Planting Liberally

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.

Right on time for the 2009 Green Jobs Conference, this week Change to Win released a report titled High Road or Low Road?  Job Quality in the New Green Economy.  The report looks at wages and conditions for jobs in a variety of green workplaces, and finds that not all is well in the green collar economy.

The bad news is that some green jobs are low-paying and subject to union-busting and off-shoring, just like jobs anywhere else.  The report cites wages as low as $8.25 / hour in a recycling plant and $11 / hour in renewable energy manufacturing.  Like other manufacturing jobs, green manufacturing for products like windmills can be offshored, and that is already happening.  And jobs everywhere are subject to aggressive anti-union activities - in fact, the head of the National Green Building Committee (an initiative of Associated Builders and Contractors) is W. Brewster Earle, president of Comfort Systems USA Energy Services, a large heating, ventilation, and cooling systems company which has sought to undermine union activity in its workforce for years.

There is, on the hand, plenty of good news to go around too.  That includes reports of stellar green employers, like wind energy manufacturerGamesa, and examples of good municipal initiatives to give workers good, green jobs, like the LA Clean Trucks program and the Newark weatherization training program.

As Tod wrote yesterday, it now appears that the stimulus package will be passed by the Senate within a few days.  Despite the out-of-whack priority given to tax cuts over spending, the stimulus should still include a good chunk of change for green spending.  The question now is, how much of that spending will support good jobs?  There is some language in the bill for enforcing wage protection laws, but that's about it in terms of worker protection.

While I'd ideally like to see stronger worker protection languge in the bill - for example, language which allows workers at any company which receives stimulus spending money to organize by card-check - it looks like that is unlikely to happen.  I think it will be incumbent on the Obama administration, as well as any local and state agencies to which the funds are distributed, to attach reasonable regulations to this money.  At a bare minimum, companies which receive stimulus spending should be paying a living wage.  More than that, they should not be allowed to engage in union-busting, and should be compelled to remain neutral in the face of union organizing drives (it also follows that they should also contract in good faith with their workers, although I'm not sure how easily good-faith bargaining requirements could be written into regulation.)  Such requirements will not water-down the green nature of the stimulus; on the contrary, they will make the green collar economy more attractive to workers, and will incentivize more and more people to enter this workforce and become available for the massive task of greening the economy.

This week, Paul Benson posted an interesting diary at OpenLeft about supporting project groups on progressive blogs. The basic idea is fairly simple: quite often, progressive blog readers want to get together to collaborate on a project. Projects can range in nature and scope widely, and they can have a fixed goal (like producing a catching YouTube video) or an ongoing set of goals (like promoting progressive legislation). But they all seem to share on common characteristic: they are poorly served by the recommended diary section of most progressive blogs. Paul lists only two examples of projects that were successfully organized via diaries - YearlyKos and the Gannon investigation. There are probably a few more we could add to the pile, especially if we reached into the archives of local and statewide blogs, but I think the point stands. Blogs are a great way to share news and opinions and to incite activism; they are not a great way to organize activism.

Paul sketches out a quick-and-dirty example of what a progressive project organizing platform might look like, and I think it's a reasonable first start. There are certainly other online project management tools available, ranging from dotProject to 37 Signals's Basecamp. I would also add that Paul's critique only underscores a point I've been making here in recent weeks: that the progressive blogosphere could be exceptionally well-served by an open-source platform, especially one like Drupal.

There are a couple of Drupal modules which are particularly well-suited to the sort of project management Paul is referring to: Organic Groups and Project. The former allows any Drupal site to be subdivided into a number of workspaces for interest groups. The form of a workspace can itself be flexible - it can be a wiki, a blog, a document-sharing space, or a combination of all of these. The Project module is used to keep track of projects, subdivide them into tasks, and monitor the progress on each task, using a lightweight project-management paradigm. Project was written to support bug tracking for Drupal modules and themes, but it can also be adapted for other purposes. While I have not yet had the chance to incorporate them into the Drupal-based blogging platform I wrote about last week, it's clear that the ability to add these modules easily to any Drupal site is a major advantage to using Drupal to power a progressive blog.

