-to-use "call your senator" web-based widget on their website. The tool allows organizations to track calls, and doesn't require users to look up phone numbers or even make a phone call (Advomatic calls you, and then connects you.) I've used HCAN's Click to Call widget, and it is very, very slick.
• Crowdsourced public whip-counting, like Stand with Dr Dean. The technology behind this application is very simple - it could easily have been written during Dean's presidential campaign - but crowdsourced whip-counting is a great idea which allows the progressive base to lobby while doing something that's actually very important to the overall effort.
• FriendRoots is a new Facebook app developed by Max Gottlieb and announced on Dailykos a few days ago. The application allows you to locate Facebook friends who are constituents of (or whose home towns are represented by) swing senators on ACES and the health care bill, and to email those friends to ask them to email their senators about ACES and the health care bill.
• Tweet Your Senator is an interesting mashup just released by OFA; the idea is to send your senator a tweet about health care reform, and there's a tiny bit of magic which uses your zip code to look up your senator's Twitter username. This kind of tool, together with other Twitter-petition applications, has good promise for making the petition process a bit more public and viral.

The Future of Lobbying

Broad-based participatory lobbying is not easy to do, but I am actually very excited about it. For all the difficulties and challenges posed by this kind of work, it offers us a chance to really govern together, in a manner that is much more interesting than broad-based participatory electioneering. Although I didn't have a lot of success on the phones, some of my fellow callers were doing pretty well, and having some very interesting and valuable conversations with voters.

For the past few months I've watched the health care and energy bill debates with horror, partially because the degree to which Congress is for sale has been so readily apparent, and partially because the conversation has been so frustratingly remote, focused as it is on Washington.  For a long while it seems that there was really very little that could be done, and that we would have to sit back and watch as the lobbyists had a field day.

While I don't think that broad-based lobbying is the silver bullet that will stop corruption dead in its tracks, I do think it is a promising new approach to legislative battles.  And by engaging us in conversation about live, ongoing, tangible policy issues with our neighbors and friends, I think it brings us a little closer to the whole point of self-governance.

Continuing with this weekend's close reading of the stimulus package, Katie Fehrenbacher at Earth2Tech made a great catch this week:

The text in the stimulus bill doesn’t require decoupling per se in order to get funds, but requires the state governors to get certification from their respective commissions that the states in question will:

“…seek to implement…a general policy that ensures that utility financial incentives are aligned with helping their customers use energy more efficiently and that provide timely cost recovery and a timely earnings opportunity for utilities associated with cost-effective and verifiable efficiency savings, in a way that sustains or enhances utility customers’ incentives to use energy more efficiently.”

In short, the stimulus package asks the states which are accepting stimulus money to pretty-please think about decoupling.  Decoupling is a policy which allows state regulators to set the electricity rates for utilities with allowances for investments in energy efficiency and reasonable rates of return on those investments, thereby separating (or decoupling) the price of electricity from the demand.  Under a decoupling regime, utilities can make money while lowering electricity consumption; without it, utilities have a built-in incentive to encourage consumption, even to the point of overconsumption that leads to new power plant construction.

The text that made it into the law is weak - a watering-down of decoupling language inserted by Henry Waxman in late January - but it's something, and considering the federalist problem (utilities are typically regulated at the state or municipal level), it might be about as good as what we can expect, as Fehrenbacher explains.

Decoupling is a highly successful environmental responsibility policy, and its implementation in California over the past three decades has contributed to the slow-down in California energy usage - the average Californian now uses about 33% less electricity than the average American (PDF).  Energy innovators are very aware of the impact of California's decoupling policy, too - pretty much every energy startup presentation I've attended has a line along the lines of "we think we can get our kilowatt hour price down to here, which as you can see is impractical for most of the US market but is profitable in California...."  Particularly in the solar industry, the decoupling policy has been a tremendous incentive for clean energy.

We shouldn't be insensitive to the cost that decoupling might impose on low-income people, so decoupling should be paired with additional policies that allow low-income people to reduce their energy consumption along with everyone else - targeted tax credits and rebates to begin with, but also closer-to-home projects like the weatherization assistance program.  Congress will almost certainly revisit this issue in the midst of the budget debate and the next energy bill, and it should take the next step in promoting a decoupling policy that is friendly to low-income consumers.

