Convene concerned individuals and organizations from anywhere on the political spectrum Consider every issue that anyone cares enough about to defend or advocate Connect everything and include Congress
Nancy Scola - the Assault on Binary Online Politics Bruce Schuman Thursday, May 13, 2010
Bill, Baby, Bill is a new Twitter campaign that is challenging the idea that passing comprehensive climate legislation through the U.S. Senate is, in the words of one Senator, "impossible."Standing at the intersection of the 2008 campaign's Great Schlep and the U.S. State Department's Opinion Space is Bill, Baby, Bill.
Let me explain. The Great Schlep was the brainchild of Ari Wallach, in my humble opinion, one of the most creative online innovators working in the political space today. The premise, on one level, was simple. Rumors and innuendo were, in 2008, getting between Barack Obama and members of the Jewish community, particularly in the key state of Florida. Who better to convince Nana and Bubbie of Obama's merits than their Obama-loving grandkids? Sarah Silverman was even recruited to record a saucy web video. But there was a deeper intention: shifting the public discourse about Barack Obama by injecting more voices into it.
Opinion Space is a U.S. State Department experiment in mapping global public opinion.Then, there's Opinion Space. I profiled the State Department experiment in mapping global public opinion back in March, calling it "intriguing, exciting, engaging," and "the slightest bit inscrutable." Berkeley professor Ken Goldberg, the State Department's partner in the project, explained the project this way: "The model that is often used [online] is that there is a binary relationship -- friends or not friends, followers or not followers. All the nuances are not being all that well captured. But the real world isn't like that. Everything is messy and shades of gray. People feel more comfortable answering questions that allow them to convey a sense of gradation."
Wallach was a consultant to the State Department on Opinion Space, and cites Goldberg as a mentor. Both are influenced by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, and in particular his work on discourse ethics that examines the morality inherent in public debate and the role that consideration of differing opinions has in shaping how we, as human, interact with one another. Both Wallach and Goldberg use the word binary to talk about the way that online debate has trended in recent years, and both see other, better possibilities. "There was a post-partisan these that was alive for like four days," after the election of Barack Obama. "And that ethos is going to live or die depending on what we do online," says Wallach.
Which brings us to Bill, Baby, Bill. In sum, it's a Twitter campaign to try to counter the opinion of one U.S. Senator, Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, that it is "impossible" to pass a climate change bill through the Senate at this juncture. The site, BillBabyBill.org generates tweets in favor of a bill, directed at your home state senator (unless your home state is Kentucky, West Virginia, or Rhode Island; those state's senators don't have Twitter accounts).
"I initially though of this not as a 'Twitter thing,'" said the Manhattan-based Wallach in an interview yesterday. "I thought of it as a 'How can I hack Google Alerts?' thing. People are tracking their buzz rating. Communications directors are tracking their Google feeds. The thinking is, 'How can I game that?'" Wallach had the idea in the shower on Thursday, he says, and the New York City-based firm Empax had the site up and running in short order.
What's important here, says Wallach, is that the Bill, Baby, Bill campaign is, really, anything but binary. It's a push for debate, for the United States Senate to utterly reject the idea that a bill on climate change isn't made impossible by politics or public events.
Its inspiration, of course, is the "Drill, Baby, Drill" push made popular by Sarah Palin during the 2008 presidential campaign. "Drill, Baby, Drill is a very binary thing," says Wallach. "And that ethos is very dangerous to our world, those sort of narrowcasted solutions. It's a great short term play. But it's a shitty long-term play for my grandkids."
"Everyone wanted there to be axes on Opinion Space," said Wallach. "That would be a great thing for a polling firm to do. But Opinion Space is about thinking through what other people think about what you think. You know, we don't have to be black or white on these things."
Wallach knows that Bill, Baby, Bill is an experiment, and a small one that that. But it raises the question: can Wallach, Goldberg, and others reorient online activism and engagement towards what Wallach calls the Internet's "IRC roots," referring to the free wheeling discussion forums of the early days?