There is also, I think, a larger point to be made about the use of open source software to power the progressive movement. There are many similarities between the progressive movement and most open source software project. They are both decentralized, made up of many independent actors with similar goals. It's no accident that they are both likely to run up against the same kind of collaborative challenges, which is, I think, yet another reason that the progressive movement should build upon the progress made by Drupal.

Last week I posted a prospective roadmap for a Drupal-based progressive community blogging platform. I've begun working on that platform, and have a very rough draft of the platform ready to go. If you are interested in helping out, email me at work (ssachs at lightbulbfirst dot com) or leave a note in the comments, and I can send you more details.

Below, I've written some details about the functionality available to date, as well as some of the upcoming high-level technical challenges. If you are a Drupal developer who'd like to lend your suggestions or expertise, or if you are a blog reader/writer and have some thoughts about how comment voting and recommendations can be improved, feel free to drop a note in the comments. Finally, if you have some thoughts about a good name for this platform, I'm all ears!

In this first release, I've worked on pinning down the user model and the permissions available to each type of user. There are four roles: administrator, owner, front pager, and member. Anyone who registers with the site automatically becomes a member, and is allowed to write blog posts and comments. The administrator is an all-powerful user who has access to all functionality on the site; generally, this is someone who really knows Drupal very well, and is capable of working with all of its features. The owner is the user whose job is to oversee operation of the site and who has power over all users and all content on the site, but might not be a Drupal expert. The owner can make other users front pagers, or can block or delete users at will; she may also promote or delete content at will. Front pagers are normal users in every way except one - their blog posts automatically appear on the front page. Blog posts which don't appear on the front page automatically will appear in a right hand sidebar called "Recent member posts".

In the near future I will work on making the user profiles a little bit more interesting. That will include a signature line, an about me section and a URL for the user's home page. I'm fairly comfortable with the technical work needed to accomplish that - for the Drupal developers in the room, I'll be using the Content Profile module, and I'll write some custom code to display comments in a separate tab on the user profile screen.

The other upcoming functional improvement is comment ratings. I am somewhat familiar with the Voting API, but would be curious to hear from others whether there are superior ways to implement comment ratings. If it's possible to implement recommended diaries at the same time, so much the better.

Yesterday Andrea Batista Schlesinger and Rep. Jerry Nadler co-authored a piece on cleaning up our ports in the Huffington Post. The piece, partially inspired by the Clean Trucks Program in the port of Los Angeles, calls for a reversal of trucking deregulation in the early 80s which allows truck companies to classify their drivers as independent contractors.

That deregulation was a double-whammy hurting both the labor movement and the environment. On the one hand, allowing trucking companies to classify their drivers as independent contractors effectively prevents truckers from unionizing and negotiating for fair wages and working conditions. The Teamsters have been complaining about these unfair regulations for years; this argument is at the heart of their FedEx Watch campaign. On the other, it also allows the companies to force drivers to pay for their trucks; consequently, the trucks going through are ports tend to be poorly-maintained and not fuel efficient. And they tend to pollute the air, disproportionately hurting low-income communities that surround the ports.

Schlesinger and Nadler are calling for New York to follow LA's lead and to implement a Clean Trucks Program of its own. They argue that regulations which compel trucking companies to hire their drivers, coupled with clean truck regulations, will benefit the environment while helping workers.

The push to clean up New York's port prompted Jason Lefkowitz at Change to Win to remind us that green jobs must also be good jobs.  I think that is a key point as we move forward with the economic stimulus package - that greening the economy and making it equitable must go hand-in-hand.  I discussed this a bit in last week's review of The Green Collar Economy; as Van Jones argues, environmentalists need the support and participation of low-income people in order to assemble a winning political coalition.  But I think there's an essentialist argument to be made that's economic as well as political, and the cause of clean ports draws that argument into focus.  In an economy organized around pollution, green goods and services cost more money.  So long as the economy is inequitable, more and more people will be unable to afford to green themselves, their homes, and their workplaces, and environmental action will continue to be a boutique option for the rich.  But, as wealth and the externalities of business are more fairly shared throughout society, transitioning to a green economy will become more and more accessible.  Really, that's what the clean ports campaign is about - transferring the externality of trucking pollution to the trucking companies, where that burden properly belongs, in order to reduce the burden and raise the standard of living for truckers.