 

One of the lower-profile sub-plots within the stimulus package debate was about the use of open standards in the smart grid.  The package sets aside $4.5 billion for the smart grid.  Although that's only a fraction of the total investment needed to build the smart grid - perhaps as little as 5 or 10% - it's still a big chunk of change, and the strings attached to that money by Congress will make a big difference in the evolution of the new grid.  So it's no surprise that smart meter builders tried to weigh in on open standards earlier this month.  An early version of the House bill required that utilities must use an Internet-based open protocol (meaning IP, almost certainly); a later version required "Internet-based or other open protocols and standards if available and appropriate."  A group of electricity meter providers sent the Senate a letter complaining about the IP-only language, saying that it would interfere with existing projects.  As far as I can tell, the final language is actually a bit weaker than the flexible "IP or something else" provision (from page 30 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act):

OPEN PROTOCOLS AND STANDARDS.—The Secretary shall require as a condition of receiving funding under this subsection that demonstration projects utilize open protocols and standards (including Internet-based protocols and standards) if available and appropriate.

Earlier this week, Secretary Chu said that he wants to start deploying smart grid standards, although his actual language left plenty of wiggle room on the question of IP versus other open standards.

Meanwhile, out in the field, the battle is already joined.  San Diego Gas and Electric announced earlier this month that it will start installing 2.3 million smart meters in its customers homes.  In a country with about 7 million smart meters in operation, that's a pretty hefty deployment.  The meters will be Itron OpenWay meters, built on the ZigBee standard (which is an alternative to IP); the rollout is expected in March of this year.  At around the same time, Google announced its PowerMeter project and eMeter announced a major new deal which will allow some Houston-area customers to better monitor their electricity consumption.

We are not far, I hope, from the point when smart grid technology becomes widely available - meaning not just that there are a lot of meters installed in a lot of homes, but also that the entry costs for small-scale entrepreneurs to build applications on top of the grid will be getting lower and lower.  As far as I can tell, there are no open source software projects for extracting data from smart meters, but smart meter start-up Tendril announced a new API for its products (which are, it appears, ZigBee-based) earlier this month.  Unfortunately, the API is currently only available to Tendril partners.  But I suspect that smart grid applications will open up significantly in the next year; I imagine that it won't be long before we see Facebook and iPhone applications for monitoring and calibrating residential electric consumption.

This is great news for the environment and the green economy, of course.  I also think it's great news for the progressive economy, because it means more opportunities for liberal entrepreneurs to profit from environmental protection, and more opportunities to cycle those profits through the progressive economy.

As the recession deepened over the last few months, one thing I've worried about (among plenty of other things) is the toll that it would take on the progressive movement.  It's no secret that the movement runs on a shoe-string; a single hacker attack is enough to take out a pretty significant chunk of the infrastructure running the progressive blogosphere.  It seems inevitable that a wallet-emptying recession will slowly drain the spending ability of progressives, and thereby drag down our nascent institutions.

The key weakness within the progressive movement's business plan (forgetting, for a moment, that the progressive movement isn't a single, cohesive organization, and that many organizations within the movement don't have anything like a business plan in any case), is that a large part of our revenue relies on donations.  In a recession, voluntary donations are the easiest things to cut from a household budget.  A further weakness is the massive amount of money that leaves the progressive ecosystem.  In five years, ActBlue has raised $88 million; some of that has gone to necessary expenses in progressive campaigns and is money well-spent, although no doubt a significant part of that money ends up in the pockets of anti-progressive political consultants.  And some of that money does return to the progressive ecosystem, in the form of advertisements in progressive blogs, for example.  But on the whole, the progressive blogosphere leaks donations like a sieve, meaning that even the flush years don't leave us with a lot left over for recessions.

Fortunately, I believe it is possible to address these weaknesses, and to help keep the lights on during the recession.  Conceptually, it's fairly simple: diversify our business plan beyond donations, and design mechanisms to keep recycle more money back through the progressive ecosystem.  The particulars are a bit more tricky, but below I'll outline a few possibilities for implementing these high-level solutions.  Other ideas are certainly welcome; feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.