One thing working against them is that, says Wallach, traditional advocacy groups tend to want to pay consultants for online campaigns that are for Bill X or against the extinction of animal Y. Wallach says he talked to a number of people in the environmental and energy advocacy worlds before launching Bill, Baby, Bill. "A lot of the organizations had a specific points that they wanted in the bill -- Yes on Nukes, No on Nukes. People said, 'If you say this, or if you say that, we'll pay for it. There's a membership-industrial complex that wants to wait and see." Natural Resources Defense Council President Frances Beinecke blogged yesterday about the new Kerry-Lieberman bill draft, "It is too soon to say where NRDC stands on every aspect of the bill. As I write this, NRDC experts are combing through the document, and I imagine they will discover things in it that NRDC likes and things we don’t."
"I'm the little guy shouting into the wind," says Wallach. "And I understand that. But there are already a lot of people making a lot of money online doing transactional politics. I don't think the Internet is built for that. I think that's just fancy direct mail."
"It's an uphill battle. It's not where dollars and audience is right now," says Wallach. "But it's an uphill battle that's also our jobs."
It's a nightmare scenario: One day, you log on to the Web, and only 20 or 25 Web sites built by brand-name Net companies fire up quickly. Everything else -- all the mom-and-pop sites, all the niche retailers, all the alternative blogs you read -- dribble out onto your screen like it's 1996 all over again.
But this is a nightmare, too: You log on to the Web after work, and nothing seems to be working. That's because the people living in the three other apartments in your building are busy downloading one pirated Blu-ray movie while watching another. Or spammers have taken control of your neighbors' machines and are pumping out millions of e-mails, totally clogging your Internet pipe. You call your ISP and complain. An operator there says, "Sorry, those pirates and spammers have just as much right to the network as you do."
The important debate on net neutrality is perhaps the most misunderstood technology argument of our time. Sure, neutrality is good and discrimination is bad. And of course, it's terrible that companies like Google and Verizon seem to be holding secret meetings that will decide the future of our beloved free Internet. It's a shame that this important debate has been dragged down by sloganeering and extremism. Here are two important points everyone should understand about this fight.
1. This is not the fight of big companies vs. little people that it has been cast to be. It is big companies vs. other big companies. It's Web content s... [more]
IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.
More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy. Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance — vulgar Keynesianism r... [more]
Get American Back to Work - Manifesto signed by leading economists View entire article
GET AMERICA BACK TO WORK
July 19, 2010
Fourteen million unemployed represents a gigantic waste of human capital, an irrecoverable loss of wealth and spending power, and an affront to the ideals of America. Some 6.8 million have been out of work for 27 weeks or more. Members of Congress went home to celebrate July 4 having failed to extend unemployment benefits.
We recognize the necessity of a program to cut the mid- and long-term federal deficit but the imperative requirement now, and the surest course to balance the budget over time, is to restore a full measure of economic activity. As in the 1930s, the economy is suffering a sharp decline in aggregate demand and loss of business confidence. Long experience shows that monetary policy may not be enough, particularly in deep slumps, as Keynes noted.
The urgent need is for government to replace the lost purchasing power of the unemployed and their families and to employ other tax-cut and spending programs to boost demand. Making deficit reduction the first target, without addressing the chronic underlying deficiency of demand, is exactly the error of the 1930s. It will prolong the great recession, harm the social cohesion of the country, and continue inflicting unnecessary hardship on millions of Americans.
WASHINGTON — On the eve of a critical Congressional vote last week on a sweeping measure to regulate Wall Street, the prominent lobbyist Tony Podesta met with one of the lawmakers to go over some final language and discuss the effect it could have on his many corporate clients.
Once that was over, Mr. Podesta pivoted back to another client, BP, to help the company navigate Congressional waters and, in short, try to prevent an ugly situation from getting even uglier.
For weeks now, the two biggest issues in Congress have been cleaning up Wall Street and cleaning up the Gulf Coast. To the surprise of no one in the capital’s K Street corridor, Mr. Podesta — Democratic fund-raiser, avid art collector and member of a family brand in Washington — has had a big hand in both. And medical companies have also been drawn to his firm, particularly in the wake of the health care legislation.
In a remarkable season of lobbying, business is booming for the Podesta Group, already one of Washington’s biggest players. It has become particularly lucrative for firms like Mr. Podesta’s that are skilled at wielding influence in Congress, the center of epic debates on health care, bailouts and financial regulations.... [more]
Acceptance message for the 1990 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought (July 1991)
It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.
