Progressive Media USA was a more important organization to the progressive movement than many people know. For one thing, it employed a large number of progressive movement types with an online focus. Also, even though it was accomplished behind the scenes, it is responsible for a strikingly large number of the anti-McCain stories to appear in the national press over the past six months. Further, it was not meant to just operate during the campaign, but also to fight media pushback against a new Democratic administration in 2009 and beyond.
At the same time, Progressive Media USA was also a soft-money organization dependent not upon small donations from the rank and file of the progressive movement, but instead upon humungous donations from a few dozen extremely wealthy donors. In other words, the only reason the Obama campaign was able to decapitate it was because its survival was entirely dependant upon buy-in from a few hundred extremely wealthy multi-millionaires. Other elements of the progressive movement that are not dependent upon large donations are doing just fine:
Blogosphere traffic has more than doubled over the past six months. Further, new advertising streams are increasing revenue to the point where many more blogs are closer to sustainability than ever before.
MoveOn.org and Act Blue, both of which are dependant upon small donations from their members and users, are also doing just fine. As of March 31st, well before the major fundraising of the cycle takes hold in September and October, they had raised a combined $35M, close to their combined receipts in 2005-2006. Respectively, they rank third and fourth among the nation's largest PACs, behind only EMILY's List and SEIU. And they are still both quite new.
Across the board, progressive organizations that have never been dependant upon soft-money donations are booming. Obama appears to be exerting significant influence over the livelihoods of soft money organizations dependant on large donors, but otherwise progressive infrastructure is thriving of late.
By cutting off the spigot for Progressive Media USA, the Obama campaign has caused a wedge between "bloggers" and "billionaires" in one instance. Given that Obama skipped the vote to defend MoveOn.org, referred to Daily Kos as boring, and that his campaign has generally been credited with the worst blogosphere outreach of any campaign this season, I won't be surprised if something like that happens again. Clearly, the Obama campaign does not appear keen to work with the online elements of the progressive movement that predated the campaign. However, it isn't hurting online, small donors, and hard-money movement infrastructure in and of itself, it is just hurting the ability of that potion of the progressive movement to expand into the soft money realm. Still, our resources continue to increase apace regardless of this development, and there is more than one way to expand. The soft money route has repeatedly shown that it is dangerous, unsustainable and possibly incompatible for a bottom-up, less control oriented movement. Bloggers don't necessarily need billionaires. We will just have to find another way, just like we always have.
Along with African-Americans, the netroots were one of two groups that made a decisive, pro-Obama shift in January to basically hand him the nomination. Our money, media, activist support in caucuses, and shifting allegiances after Edwards dropped out proved enough to push him over the top. In return, we will receive Obama's excellent telecom policy, which will grow the movement in a way that Clinton's fraudulent telecoms plans might have brought all growth to a halt. However, we will also receive exactly the same sort of top-down control over large donors and infrastructure development that we had actually thought was more likely from the Clinton camp. Clearly, that was a mistake in judgment, since Progressive Media USA would never have met the same fate if Clinton were heading toward the nomination right now. Obama is apparently even more invested in top-down, large donor control over infrastructure than the Clinton's. And Hillary Clinton voted to defend MoveOn.org, too.
Was it the right decision to back Obama? Hard to say for certain, but on balance my guess is still yes. I miss the days when we could play all three top candidates off each other. Unfortunately, that ship sailed the day Edwards failed to win Iowa, and the campaign lurched to the right as a result. It is possible that our increasing separation between large, soft-money donors that his campaign is creating might even prove beneficial for us over the long-term, as we are forced to find more sustainable, broadly based forms of funding. In the extended entry, I close with a quote about the foundation of the Grameen Bank, which started in a rather analogous circumstance. Perhaps the best day of all is when you realize that the powers that be will never really be there to help you, and you are forced to find another, better path.
[Grameen Bank founder Muhammad] Yunus's first "aha" moment was meeting Sufiya Begum, a twenty-one-year-old mother who fed her family by making bamboo stools. She bought the cane, her raw material, with loans from moneylenders who made her sell back to them at the end of each day. Her profit? Two cents a day.
Soon Yunus and his students had collected a list of forty-two people in straits similar to Sufiya's, and he provided each with a loan out of his own pocket. "My loan of only twenty-seven dollars spread among forty-two people was enough," he tells us. It was enough to liberate them all from bondage to the moneylender.(...)
Where others looked and saw pathetic, hungry people who needed food, Yunus looked and saw resourceful people deprived of resources. To him, it was obvious that more than food handouts, they needed money to invest in tools of production. They needed a way to free themselves from dependency on the moneylender, to free themselves from vulnerability to hunger. Yunus saw credit as the liberator.
"But my loan was an individual response," Yunus says. "It stuck in my mind: What about the bank? This is what they should be doing. This is their job. So I went to the bank and talked to the manager. He was shocked and said, 'No it cannot be done, banks don't loan without collateral.' I told him, 'Look, I've shown that the poor are reliable, they've all repaid as promised. Will you lend to them?"
"We won't believe you until you've tried it in more villages," the banker said.
"Not a problem," Yunus replied, and expanded his informal lending with success. He returned again to the bank. "Now will you lend to the poor?" he asked.
Each time, the manager demanded more evidence; each time, Yunus made more successful loans to the poor.
Ultimately, Yunus threw up his hands and decided that he himself had to create a new kind of bank.
"That bank manager did you a favor, didn't he?" we joke. "If he'd gone along with you, today there would be no Grameen Bank."(..)
"People always ask, 'How did you get these ideas about lending to the poor?' I say: I knew I had to change the institutions themselves, and whenever I didn't know what to do I would look at the banks, and whatever they did, I did just the opposite. Every time I got into difficulty, I would just reverse the way banks do things, and that became the Grameen Bank," Yunus says, taking obvious pleasure in our looks of surprise.
"We have an expression in Bengali: 'You can't expect a mango from a jackfruit tree.' If you want a mango, plant a mango tree."
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