Organized affiliate codes for progressive products

Many progressive blogs, and some organizations, already make money from affiliate marketing programs; probably the most well-known program along these lines is the Amazon Associates program.  Affiliate marketing programs like these generally fail to raise a lot of money for any one organization, because they don't generate a lot of sales.  At the same time, the money from sales usually touches only one, or sometimes two, progressive entities along the way - the author of a progressive book, and sometimes, a progressive publisher like Chelsea Green or Ig Publishing.  The retailer (Amazon, typically) is not usually a progressive organization.

If you think of a progressive book sale in terms of a series of monetary exchanges resulting in a customer getting a book, with each exchange yielding profit for the vendor, then the typical progressive affiliate book sale only yields a small bonus to the progressive blogger, and a fraction of royalty sales to the progressive author.  The profits paid to the retailer, the publisher, and the shipping company are all, usually, lost to the progressive ecosystem.  (There are, of course, exceptions: the sale of a Chelsea Green book through Powell's, with delivery handled by UPS or the Postal Service, supports progressive organizations and unionized organizations at almost every step of the way.)

There's a lot of value being left on the table here, and there are many lost opportunities to sell progressive products and support progressive companies.  There are a wide variety of products made by progressive organizations: progressive books, CDs, magazine subscriptions, and movies; Credo mobile service and Working Assets credit cards; and a virtually limitless number of green products.  Heck, you can even create a neighborhood group to buy solar panels in bulk.

There is, I think, ample opportunity for progressive organizations, particularly bloggers and local organizations, to focus a bit more deeply on affiliate sales of these kinds of products.  Some of these products are potentially high-margin, and some of them (like solar panels and energy-efficient light bulbs) could even be net profitable for their consumers.  All of them would help keep more money in the progressive ecosystem, as they would channel more money towards progressive companies.  The reason this opportunity is largely unexploited, I think, is that it's a pain in the neck for companies to maintain affiliate programs, and that it's a pain in the neck for bloggers and local organizations to maintain a dozen different affiliate program memberships.

A well-organized general-purpose affiliate program for progressive products and services could overcome this hurdle.  Such an affiliate program would need to herd cats, to some degree, among progressive companies, and convince them to fit their affiliate programs into a standard one-size-fits-all shape, or to begin to offer affiliate programs in the first place.  It would also face the hurdle of Amazon's entrenched position.  And, it would need to offer a flexible API and embeddable widget architecture, to allow progressive organizations of all shapes and sizes to use the program.

But the benefits of such a program could be significant.  It could boost demand for progressive companies; provide much-needed revenue for bloggers and local organizations; and, in some cases, help progressive consumers save money by becoming more energy efficient.

Green businesses embedded in progressive organizations

Among other things, the stimulus bill included about $5 billion for weatherization efforts for "modest-income homes", according to the summary produced by Nancy Pelosi's office.  That's a massive increase over the previous year's allocation of about $272 million; because the money has to be spent in 18 months, actually spending the money may be a bit of a challenge.  There may not be enough existing weatherization capacity, meaning that there are opportunities to create new weatherization companies.

As Leah Edwards has written, non-profit ownership is one way to bootstrap a small business; there may be some cases in which owning and operating a small business is a logical step for a progressive non-profit.  Weatherization consulting and implementation is one industry where those opportunities are not just available and lucrative, but a good fit for a mission-driven organization.

In particular, I'm thinking of progressive churches, many of which are already active in environmental action and social justice, and have a deep well of talent to draw upon from their membership.  While operating a business is a pretty hefty endeavor, a lot of churches already run small-scale social service agencies - part-time soup kitchens, homeless shelters, etc. - out of their premises.  Why not extend that social justice work while making a profit, too?  On top of the fact that operating a weatherization business could be a meaningful act of bearing witness to core convictions on respect for the natural world and alleviating suffering, such an endeavor could help boost membership (by extending the church's voice into the community) and donations (by keeping church members employed).

Weatherization operations won't be a good fit for many progressive churches, and will certainly not be a good fit for smaller progressive organizations or blogs.  But it's only one kind of opportunity.  The greening of the economy in general, and the signing of the stimulus bill in particular, means that there are now a lot of opportunities to save money through environmental action - and that translates into profitable opportunities for progressive organizations.