It would be difficult to dispel ignorance unless there is freedom to pursue the truth unfettered by fear. With so close a relationship between fear and corruption it is little wonder that in any society where fear is rife corruption in all forms becomes deeply entrenched.
The effort necessary to remain uncorrupted in an environment where fear is an integral part of everyday existence is not immediately apparent to those fortunate enough to live in states governed by the rule of law. Just laws do not merely prevent corruption by meting out impartial punishment to offenders. They also help to create a society in which people can fulfil the basic requirements necessary for the preservation of human dignity without recourse to corrupt practices. Where there are no such laws, the burden of upholding the principles of justice and common decency falls on the ordinary people. It is the cumulative effect on their sustained effort and steady endurance which ... [more]
Everyday Democracy's Executive Director Martha McCoy gives her remarks at the Brookings event, "How Broken is Our Democracy? And How Can We Fix It?”
On June 1, 2010, Demos, AmericaSpeaks, Everyday Democracy, the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School, and the Brookings Institution hosted a half-day conference to discuss the key issues at stake in our democracy. Panelists explored the priorities that should be front and center over the coming year; examined possibilities of a unified agenda for democratic reform; and discussed ways of creating and strengthening a movement for a vibrant and inclusive democracy.
Everyday Democracy's Executive Director Martha McCoy spoke about issues related to talking about participation and collaboration. To see the video, click here. McCoy appears at about 8 minutes into the video.
The Open Government Directive that the president issued his first day in office was hopeful and exciting for many across the country. The 3 commitments in that directive – to transparency, participation, and collaboration – are critical aspects of the democracy reform movement.
The challenge with talking about participation ... [more]
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Christopher McMahon, a professor of philosophy at UC Santa Barbara, has a new take on disagreements –– particularly those that are political in nature. His most recent scholarly work could lead to a greater acceptance of differing points of view, or, at the very least, offer an explanation about why even the most well- reasoned arguments generally fail to bring everyone into agreement.
In his new book, "Reasonable Disagreement: A Theory of Political Morality" (Cambridge University Press, 2009), McMahon examines the ways in which reasonable people can disagree about the requirements of political morality. He argues that a "zone of reasonable disagreement" –– a range of possible positions that can be taken –– surrounds most questions of political morality, and that the zone evolves over time, so what might have been reasonable hundreds of years ago is not so today.
"There is an idea in political philosophy today that under ideal conditions people deliberating in good faith will reach a consensus about political policies that should be adopted," McMahon explained. "C... [more]
'We like it being a collective group of voices,' says member
By Amy Gardner The Washington Post
updated 1:00 a.m. PT, Sat., June 12, 2010
The polls hadn't even closed Tuesday when "tea party" activists in Nevada started sniping at one another over whether Sharron Angle, the soon-to-be Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, was the best candidate to bring down Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid.
In Virginia, tea partiers vented on blogs and to reporters about the movement's inability to coalesce around a single, strong candidate in two House races, resulting in the nomination of establishment candidates instead.
The national tea party movement has never had a central organization or single leader; in fact, it has boasted the opposite.
But Tuesday's primary results provided fresh evidence of the amorphous network's struggle to convert activist anger and energy into winning results.
'Breaks my heart'
Frustrated and lacking agreement on what to do next, self-identified tea party leaders say the movement may be in danger of breaking apart before it ever really comes together.
"No one owns the tea party brand, and that's kind of the problem," said Brendan Steinhauser, grass-roots director for FreedomWorks, which organizes tea party groups. "In Virginia — it breaks my heart. You've got six self-appointed tea party candidates and one establishment g... [more]
The Progressive Politics of Happiness by John de Graaf
The following is adapted from a speech John de Graaf delivered to the annual gala of the Northwest Progressive Institute on Mercer Island, Washington, June 9, 2010.
You may have noticed that the subject of happiness is hot right now. In the past year and a half, more than 27,000 books and articles have been written on the subject. But the interest in happiness is not entirely new.
