US power failure a 'dismal' turning point
By Joe Costello
I was 19 in October, 1979, when I first stepped into a campaign office. It was
the Draft (Teddy) Kennedy for President office, directly east across the Daley
Plaza from Chicago's City Hall. I would work on that campaign across the
country for 10 months and it would instill in me an interest in politics, more
accurately an interest in the politics of self-government that has lasted 30
years. It was a time when economics dominated political discourse from the
nightly news to the kitchen table.
Unfortunately, little did I understand, two months before I walked into that
campaign office in 1979, president Jimmy Carter appointed Paul Volcker head of
the Federal Reserve, an event that would change American politics for the next
three decades. Almost everything I learned on the Kennedy campaign about how
American politics worked collapsed over the course of the next 10 years. A new
political regime, people, institutions, thinking, and culture replaced what had
been the dominance of New Deal politics.
Monetarism, Reaganomics or neo-liberalism, call it what you may, would totally
dominate the American political landscape until today. This new political
regime's greatest accomplishment was actually something quite extraordinary. It
basically removed economics, or at least any meaningful discussion of it, from
politics.
Various terms such as "free markets" and "free trade" became mantras repeated
without end and thus believed by most adherents to have a meaning negating any
need for further debate. Economics became removed from political discussion to
an extent unprecedented in American history.
Yet today, the Reagan revolution seems similar to its New Deal predecessor in
1979, a cultural, ideological and political spent force, not up to meeting the
challenges being asked of it in the first decade of the 21st century. Looking a
little deeper, it would seem this quaking of neo-liberal politics portends not
simply the passing of another regime of our two centuries-old industrial
economics, to which the New Deal also belonged, but a more fundamental
revaluation of political economy. A necessary revaluation of economics that
will move us beyond the "dismal science".
Looking back at the politics of 1979, what in hindsight can be seen as the end
of the New Deal is an era seemingly belonging to a different world. The late
1970s and early 1980s witnessed the greatest economic troubles the United
States experienced since the Depression and there has been nothing as
significant since. Unemployment was high, inflation was high, and the economy
was barely growing, a configuration of symptoms economists up to that time
didn't think possible. Thus a new name was born, stagflation, and of course in
that peculiarly human trait, the naming of something gave the wrongful notion
that it was also understood.
Fundamental forces were moving the American economy in the late 1970s,
including debt from the Vietnam War, the acceleration of de-industrialization,
the slow but continuing deterioration of American post-war global economic
dominance, and finally a spike in the price of oil brought about by the US
domestic oil production peak in 1973.
Powerless New Deal
New Deal politics, which owed a great deal to the thinking of John Maynard
Keynes, seemed powerless in meeting these challenges. Much of Keynes's economic
thinking was developed in the Depression and dealt with falling prices,
creating demand, and putting to use under-utilized capital, while the problems
of the 1970s seemed exactly the opposite, rising prices and too much demand.
This created an open public dialogue and thus the 1980 campaigns were all
centered around economic ideas. The Kennedy campaign, unbeknown to all
involved, became the last stand for New Deal economics, though its corpse would
be dragged around by Walter Mondale four years later.
Yet the 1980 campaign's economic discussions were for the most part a moot
debate. The real discussion and decisions were taking place inside the Federal
Reserve. Carter had handed over the country and his political career to
Volcker. Hitting one of the main pillars of stagflation and carrying out the
greatest charge of the then seven decades-old Federal Reserve, Volcker would
raise interest rates to over 20%. The economy contracted, Carter lost the
election, and the new, or maybe a newly resurrected economic era, was born.
When one looks at the political economy of the New Deal, one principle stands
out - an active role for government in the economy to bring about a more
equitable distribution of wealth. It would be wrong to simply state, an active
role of the government in the economy, for every government that has ever
existed in the history of humankind has played an active role in economic
affairs.
The greatest shift in this new political economy of neo-liberalism was the
abandonment of any notion that the government had a role to play in more
equitably distributing wealth. This was done in various ways, from removing
government oversight of labor relations, drastically dropping upper-level
income and corporate taxes, and year after year removing government oversight
of corporate behavior.