Microinvesting and microlending

The progressive movement has demonstrated, repeatedly, that it can raise huge amounts of money with small dollars.  For the most part, as I mentioned above, that money goes to Democratic candidates, and it doesn't return to the progressive ecosystem.  There's no reason that we have to organize our donations this way.  There are ample opportunities to give money to socially beneficial endeavors and in some cases, it's possible to get that money back - even with a good return on investment.

Microlending has become an increasingly popular strategy for alleviating poverty over the past 25 years or so.  Grameen Bank, one of the most well-known microlending banks in the world was founded in 1983, and since then, other organizations have joined the bandwagon.  The idea is to provide impoverished people with small loans which can be used to launch very small business endeavors, which can, in turn, build wealth that helps the entrepreneur rise out of poverty.

There are numerous ways to get involved with microlending online; Kiva is probably the most well-known.  Kiva's lending process is geared towards individuals, but the process could, in principle, be applied to small progressive groups and networks of progressive blog readers.  Earlier this month, Kiva released the Kiva API; while the API doesn't seem to make it possible to group together bundles of loans, Kiva's developer wiki encourages developers to create social applications around lending activity, so it's not hard to imagine that an application along these lines might emerge from their network.  While progressive group microlending would not really make progressives much richer, it would at least cycle money back to the progressive ecosystem, giving lenders a chance to recover their initial loans and thereby seal up some of the leaks within our donor network.

Related to microlending, but not nearly as mature, is the notion of microinvesting: gathering together large pools of individual investors in order to purchase equity in promising companies, preferably with an environmentally or socially responsible flavor.  That is the notion behind GreenFund, a project of the for-profit activism company Virgance.  Due to SEC regulations, it's not particularly easy to create a microinvesting project, but Virgance appears to have made some progress on the idea (although they're not releasing many details, won't commit to any launch date beyond "a while" on their website.)  If that fund does take shape, then it could become possible for progressive groups to organize micro-investing in green companies, and earn new revenues from dividends or equity sales.

What a progressive economy might look like

The ideas I've posted here are meant, for the most part, to prod progressive organizations to think a bit more creatively about their business plan, and to identify financing mechanisms that extend beyond donations.  The list I've posted here is no doubt incomplete, and I hope we get some additional creative thoughts in the comments.

More broadly, these ideas are also meant to encourage us to think of the progressive movement as an ecosystem that is fed by a healthy circulation of money.  A movement which is built on voluntary donations, from its core activists to its institutions and outward to favored politicians, is not sustainable.  A better model involves, as much as possible, a series of transactions that make progressives wealthier at every step of the way, while reinforcing progressive values.  A movement which boosts demand for progressive businesses like Credo Mobile, which provides jobs for members of progressive churches, and which gives progressive groups the opportunity to own equity in profitable and environmentally responsible companies will allow many more progressives to prosper together with their movement.

Saving Energy, Growing Jobs is David Goldstein's book about the economics and politics of environmental regulation.  Goldstein's argument is that environmental regulation does not inhibit economic growth, nor is it inconsistent with a market-based economy.  On the contrary, for a variety of structural reasons, environmental regulations promote economic growth through innovation and competition, and are consistent with the smooth operation of today's complex markets.  The Firedoglake Book Salon recently reviewed the book, and I encourage you to check out the discussion they had a few weeks ago.

What I found most interesting about this book was its fundamental structural critique of economic theory and the ongoing political debate between environmentalists and economic fundamentalists.  Perhaps more interesting are the unstated applications of this critique.  While Goldstein's critiques are discussed in terms of environmental regulation, many of these ideas could be equally well applied to a variety of contexts in which business behavior must be regulated, especially collective bargaining and labor relations.

The structural critique of economic theory is sound and extremely illuminating, particularly for someone (like myself) who has only a passing understanding of economic theory and an even shadier understanding of modern corporate management practice.  Unfortunately, Goldstein's critique of the political landscape that shapes the environmental regulation debate is not quite as sound, and ignores entirely the existence of the modern conservative movement.  There are still valuable ideas to be gleaned from this critique, but it is considerably weaker than the economic critique.

