I bumped into this because I want to see if Emotiv, a company that’s trying to create off the shelf mind-controlled gaming tools, had gotten any further since they blew their much-hyped launch a year or two ago. I’m interested because if I could read rss feeds & surf the web without using my messed up hands or voice recognition, I’d be a happy camper.

When Emotiv realized they couldn’t pull off their launch, they did something very smart — they created a developer software development kit and started selling the sucker for very little money, encouraging geeks to start coming up with cool stuff. I think virtually everything the guy’s using is off the shelf glued together with some geeky coding.

Of course the video also looks like the first few minutes of a $1,000 budget Grade C horror movie….

Another interesting example, which looks more like performance art:

A great example of what’s possible when you use a decentralized, socially networked approach to unleash folks’ creativity.

an examination of the American tax code indicates that oil production is among the most heavily subsidized businesses, with tax breaks available at virtually every stage of the exploration and extraction process.

For example, by leasing the oil rig that caused the disaster, BP

used a tax break for the oil industry to write off 70 percent of the rent for Deepwater Horizon — a deduction of more than $225,000 a day since the lease began.

Another great scam:

Because of one lingering provision from the Tariff Act of 1913, many small and midsize oil companies based in the United States can claim deductions for the lost value of tapped oil fields far beyond the amount the companies actually paid for the oil rights.

Overall,

According to the most recent study by the Congressional Budget Office, released in 2005, capital investments like oil field leases and drilling equipment are taxed at an effective rate of 9 percent, significantly lower than the overall rate of 25 percent for businesses in general and lower than virtually any other industry.

And for many small and midsize oil companies, the tax on capital investments is so low that it is more than eliminated by various credits. These companies’ returns on those investments are often higher after taxes than before.

On top of that, rig owners drill for oil in American shores while flying the flag of another country and putting the headquarters overseas, all to radically cut their taxes.

I’m sure any day now conservatives — especially those rabidly free-market Texas conservatives — will put an end to this corporate socialism.

The other thing I like about Topos’ Promoting Broad Prosperity framework is that they tested their ideas with opinion research. You’d think by 2009 this wouldn’t be a novel concept. If big corporations spend lots of time testing the best way to convince you to eat Cheetos — and let’s face it, most of us don’t need that much convincing — you’d figure testing language for promoting social justice would be a no-brainer.

Yes, most progressive groups’ budgets are corn chip crumbs compared to Cheetos’ budget. So testing ideas & words wouldn’t be an everyday practice the way it is for Big Business. But even when folks on our side spend millions of dollars on a TV campaign, you can see from their ads that they didn’t do any testing. Or at least you hope they didn’t given how bad the ads are.

(Am I planning on testing RTE framework? With a budget of $0, not anytime soon. But if I ever get to the point where I could afford it? You betcha.)

Up next: where I think Topos’s framework needs work.

In 2008, the American National Election Study asked folks if Uncle Sam spent too much, too little, or about right in 12 areas.

The
results:

the respondents who identified themselves as “conservative” or “extremely conservative” had little appetite for specific spending cuts.

Very few conservatives said they favored reducing (or cutting out altogether) spending on any program. The least popular program proved to be childcare — with a grand total of 20 percent of conservatives saying they’d slash it. The most popular is highways; only 6 percent want to cut spending there. Even bugaboos like welfare and foreign aid fare well, attracting the ire of only 15 percent of conservatives. Amazingly, the survey found that, on average, 54 percent of them actually wanted to increase spending.

As John Sides points out, if you polled activists you might get different results. But for the conservative base? Keep your government hands off my Medicare!

What works: it pulls together several points that I really like, although they still feel like they’re duct taped together.

What doesn’t: it doesn’t pull in the nitty-gritty details about how the economy actually works and therefore the different types of rules we’ll need to use — stacking the deck, make it easy, make it visible.

I feel like I keep banging my head against variations on the same 3 problems:

1) I’m not sure what I want to emphasize. One minute it’s the importance of players in power, the next it’s the nitty-gritty details of how people & organizations actually make decisions.

2) The framework still doesn’t chunk things properly. When I imagine an ideal framework, I think about a table. A table lets you do things like say, “that solution takes care of Type A problems, but it also needs to address Type B and C problems.” It lets you classify/tag and bag issues.

3) The Big Problem: extra dry white bread. I want to get into the nitty-gritty — make it easy, make it visible, stack the deck, checks and balances, sustainable success. But the minute I do, the minute it feels like I’ve pulled the pieces together, the end result feels dry and mechanical — I don’t feel the connection back to the issues folks really care about. And when I try to connect it back, the result forced, not fluid or authentic.