Where Keynesian demand-side economics worked to give the middle and lower
incomes direct government support, the neo-liberal supplyside doctrine in many
ways resurrected the ideas of 19th century Frenchman John Baptiste Say, who
claimed supply generated its own demand.
Different - with same ends
However, it is important to understand that New Deal and Reagan revolution
economics, while their means differ, both claim identical ends, that is to
generate goods and the demand to purchase them - to create a continuum of
growth. The greatest difference is that New Deal economics claims some
responsibility for equitable distribution, while neo-liberalism claims none.
This is an important cultural difference.
The Reagan revolution proved adept in its prime goal of redistribution of
wealth from 1980 until today. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows
in a 2007 study:
The top 1% of the population received 14.0% of the
national after-tax income in 2004, nearly double its 7.5% share in 1979. (Each
percentage point of after-tax income is equivalent to US$71 billion in 2004
dollars.) In contrast, the middle fifth of the population, which has 20 times
more people in it, received 15.0% of the national after-tax income in 2004,
down from 16.5% in 1979. The bottom fifth received 4.9% of the income in 2004,
down from 6.8% in 1979.
Yet, the most important cultural impact
of the Reagan revolution was the unleashing of the power of mega-corporations.
It can be said in the year 2008, that the power of large corporations is as
unfettered as any time in American history, and that is saying something.
The modern industrial corporation and the American republic were born
contemporaneously. The basically centralized authoritarian structure of the
corporation and the comparatively distributed democratic structure of the
republic led to rather a fitful existence between the two from the beginning.
Thomas Jefferson was the first to warn of the concentrated power of the new
corporate entities. Fifty years later, at the dawn of the first Gilded Age,
Henry and Charles Adams, the great grandsons of America's second president John
Adams, would warn in their Chapters of Erie:
And yet already our
great corporations are fast emancipating themselves from the State, or rather
subjecting the State to their own control, while individual capitalists, who
long ago abandoned the attempt to compete with them, will next seek to control
them. In this dangerous path of centralization, [shipping and railroad magnate
Cornelius] Vanderbilt [1794-1877] has taken the latest step in advance. He has
combined the natural power of the individual with the factitious power of the
corporation. The famous L'Etat, c'est moi of Louis XIV represents
Vanderbilt's position in regard to his railroads. Unconsciously he has
introduced Caesarism into corporate life. He has, however, but pointed out the
way which others will tread. The individual will hereafter be engrafted on the
corporation, democracy running its course, and resulting in imperialism; and
Vanderbilt is but the precursor of a class of men who will wield within the
State a power created by the State, but too great for its control. He is the
founder of a dynasty.
It would be a warning continually sounded
by others across the last decades of the 19th century. Eventually, the Populist
Movement would emerge, a uniquely American movement that was a reaction from a
dominant but declining agriculture economy to a growing and increasingly
powerful industrial economy. The question of concentrated corporate power
became a popular concern.
The Populist Movement and the following Progressive era sought democratic
republican solutions to the concentration of corporate power, most importantly,
break them up. Reformers understood Jefferson's political imperative that any
democratic system, any system of self-government, required power to be
decentralized or horizontal, while the power of the industrial corporation was
as centralized and vertical as any institutions in human history. The reformers
therefor turned to attempting to break up the power of the corporations, which
became known as anti-trust. Unfortunately, corporate power had grown too strong
at this point and the anti-trust effort was for the most part stillborn.
Instead of turning to the more American notion of decentralized power, American
reformers began looking to Europe and particularly Otto von Bismark's Germany.
Not only was industrial society creating new vast private entities of power, it
was also growing government bureaucracies. The American system gradually began
to use government as a counterbalance to the power of corporations. In doing so
the system needed to keep growing government bureaucracies as corporate power
grew, until finally with the New Deal an agreement was reached. Antitrust
basically was abandoned and a regime of regulation, bureaucratically
controlled, was instituted to quell corporate power.