An environmentalist critique of economic theory and the reality of the marketplace

A central premise of Saving Energy, Growing Jobs is that the environmental regulation debate frequently pits environmentalists against economic fundamentalists, with the latter arguing against one environmental regulation after another on the grounds that regulation inhibits economic growth.  Goldstein sets out to undermine that argument in two steps.

The first step is the critique of the economic theory to which economic fundamentalists are devoted.  Economic theory is based on a number of assumptions, and in some cases these assumptions are so deeply ingrained in modern economics that they are not even explicitly stated in economics textbooks.  Yet in many cases, these assumptions are invalid.  Goldstein lists ten assumptions and suggests that the vast majority of them are incorrect, especially in matters that affect environmental health.  To summarize the assumptions and the counterexamples that disprove them (and here I'm quoting, in large part, from chapter 4):

1. Consumers have practically unlimited material wants, which are self-consistent and rational.  Clearly, some material desires are irrational or internally incosistent.
2. Consumer goods are limited.  This assumption is largely valid.
3. Firms provide goods that compete perfectly with each other.  This assumption relies on the supposition that goods can be easily compared against each other.  However, comparisons require definition; not all cars are the same, and standards are required to facilitate comparison.  Often, government regulation has the effect of creating standards; for example, auto safety standards allow us to compare two cars, knowing that are defined by the government as safe.
4. One person's consumption does not affect another's.  This assumption does not take into account environmental "externalities", like pollution.  If someone drives a car which produces air pollution and gives someone else asthma, then the second person will need to go to the doctor.  This assumption also does not take into account the efficiencies introduced by scale - if many people buy energy-efficient light bulbs, then they become more available and cheaper for other people to buy them.
5. Goods are traded in markets where infermation is perfectly available.  This assumption is not valid in cases where information is difficult to understand or obtain.  For example, it is often difficult to determine the energy efficiency of a household appliance before purchasing it, especially in the absence of good efficiency rating systems.
6. Each person has a rank order of material desires, and one person's order does not affect another's.  Clearly, peer pressure and other informal social cues affect our preferences; entire industries are built on that reality.  In some cases, goods like luxury cars are marketed and priced based largely on their perceived popularity.
7. People and corporations always act in their own economic self-interest and behave rationally.  This is not always the case because the agents who make corporate decisions are people, and those people's interests do not always align with those of the corporation.  Moreover, individual choices are not always rational in a number of ways, and behavior economists have proven repeatedly.
8. Deals or transactions are real, and parties in transactions do not behave fraudulently.  In a society with a strong government and a respect for the rule of law, this assumption is valid.  However, this supposition by itself suggests that some measure of regulation and governmental action is necessary for a free market.
9. People and corporations can actually act on their preferences.  This is not the case when a person or corporation lacks sufficient credit.  For example, mortgage lending rules may enable a family to buy a cheap home in an exurban subdivision, with high transportation costs, while forbidding that same family from buying a more expensive home in a smart growth development with low transportation costs - even if the family's combined housing and transportation costs are cheaper in the smart growth development.
10. Real markets will deliver an optimal amount of well-being, if it exists, beforeunderlying conditions change.  This assumption presupposes that a single, globally optimal amount of well-being can be achieved.  However, in a complex economy it is possible that there are many locally optimal points - that is, amounts of well-being that are merely a bit better than those we are accustomed to - and that the economy can muddle its way towards these local optima without making the large changes needed to reach a much larger amoutn of overall well-being.  Furthermore, while economic progress happens slowly and incrementally, technological change happens quickly; while the economy is slowly muddling its way towards improved well-being, technological change can much more quickly completely redefine the notion and degree of well-being.

This is a fairly lengthy summarization, and I included it this way because I think it's particularly incisive in attacking conservative economic dogma.  The apparently still-popular notion that tax cuts engender economic growth is closely relate to the conservative argument that government regulation inhibits growth; and that argument, in turn, rests on an economic theory based on all of the above assumptions.  Many of those assumptions are invalid, and others presuppose strong government regulation.  In other words, Goldstein's critique is, in some ways, a good general-purpose critique of conservative economic theory.