Once upon a time, in a far-off land of green valleys and soaring mountains, a boy of 16 was crowned King—and began in a quiet way to change the world. The year was 1972—not so long ago. The faraway land was a tiny Himalayan Kingdom called Bhutan, thought of by many as the model for Shangri-La. And the 16-year-old king was Jigme Wangchuck, who, when asked what he would do to increase Bhutan’s Gross National Product, replied that, as far as he was concerned, “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product.” And Gross National Happiness would be the goal of his reign.
Now if any leader, young or old, had made those remarks here in the United States, he or she would have received a few polite chuckles perhaps, then a collective yawn, and an exhortation to get real and get back to making money. But... [more]
Only a nonviolent revolution, like the one led by Gandhi, can meet the challenge of the climate crisis.
by Michael N. Nagler
posted Jun 03, 2010
An array of constructive activities, such as building community gardens or installing solar panels, need to be part of the push towards a climate friendly world.
Mahatma Gandhi is widely regarded as the father of the Indian nation, which he was. But the founding of the nation was not his only aim. He was, as he freely admitted, using India to demonstrate to the whole world how nonviolence could change history. The swell of mostly nonviolent revolutions that has followed in the last 30 or so years would seem to indicate that his bold scheme worked.
We need to be no less daring now, in the face of the coming climate chaos. To rebalance and stabilize the planet’s climate, which we probably have to do in the present decade, is daunting; but it doesn’t go far enough. We need to do it the right way, and we need to unleash a domino effect that will end up—maybe by the end of the century—eliminating not just human-caused climate change, which is the most urgent problem, but many, if not all, of the problems linked to it... [more]
Editor’s note: The following guest post is by Tim O’Reilly, the founder and CEO of computer book publisher O’Reilly Media and a conference organizer. O’Reilly coined the term Web 2.0 five years ago. Now he is arguing it is time for Gov 2.0, and has helped organize a summit next week to talk about what that might mean.
Today, many people equate Web 2.0 with social media; three or four years ago, they equated it with AJAX applications and APIs. Many are now starting to think it’s all about cloud computing. In fact, it’s all of these and more. The way I have always defined Web 2.0, it’s been about what it means for the internet, rather than the personal computer, to be the dominant computing platform. What are the rules of business and competitive advantage when the network is the platform?
So too with Government 2.0. A lot of people equate the term with government use of social media, either to solicit public participation or to get out its message in new ways. Some people think it means making government more transparent. Some people think it means adding AJAX to government websites, or replacing those websites with government APIs, or building new cloud platforms for shared government services. And yes, it means all those things.
But as with Web 2.0, the real secret of succes... [more]
Watching the news, it's easy to conclude that "Yes We Can" has been replaced with, "Actually, On Second Thought... We Probably Can't." We can't plug the damn hole, we can't get rid of too-big-to-fail banks, we can't pass an adequate foreclosures bill, we can't pass an adequate jobs bill. The list goes on and on.
Nevertheless, there are reasons for optimism -- even when it comes to the way our government is being run. One of these reasons is Tim O'Reilly, the tech guru CEO of O'Reilly Media. Among other things, five years ago O'Reilly coined the term Web 2.0. And now he's at the forefront of a movement to apply the concept to the way our democracy is run: Government 2.0.
I talked with O'Reilly at last week's Personal Democracy Forum in New York, a don't-miss annual gathering focused on the intersection between government and technology.
We talked about the need to create a new relationship between We the People and those we elect to represent us -- and the crucial role technology can play in it. For O'Reilly, Government 2.0 isn't about every office in D.C. having its own website and posting reams of data. It's about, as he put it in a blog post-cum-manifesto,... [more]
Call it the New Digital Divide. In the early days of the Web, social innovation leaders predicted it would spawn a more open and democratic society. Today, though, that hope is being strongly challenged.
According to Eli Pariser, a cofounder and former Executive Director of MoveOn.org, data aggregators like Google have started using increasingly sophisticated filters to decide what information we consume online. Trouble is, these new levels of data-filtering, along with the growth of social networks that aggregate like-minded souls, don't do a lot to foster broad-based civic engagement. The filtering, he told those attending this week's Personal Democracy Forum in Manhattan, is starting to keep us from being exposed to "big chunks" of information and ideas -- chiefly, viewpoints that may differ from our own.
