I'm convinced that what this country needs to unite and move forward is a deeply inspiring vision of the future backed up by a strategic and practical plan of reform that addresses fundamental needs and systemic problems.
To be politically successful, this vision and plan must speak simultaneously and authentically to American's love of both "freedom" and "community," and in a manner that speaks to our cherished heritage, our current situation, and our shared hopes for a brighter future. In doing so, it will resonate with the positive and progressive elements of both liberal and conservative political ideologies.
Though I don't claim to have a full and clear picture of what this vision and plan should include, I see several key related elements that can help create a solid foundation upon which we can build. I also believe that these can be combined under a broader "framing" focused on the need for a "21st century upgrade of the American operating system" that could attach a 2.0 (or 3.0, et.) tag to terms like Democracy, Legislation, Politics, Capitalism, Policy, Economics, Communication, Healthcare, Education, etc.
As the above suggests, this upgrade would encompass our capitalist system and accompanying economic theories and public policies; our political system (as exemplified by Open Left's Legislation 2.0 project, Sunlight Foundation's projects and the netroots in general); and our communications sector, in the form of an open-access Internet replacing the dominance of the one-way TV medium and the telco and cable duopolies. Other areas where this could be applied include healthcare and education, both of which exhibit an urgent need for systemic upgrades, and are tied closely to these other core elements of the broader system upgrade.
I hope to address all this in a series of Open Left diary posts. This first one will start with excerpts from the book, Capitalism 3.0: Reclaiming the Commons, by Peter Barnes, co-founder of Working Assets Long Distance. A hard copy of the book can be purchased at this site: http://www.amazon.co... laiming-Commons-Currents/dp/1576753611. An electronic Creative Commons version can be downloaded here: http://onthecommons.... _3.0_Peter_Barnes.pdf, and some of Peter's blog posts based on the book are here: http://onthecommons....
I think the excerpts speak for themselves, with a fuller explanation in the book. In later posts I'll discuss other potential elements of a systemic upgrade, and how they relate to each other as part of a broader process of fundamental change. Thanks to Peter for thinking this all through and taking the time to put it to paper.
I'm a businessman. I believe society should reward successful initiative with profit. At the same time, I know that profit-seeking activities have unhealthy side effects. They cause pollution, waste, inequality, anxiety, and no small amount of confusion about the purpose of life.
I'm also a liberal, in the sense that I'm not averse to a role for government in society. Yet history has convinced me that representative government can't adequately protect the interests of ordinary citizens. Even less can it protect the interests of future generations, ecosystems, and nonhuman species. The reason is that most--though not all--of the time, government puts the interests of private corporations first. This is a systemic problem of a capitalist democracy, not just a matter of electing new leaders...
... For years the Right has been saying--nay, shouting--that government is flawed and that only privatization, deregulation, and tax cuts can save us. For just as long, the Left has been insisting that markets are flawed and that only government can save us. The trouble is that both sides are half-right and half-wrong. They're both right that markets and state are flawed, and both wrong that salvation lies in either sphere. But if that's the case, what are we to do? Is there, perhaps, a missing set of institutions that can help us?
...My initial ruminations focused on climate change caused by human emissions of heat-trapping gases. Some analysts saw this as a "tragedy of the commons"... I saw the problem instead as a pair of tragedies: first a tragedy of the market, which has no way of curbing its own excesses, and second a tragedy of government, which fails to protect the atmosphere because polluting corporations are powerful and future generations don't vote.
This way of viewing the situation led to a hypothesis: if the commons is a victim of market and government failures, rather than the cause of its own destruction, the remedy might lie in strengthening the commons. But how might that be done? According to prevailing wisdom, commons are inherently difficult to manage because no one effectively owns them. If Waste Management Inc. owned the atmosphere, it would charge dumpers a fee, just as it does for terrestrial landfills. But since no one has title to the atmosphere, dumping proceeds without limit or cost....
...I wondered what would happen if we, as a society, created a trust to manage the atmosphere on behalf of future generations, with present-day citizens as secondary beneficiaries. Such a trust would do exactly what Waste Management Inc. would do if it owned the sky: charge dumpers for filling its dwindling storage space. Pollution would cost more and there'd be steadily less of it. All this would happen, after the initial deeding of rights to the trust, without government intervention. But if this trust--not Waste Management Inc. or some other corporation --owned the sky, there'd be a wonderful bonus: every American would get a yearly dividend check.