Goldstein furthermore enumerates a number of ways in which real markets fail to produce optimal well-being.  Again, I think this section (chapter 6) is a particularly solid critique of market fundamentalism, so I'll try to provide a reasonably concise summary here.  Market failures include:

•  Market failures - small-scale failures that inhibit competition, such as:
  • Imperfect information
  • Split incentives (scenarios in which one person's investment would increase overall well-being, but the benefits would accrue mostly to another person - for example, a commercial landlord weatherizing an office building in which tenants pay heating bills)
  • Uncertain performance (scenarios in which a consumer is uncertain whether a new product will perform as promised)
• Market failures
  • Diffuse decision making (scenarios in which multiple parties are responsible for jointly making a decision; e.g., building development, in which the developer, contractor, and laborers all must decide whether to build a new building using new energy efficient methods or conventional, inefficient methods)
  • Inadequate or ineffective private regulations, such as mortgage lending rules which do not take into account combined transportation and housing costs
  • Price competition for new products - new products, like electric or hybrid cars, are frequently sold at high prices initially, because they do not have a sufficient scale of consumption to support the kind of mass production which amortizes high capital costs; that in turn inhibits consumption and adoption of the new technology.  This problem is particularly acute in cases where an innovative technology "leaks" from one company to its competitor.
• Human failures
  • Peer pressure - informal pressure exerted by one member of a trade or industry on another can be a powerful factor in promoting, or inhibiting, a new practice.  Moreover, peer pressure can inhibit competition, as peers within an industry will not want to excessively "rock the boat" with colleagues.  On the other hand, peer pressure can also create collegiality and informal standards of ethics and responsibility within an industry.
  • Not paying attention - Individuals only have so much time and knowledge, and may therefore miss important opportunities to save money or make a profit.  This problem can be particularly acute in the case of energy efficiency, because energy costs are frequently among the more minor line items in a company's budget.
  • Loss and risk aversion - Numerous studies have indicated that many people are naturally risk averse, and will intentionally eschew a potentially profitable investment, because they do not want to pay for the up-front investment.  Along similar lines, there is "status quo bias" - many people would rather do things the way they have traditionally been done, rather than risk trying a new approach.
• Institutional failures - In particular, Goldstein critiques the role of trade associations in crafting industry policy.  Proceeding from a game-theoretic analysis, Goldstein suggests that the development of trade associations to lobby for policies friendly to an industry are perfectly natural.  They are also inherently anti-competitive, because trade associations want to promote policies which support the operation of all of their members, without creating competitive opportunities that would tend to favor the interests of some members over those of others; similarly, trade associations tend to promote policies which support economic incumbents an inhibit the entrance of innovators within an industry.  The lack of studies on the policymaking role of trade associations is a serious problem, and Goldstein argues for much deeper study of trade associations.

This section of the book is particularly interesting because it suggests a positive role for environmental policy, and government regulation in general, which is pro-competitive.  Indeed, it appears that in some cases it is the market itself which is anti-competitive, and the supporters of economic incumbents who are in fact limiting economic growth.

I'd go a bit further than Goldstein does, in fact, and recommend this section of the book to anyone who wants to reform corporate behavior or the operation of the market generally.  Union activists in particular would be smart to review this section, because unionization is so frequently critiqued from the vantage point of simplistic economic theory.  While I'm not entirely familiar with the literature on the economic impact of unionization on a company or an industry's performance, there are encouraging case studies at companies like UPS that suggest that unionization can help stabilize a company's workforce, improve morale, and boost productivity.  In A Country that Works, Andy Stern argues that unionizing an industry makes the cost of labor more or less uniform within that industry.  That means that companies can't become artificially competitive by exploiting their workers, but must instead innovate by bringing new products to market, improving their operations, changing their marketing strategy or cost structure, etc.  In short, it's possible that although many of Goldstein's arguments are based on an environmentalist critique, they could easily be adapted to make the case that unionization and other progressive market reforms enhance competitiveness and market behavior.

Analyzing the political landscape

Another part of Saving Energy, Growing Jobs analyzes the political landscape of environmental policy.  This part proceeds by looking at the rhetoric on both sides of the debate.  One chapter lists the myths that economic fundamentalists have about the environmental lobby, and the next lists the myths that environmentalists have about the economic fundamentalist lobby.

