Today I was thinking a lot about disruption and democratization. Disruption is a term that has been done to death in business literature; you want a disruptive business model, a disruptive technology, etc etc. I think the only thing that might have it beat for overly talked about and underly acted upon catchwords is 'innovative'.
For those of you who are lucky enough to never have read business literature, disruption in a nutshell is taking some thing, some product, some solution that people have been making money on and undercutting it by coming up with something that is worlds cheaper, simpler, or easier to use. This is usually done by discarding old assumptions about how things must be done, and providing a product that isn't as good in many of the traditional ways of measuring, but that solves the problem 'well enough' and makes it affordable or easy enough that it reaches a much wider audience.
In politics, I believe we call this democratization.
The radical idea that 'we the people' can determine the way we will be governed has been disruptive in the extreme. For all of the setbacks, in a very short time, the number of representative democracies in the world has gone from somewhere very close to 0 in 1775 to 122 in 2005.
At a micro level, the democratization of our government is ongoing today. We, as bloggers, as individuals, are participating in the political discourse of our nation. By the combined weight of our numbers, through the forum provided by Daily Kos and tools like ActBlue, are participants in one of the greatest political disruptions in the history of government. Through their ease of use wide availability, these tools and mechanisms are opening up politics to a wider audience than ever before.
But all of you know this. You're here, reading blogs on DailyKos. You email your Senators and representatives. You donate on ActBlue. So why am I writing this diary? Because I want to bounce an idea off of you for another tool to democratize politics.
Its probably a bad idea, its probably broken, would never work, and I never should have thought of it. But maybe, if you speak up and tell me why its broken, what you hate about it, and why it will never work, maybe that will give us all a glimpse into something that would work.
The target of my idea is this: Corporate interests have the ear of government through lobbyists. started realizing how much this is true when I started doing volunteer research on earmarks at earmarkwatch.org. $20,000 or $40,000 to a lobbyist often appears to buy a $5,000,000 earmark. Beyond the simple money-for-money buying of contracts, even more lobbyists are hired to argue for legislative positions that favor a particular company's business model. Think CAFE standards or Net Neutrality.
I think that this system is broken and needs to be fixed, but I also think that it is unlikely to ever completely go away. So my question is: Can we democratize lobbyists? Would it work to have a website, similar to ActBlue, where instead of raising money for political candidates you raise money for political lobbying campaigns?
Where all of the small software entrepreneurs could band together via small donations to fight against the TelComms to hire lobbyists and fight for Net Neutrality. Where environmentalists could recruit grass-roots money to hire lobbyists to fight against mountaintop destruction. Where everyone who saw Sicko and wanted to make a difference could donate $10 to fight for healthcare reform.
I don't envision this as replacing traditional grass-roots lobbying at all. Writing letters and calling your representatives is crucially important. But today, corporations and others with lots of money have access to this back door into Congress that we as individuals don't. I merely want to level the playing field a bit more, and continue this disruptive trend of bringing government to the people.
Naturally there are many details to be worked out. You would probably want a wiki of lobbyist information associated with the site, to figure out which lobbyist firms to hire. Lobbying campaigns would probably need a few contacts who would be the ones actually interacting with lobbyists and political figures most of the time.
Figuring out what are all the records that need to be kept would be crucial; this should be as transparent as humanly possible.
But before figuring out the details, you tell me: Is this worth pursuing? Is this dirty path into Congress something we want to touch? Can we afford not to? What are the pitfalls you see? Would you use it?