For example, Pariser says, Google now uses 57 different personalization filters to customize what we see on the Web, even if we aren't logged in. That makes it harder for us to see news and information that Google's algorithms suggest might bore us or upset us. And that's not all, says Pariser. Often these "filter bubbles" -- relatively new on the tech scene -- are keeping information from us without o... [more]
By Gautham Nagesh - 06/03/10 01:17 PM ET The deluge of information available on the Web has made the country ungovernable, according to Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow.
"The political system is broken partly because of Internet," Barlow said. "It's made it impossible to govern anything the size of the nation-state. We're going back to the city-state. The nation-state is ungovernably information-rich."
Speaking at Personal Democracy Forum in New York on Thursday, Barlow said there is too much going on at every level in Washington, D.C., for the government to effectively handle everything on its plate. Instead, he advocated citizens organizing around the issues most important to them.
Barlow also said that President Barack Obama's election, driven largely by small donations, has fundamentally changed American politics. He said a similar bottom-up structure is needed for governing as well.
"It's not the second coming, everything won't get better overnight, but that made it possible to see a future where it wasn’t simply a matter of money to define who won these things," Barlow said. "The government cou... [more]
Whether the internet can "fix" politics or not is a function of what exactly you think is wrong with politics. And as someone who has spent the past several years working in online activism, I would say that the problems in our political system are monumental and spin out from what I call the Cycle of Decay:
Not to be overly melodramatic, but at the moment, it's becoming more and more apparent that corporate America and political elites of both parties are locked in an embrace that threatens to scuttle the world economy, the environment and our system of representative democracy.
And we don't even have a language to talk about it. We measure every political debate along a right-left axis, with rhetoric left over from the culture wars of the 90s. But in doing so, we're firing past the true villains -- the Masters of the Universe who skillfully manipulate tribal prejudices to insure that it is their interests, and not those of the public, that are the ones always being served.
Okay, this week I'll be at Personal democracy Forum, a big deal where people make online grassroots democracy happen.
Its big theme asks, really, can people use the Net to fix politics?
That's a big question, since political gridlock is really hurting our country. Most Americans are reasonable, but loud, extreme voices drown out moderate voices.
I talk to a lot of people on Capitol Hill, and they're tired of it, but no one sees a solution coming from leadership.
Every day for over fifteen years, I work with grassroots America, and I can see most folks are like me in that we want to get through the day, and then become couch potatoes. (Disclaimer: I like the conclusion to LOST.)
However, the situation in America needs people of goodwill to step up and so something, and the Net makes online grassroots involvement a lot easier and more effective than ever.
So, I figure, let's figure out what online grassroots efforts might have the most impact, and get involved.
One experiment originates from the White House, Open for Government, an experiment that was part of the Open Government Initiative. (I should note here that this effort is an ongoing success story that is not being covered by the mainstream press. Lots more effort is needed, but Washington bure... [more]
Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.
It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster. Conservatives may cheer themselves that they’ll compensate for today’s expected vote with a big win in the November 2010 elections. But:
(1) It’s a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November – by then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the healthcare bill will be reaching key voting blocs.
(2) So what? Legislative majorities come and go. This healthcare bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now.
So far, I think a lot of conservatives will agree with me. Now comes the hard lesson:
A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.
At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.
Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, not... [more]
If you've learned a lot about leadership and making a movement, then let's watch a movement happen, start to finish, in under 3 minutes, and dissect some lessons:
A leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous. But what he's doing is so simple, it's almost instructional. This is key. You must be easy to follow!
Now comes the first follower with a crucial role: he publicly shows everyone how to follow. Notice the leader embraces him as an equal, so it's not about the leader anymore - it's about them, plural. Notice he's calling to his friends to join in. It takes guts to be a first follower! You stand out... [more]
Our concept is based on a fast-click approach to issues, where points of view or facets of something complicated are represented by brief bullet-points and
everything is written as a bottom line.
In our space, you come in and make a few quick choices about what is important to you, and you are invited to introduce new themes or subjects or issues or approaches to issues, always in the form of bullet-points that other people can quickly check off if they agree or are interested.
In this way, we believe we can build a kind of broadband democracy that gets all critical issues on the table at the same time, gives everybody a voice, calls in expertise from everywhere, and liberates our national governance from the crushing limits of our intensely partisan system.
Convene concerned individuals and organizations from anywhere on the political spectrum 