Recipe for failure
Unfortunately for advocates of the New Deal, the acceptance of concentrated
power in the form of corporations was a recipe for democratic failure. The idea
that government could regulate such entities proved short lived, as
corporations gradually gained control over the government. In the three decades
of the Reagan Revolution, corporate power became pervasive across American
life, unchallenged by the political class, and begrudged but not opposed by the
populous. In exchange for an obscene cornucopia of material goods, Americans
basically abdicated most of their political power.
Now however, just as in the late 1970s when New Deal economics seemed incapable
of solving contemporary problems, neo-liberal solutions seem bankrupt against a
rising number of economic concerns, some interestingly enough increasingly
resembling the stagflation problem of inflation and slow growth of the 1970s.
The greatest of these concerns is a slowing economy brought about by several
things, but what might prove most critical in the short run is a global
financial system teetering on the brink of chaos. After three decades of
dismantling the financial regulations of the New Deal and simultaneously
expanding exponentially, the financial system seems to have become dangerously
detached from the hard economy.
With first the tech bubble and now the real estate bubble, the financial system
resembles something not seen for decades - a systemic bust - a situation many
of the New Deal regulations sought not to allow again. The damage these bubbles
cause are once again being revealed. The answer of the neo-liberals to this
point, simply, more of the same.
We have to remember, a robust financial system is one of the key components of
neo-liberalism and its blind faith in monetary policy. The bubbles of the past
decade are a direct result of monetary policy conducted by the Federal Reserve
under the leadership of Alan Greenspan combined with a regulatory laissez-faire
attitude toward the private financial system. As the financial system worsens
and Fed action increasingly seems ineffective, the words of Fed Chief [Marriner
Stoddard] Eccles from the 1930s are bought to mind: "One cannot push on a
string."
Two other problems have returned from the 1970s. The first is historic high oil
prices coupled with growing inflationary pressures on many basic commodities.
These are two trends that have completely reversed in the past several years
from what was occurring in the previous two decades, and begin to reestablish
trends that were common for most of the 20th century. The Financial Times
reports on Barclay's Equities annual report on stocks and bonds:
Over
history, the great enemy of investors has been inflation. Equities have done
little more than offer a hedge against it. From 1899 to 1985, UK equities' real
return, compared with UK retail prices, was negative. Stocks often failed to
keep up with inflation. By 2007, the real return on UK equities since 1899 was
109 per cent, all of which had in effect been achieved in the past two decades.
And the report adds,
Now, Barclays says, this is coming to an end.
Taking a four-year rolling average, inflation on both sides of the Atlantic has
risen by more than 1 per cent during the current expansion - the first time
this has happened since inflation was tamed in the early 1980s.
This is quite a quandary for the adherents of neo-liberalism. One great
difference between Keynesian and neo-liberal economics was in the rewards
system. Keynesian economics with an emphasis on more equitable distribution of
wealth concentrated on benefits in the real economy, such as higher wages,
benefits, and public infrastructure.
Financial rewards only concern
While neo-liberals, unconcerned for the most part with any notions of wealth
equality, concentrated almost entirely on financial rewards, thus the constant
need for financial growth and the removing of taxes from gains on capital. This
has had a tremendous impact on the American economy as the New York Times
reported recently: "Profits from the financial sector now account for 31% of
total United States corporate earnings - up from 20% in 1990 and 8% back in
1950."
Now, the number one enemy of finance is inflation, so as inflation begins to
rear its ugly head, the ability for neo-liberalism to provide its benefits,
which are at best inequitable, becomes increasingly problematic. For in the
school of neo-liberalism, low interest rates are imperative to financial
benefits, but low interest rates are impossible in inflationary times. It seems
neo-liberalism has run into intrinsic problems just as the New Deal economics
did in 1970s.
However, we may very well be at a point of fundamental questions neither the
New Deal or neo-liberalism care to ask. For in the end, New Deal and
neo-liberal political economy are simply two sides of the same coin. They are a
political and cultural school of thought that seeks one end, economic growth.