On the whole, this part of the book is not entirely surprising, and will sound very familiar to anyone who has spent some amount of time reading op-eds on one side or the other of the debate.  There were some interesting insights, however.  For instance, Goldstein critiques the practice of environmentalists who blame environmental problems on a solitary actor or corporation.  While some charges along these may be literally true, it is often inaccurate to suggest that a complex environmental problem is caused by a single bad-faith actor.  It is similarly misleading to suggest that environmental problems are the cause of excessive greed; indeed, Goldstein suggests that sometimes insufficient attention to profitable opportunities arising out of innovation or better efficiency is the cause of environmental problems.

While this section summarizes the debate on both sides reasonably well, it makes two key mistakes.  First, it portrays environmentalists and economic fundamentalists as two essentially matched lobbies, both vying for control of the debate.  There is a "pox on both houses" flavor to the writing which is a bit unsettling in the face of reality.  In fact, environmentalists vastly outnumber economic fundamentalists in sheer numbers (in terms of broadly-stated public policy positions in opinion polls, if not always in terms of actual ballots on election day).  At the same time, economic fundamentalists have in recent years outmaneuvered environmentalists, at least at the federal level, because they have more money and are better-organized in terms of lobbying efforts and media infrastructure.

The second problem is related to the first: this section ignores the history of the conservative movement, and its impact in establishing and empowering economic fundamentalists.  At times this side-step seems almost convoluted and intentional, as though the phenomenon of business interests coalescing around a set of shared fundamentalist goals is merely a bizarre accident of such factors as peer pressure.  In fact, there has been an extraordinarily well-organized effort to unite business lobbies against progressive goals and around economically fundamentalist ones. The Powell memo lays out the plan for that effort in pretty good detail, and the conservative movement followed that plan almost to the letter over the past thirty or forty years.

These problems are significant, because in the last section Goldstein suggests a political plan for implementing sustained environmental change.  Some parts of this last section are quite interesting and reflect Goldstein's long experience with sensible environmental regulation - in particular, there's a fascinating comparison of the strengths of weaknesses of regulatory tactics like cap-and-trade, cost-based incentives, and performance-based incentives.  But on the whole, the inability to grapple with political reality causes Goldstein's political strategy for change to fall flat.

Still, Saving Energy, Growing Jobs is an insightful and worthwhile read.  It goes far beyond the facts and figures about environmental regulation and economic growth.  It's a useful handbook for any critic of the market and of corporate behavior.

Over the past few weeks, there has been a quiet but significant battle raging between religious progressives and and a coalition of evangelicals and centrists over who represents the real religious progressive voice in American politics.  I don't want to delve too far into it, but I thought I'd do a brief blow-by-blow summary for anyone who's interested.

• On Jan. 15, Third Way and Faith in Public Life released "Come Let Us Reason Together", a policy platform signed by a variety of religious leaders, purporting to be a "compromise" between religious progressives and evangelicals.  The substance of the compromise was much of what we've seen before: reducing abortions and ending job discrimination against gays, and little else.
• That document drew a number of stinging critiques from religious progressives, including one by Rev. Osagyefou Sekou which called the document nothing more than "the continued blessing of the religious right’s cultural politics", and another by Rev. Deb Haffner, who said that the document's billing was false advertising, citing the under-representation of progressive viewpoints among the document's authors.
• Robert Jones, one of the principal authors of the document, responded in kind, claiming that the authors of Dispatches from the Religious Left were being shrill and uncivil.
• This week, Pastor Dan and Fred Clarkson teamed up to respond to Jones.  Pastor Dan's essay defends ideological differences for their own sake, arguing that sometimes debate and political wrangling reflect honest disagreements over values and economic priorities.  Clarkson's essay defends the Dispatches contributors and points out that real progress can't be accomplished by a group of people bloviating about platforms anyway; organizing is the key to real progressive change.

Since I was one of the contributors to Dispatches, it's not hard to guess where my sympathies lie.  I don't see how the "Come Let Us Reason Together" document represents anything like a consensus with the energetic, and often quite radical, social critique of religious progressives.  Unfortunately, given the early signs coming out of Obama's Faith Advisory Council Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, it looks like the religious centrists are holding sway within the administration.  It's up to progressives to keep organizing, I guess.