This thought experiment turned into a proposal known as the sky trust and has made some political headway. It also served as the epicenter of my thinking about the commons, which led to this book....
Although capitalism started as a brilliant solution, it has become the central problem of our day. It was right for its time, but times have changed. When capitalism started, nature was abundant and capital was scarce; it thus made sense to reward capital above all else. Today we're awash in capital and literally running out of nature. We're also losing many social arrangements that bind us together as communities and enrich our lives in nonmonetary ways. This doesn't mean capitalism is doomed or useless, but it does mean we have to modify it. We have to adapt it to the twenty-first century rather than the eighteenth. And that can be done. How do you revise a system as vast and complex as capitalism? And how do you do it gracefully, with a minimum of pain and disruption? The answer is, you do what Bill Gates does: you upgrade the operating system...
Part 1 [of the book] focuses on our current operating system, a version I call Capitalism 2.0. (Capitalism 1.0 died around 1950)...I show how this system devours nature, widens inequality, and makes us unhappy in the process.
Part 2 of the book focuses on capitalism as it could be, a version I call Capitalism 3.0. The key difference between versions 2.0 and 3.0 is the inclusion in the latter of a set of institutions I call the commons sector. Instead of having only one engine--that is, the corporate-dominated private sector--our improved economic system would run on two: one geared to maximizing private profit, the other to preserving and enhancing common wealth.
These twin engines--call them the corporate and commons sectors--would feed and constrain each other. One would cater to our "me" side, the other to our "we" side. When properly balanced--and achieving that balance would be government's big job--these twin engines would make us more prosperous, secure, and content than our present single engine does or can. And it would do this without destroying the planet.
Part 2 proposes a number of new property rights, birthrights, and institutions that would enlarge the commons sector in one way or another. I like to think that these proposals blend hope and realism. Among them are:
A series of ecosystem trusts that protect air, water, forests and habitat;
A mutual fund that pays dividends to all Americans--one person, one share;
A trust fund that provides start-up capital to every child;
A risk-sharing pool for health care that covers everyone;
A national fund based on copyright fees that supports local arts;
A limit on the amount of advertising.
The final part of the book explains how we can get to Capitalism 3.0 from here, how the models can work, and what you and I can do to help.
The dramatis personae throughout the book are corporations, government, and the commons. The plot goes something like this.
As the curtain rises, corporations are gobbling up the commons. They're the big boys on the block, and the commons--an unorganized mélange of nature, community, and culture--is the constant loser. It has no property rights of its own, so must rely on government for protection. But government is a fickle guardian that tilts heavily toward corporations.
Perhaps the elections of 2006 and 2008, coupled with the netroot's expanding power, and the increasingly urgent and obvious need for REAL solutions, has brought us to a window in time when, as Peter says, "corporate dominance [of government decisionmaking] ebbs" and "government--acting on behalf of commoners--swiftly fortifies the commons. It assigns new property rights to commons trusts, builds commons infrastructure, and spawns a new class of genuine co-owners."
Once this occurs, Peter explains, "The commons now has safeguards and stakeholders; it's entrenched for the long haul. And in time, corporations accept the commons as their business partner. They find they can still make profits, plan farther ahead, and even become more globally competitive."
In my view, we desperately need a Democratic presidential candidate--and some leaders in Congress--that are ready and able to embrace the need and potential of this historic moment.
Incrementalism may be comfortable in some ways, but what's needed are truly fundamental changes in our nation's operating system. I suspect Senator Durbin's involvement in the Legislation 2.0 project reflects a sense of this, and that Internet policy is an arena well suited to be a test case. He deserves real credit for this. To the extent he continues down this road, we should do what we can to watch his back and work as creatively and constructively as we can with him, his staff and any congressional colleagues that join him.
We need to transmute the disgust and outrage the Bush Administration has triggered in Congress and the nation into a vision and a plan that reunites the values of "freedom" and "community," and couples the "audacity of hope" to the awesome creative intelligence that, person by person, organization by organization, is leveraging the Internet to form itself into a force for transformation never before seen on the planet.
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