So, I’m either going to skip blogging altogether or skip substantive posts for the next one to two weeks. As the Governator said, I’ll be back….

•Six in 10 Americans believe that “government should do more to promote the common good,” versus 37 percent who feel that “government should do more to promote individual liberty.” (”CAP-beliefs”)

•57 percent of Americans believe that “freedom requires economic opportunity and minimum measures of security, such as food, housing, medical care and old age protection,” compared to 38 percent who favor the idea that “freedom requires that individuals be left alone to pursue their lives as they please and to deal with the consequences of their actions on their own.” (”CAP-beliefs”)…

•Opposition to Corporate Power: 77% of Americans say that “there is too much power concentrated in the hands of a few big companies” and a 62% majority says businesses make too much profit. (See chart from Pew) As far as Wall Street’s overall impact, 49% believe that it “often hurts the economy more than helps it;” only 37% disagreed with this negative assessment of Wall Street.(Pew)

•Ending Economic Inequality: The public does not accept the idea that present economic inequality is natural and earned by the wealthy on their own. 60% of the public agree that “Rich people like to believe they have made it on their own, but in reality society has contributed greatly to their wealth” – with 30% strongly agreeing with this; 62% believe “The gap between rich and poor should be reduced, even if it means higher taxes for the wealthy” – with 38% strongly agreeing. (CAP-beliefs)…

•Need for Regulation of Business: 73% believe “Government regulations are necessary to keep businesses in check and protect workers and consumers”- with 32% strongly agreeing. (CAP-beliefs) 59% believe “Government must step in to protect the national economy when the market fails” – with 27% strongly agreeing (CAP-beliefs)

•Necessity of Labor as Counter to Corporate Power: Roughly six-in-ten (61%) agree that “labor unions are necessary to protect the working person;” 34% disagree, although there has been erosion in union support in the last few years….

•Environment: 67% believe “America must play a leading role in addressing climate change by reducing our own greenhouse gas emissions and complying with international agreements on global warming” – with 38% strongly agreeing. (CAP-beliefs). 83% believe “There needs to be stricter environmental laws and regs to protect the environment.” However, the economic crisis means there are more worries about the costs of environmental enforcement– a majority (51%) support protecting the environment “even if it causes slower economic growth) but that is less than in 2007 (when 66% held that position). (Pew)

•Health Care: 65% believe that government “should guarantee affordable health coverage for every American” – with 44% strongly agreeing. (CAP-beliefs).

What about the young ‘uns? Even better news:

The Coming Millennial Revolution in American Politics: Voters born since 1978 — the so-called Millennial Generation – voted for Obama by a margin of 66% to 32%, but that is, according to the Center for American Progress, only part of a “deeper story of a generation with progressive views in all areas and big expectations for change that will fundamentally reshape our electorate.” Millennial voters eligible to vote are increasing by about 4 million a year– by 2020, there will be 90 million Millennial eligible voters, just under just under 40 percent of America’s eligible voters.

On specific issues, Millennials are more progressive than the population as a whole (the following is from the CAP-Millennial report):

•On health care, 71% of Millennials support a federal government guarantee of health care coverage for all Americans, compared to 65 percent among the total population.

•On the minimum wage, 63% of Millennials ranked raising the minimum wage as a top priority, compared to 54 percent of the total population.

•On taxation, 60 percent of Millennials said raising taxes on those earning more than $250,000 a year will be good for the economy, compared to 47 percent of the general population who said it would be good for the economy.

•On labor unions, 75 percent of Millennial voters agree that labor unions are necessary to protect the working person, compared to 64 percent of 30- to 59-year-olds and 66 percent of people over 60.

But there’s one big obstacle — many moderate voters have lost confidence in government.

Part of the problem is, ironically, the broad criticism of corporate power in our society, since 65% of the public believes “Government policies too often serve the interests of corporations and the wealthy” – with 34% strongly agreeing. (CAP-beliefs) However, this is combined with a deeper skepticism of government effectiveness, with 61% of the public believing that “government spending is almost always wasteful and inefficient” – with 30% strongly agreeing. (CAP- beliefs). This is similar to Pew numbers finding 57% believing government is “usually inefficient and wasteful.”(Pew) Given the institutional and seemingly purposeful incompetence of conservative leadership in Washington, D.C. that mired us in Iraq and allowed Hurricane Katrina to devastate a city, that skepticism is hardly surprising. Filibusters in Washington, D.C. are just one more element that feeds the perception fed by the right-wing of government ineffectiveness.

The end result is that, despite supporting many progressive policies in practice, slight majorities end up opting in the abstract for anti-government beliefs, such as:

•57% believe “Free market solutions are better than government at creating jobs and economic growth” with 25% strongly agreeing.(CAP-beliefs)

•55% believe “Limited government is always better than big government” – with 31% strongly agreeing.(CAP-beliefs)

Rising Support for Government Action: Still, Pew found that skepticism of government has eroded in the last two years, no doubt due to the economic crisis. While a small majority (55%) still fears that “the federal government controls too much of our daily lives”, that is down from 64% back in 2007. Notably, fears over the inefficiency of government spending, while still strong, are far less than in the early 1990s and less even than two years ago.(See graph from Pew to the right).

So while in the theory, the public has reservations about government action, Pew finds strong support (62%) for the idea that “a free market economy needs govt regulation in order to best serve the public interest.” (Pew) And the overwhelming support for government acting to make health care more affordable means only 46% agree that they are “concerned about the govt becoming too involved in health care.”…

Crucially, young voters are notably less cynical about the effectiveness of government as a tool for achieving those progressive goals. When asked in the 2008 National Election Study whether the free market can handle key problems without government’s involvement, Millennials instead demonstrated an overwhelming preference for strong government by a margin of 78 to 22 percent. 63 percent of Millennials in surveys believer that “government needs to do more to address the major challenges facing our country,” while only 37% agree that “government is already too involved in areas that are better left to individuals or the free market” (CAP-Millennial) Similarly, Pew shows that young people have far more belief that government can be effective, with only 43% of those under 30 saying government is inefficient, compared with 64% of those 65 and older. Just 39% of those under 30 say they are worried about the involvement of government in health care, while 53% of those 65 and older do so. (Pew)

How to get around this problem?

The key is to avoid falling into the trap of talking about government in the abstract, where the public retains some skepticism, but instead to emphasize existing public structures like schools or other concrete programs that people support and see working every day.

Of course, none of this means anything if politicians wimp out. As Kos said, given that GOP turnout stayed steady but Dems turnout dropped, yesterday’s lessons were:

If you water down reform in favor of Blue Dogs and their corporate benefactors, you will lose votes.

If you forget why you were elected — health care, financial services, energy policy and immigration reform — you will lose votes.

Unlike a lot of other books on the business of going green, Getting Green Done argues that government has to be a big part of the solution.

business is only one key to addressing climate change. Businesses are nimble, motivated (by profit), and powerful enough to drive large-scale change…. But even businesses are not going to drive enough change, at least not voluntarily. We can’t count on them to ride up on a white horse because, at best, most corporations will hit maybe the top 30 percentage points of efficiency, at a relatively good profit, declare success (and it will in fact have been significant success), and then get on with making money. And that’s assuming every corporation cares about climate change, which not all of them do…

Relying solely on corporate, or individual, voluntary emission reduction measures to start this revolution is like asking everyone on a becalmed boat to blow toward the sail. (p.21)

Businesses still have a crucial role to play. For starters, we can’t wait for government to take action — global warming is too much of a threat to our survival.

And for government to do its job, it needs businesses and other organizations to play a vital role: figuring out what actually works.

Government needs examples of how to be environmentally progressive and case studies from which to build policy. Every individual and business matters because we need labs for determining what’s worth pursuing and how best to do it. Although this work is very difficult, the good news is that it only gets easier from here. It only resembles trench warfare now because we don’t yet have the policies in place to make it effortless. (p.21)

To put it another way, the only way to develop a Practitioners Perspective on the nitty-gritty of what it’ll take to go green is to get in there and start trying.

But even at this stage of the game — before we know enough to write smart regulations — government still has a role to play. Schendler’s first success at the Aspen Skiing Company finally happened because he was able to get a grant to fund his pilot project. Early on in the process, it’s hard for enviros inside organizations to get traction — there are too many unknowns. So government can “prime the pump” by funding these experiments.

For some regulations, there’s no reason to wait; Schendler’s a strong proponent of some kind of regulation of carbon emissions. But for others, where it’s a lot less clear what we need to do, from Schendler’s examples you can see a model emerging:

1. A handful of organizations start to experiment with making changes
2. Government “primes the pump” by funding more experiments
3. Many more organizations do the difficult work of figuring out the best way to do it
4. Advocates and organizations put pressure on other organizations to start making the change
5. Now that there’s enough experience, we fight to pass regulations that level the playing field so organizations aren’t comparatively disadvantaged by making the change (e.g., green building codes)

Obviously the path to change is rarely this straightforward, and often several steps happen in parallel or happen a little at a time, taking several rounds before the job is done.

There are lots more interesting insights and great stories in Getting Green Done. I’d blog more of them, but then you wouldn’t have a good reason to buy the book. It’s a fun, smart read, and you should definitely check it out.