Both ultimately depend on growth in the creation of jobs, growth in the
production of goods, and growth in consumption each year.
They are a school of thought that depends on infinite resources from what every
year becomes increasingly clear to the collective mind of humanity is a very
finite planet. It is this fundamental contradiction that will increasingly move
into the center of all debate on political economy and a question neither New
Deal or neo-liberal economics has any answers.
This contradiction has appeared most recently in the rise in the price of oil,
which is the life blood of any economy we have deemed modern for the past
century. Global production of crude oil has basically plateaued, while demand
has continued to rise. At the same time, rising standards of living across the
globe has given pressure to prices in other commodities. Bloomberg reports:
Farmers
aren't keeping pace with the diets of a burgeoning middle class in India and
China. The Department of Agriculture predicted February 8 that US stockpiles
for the 12 months through May will drop 40% to the lowest since 1948 as global
production lags behind consumption for the seventh year in eight. "There's been
unprecedented demand globally for grains,'' said Gordon Davis, managing
director of Melbourne-based AWB Ltd, the largest wheat exporter in Australia.
"It's being driven by demand for protein in Asia, which reflects rising
incomes.''
Global wheat production for the marketing year through May will probably reach
603 million tons as consumption rises to 619 million tons, according to the
USDA. Demand in India, the most-populous nation after China, is up 16% since
2001.
The Financial Times adds: "The broad story is of depletion. Most of the easily
obtainable resource deposits have already been exploited and most usable
agricultural land is already in production. Natural resource discoveries, where
they continue to occur, tend to be of a lower quality and are more costly to
extract. Meanwhile, the dwindling supply of unutilized land faces competing
demands from biodiversity, biofuels and food production."
End of unlimited growth?
The question becomes this: is the world entering a new era, one where the
doctrine of unlimited growth has met its limits? The questioning of unlimited
growth is not new to political economy, it has been around since almost the
inception, beginning most famously, or as most of economic proselytizers of
unlimited growth would say most infamously, with the thinking of Thomas
Malthus. An Englishman born 10 years before the 1776 publication of Scotsman
Adam Smith's seminal, The Wealth of Nations, Malthus uncovered a
fundamental rule of biological science that became essential to Darwin's
thinking, but has been disowned by our unlimited growth scientists of
economics.
Outlined in his 1798 "Essay on the Principle of Population", Malthus' thinking
is quite simple. In any limited biological environment, any species population
growth rises to the limits of available food production and once hitting that
limit will tail-off, much of the time extraordinarily. For example, a
population of rabbits in a clover field will grow until they exhaust the supply
of clovers. The population will then decline to match the lesser availability
of clovers. Since Malthus, biologists have proven this to be an iron clad law
of the natural world.
However, Malthus theory was held aghast by much of the theological and
philosophical world. Humanity's theological and philosophical history has been
one long attempt to hold itself exceptional from the rest of nature. Thus
Thomas Carlyle, mid-19th century British historian and wag coined the phrase,
"the dismal science" to disparage both Malthus and much else of early economic
thinking.
Yet, Malthus became held in ill-repute nowhere more so than amongst the
economic community. His idea of humanity as part of nature flew in the face of
both burgeoning growth economics, the new industrial ethos which seemingly
proved man's control over nature, and of course the much older philosophical
and theological conceits of humanity's natural exceptionalism.
For the next century and half, industrialization swept Western Europe, the
United States, and some other small parts of the globe. By 1950, the economics
of unlimited growth seemed to have vanquished Malthus. World population growth
went from less then a billion to over 3 billion, seemingly a direct refutation
of Malthus population theory and an even more direct confirmation of the notion
of human exceptionalism.
However, in the early 1970s, as inflation amongst commodities picked-up, oil
supplies tightened and industrial economies slowed, Malthus suddenly made a
reemergence. Organizations such as the Club of Rome in their report "Limits to
Growth", thinkers such as E F Schumacher in his Small is Beautiful, and
hundreds of thousands of adherents to the growing global environmental
movement, all began questioning industrial economics concept of infinite growth
on a finite planet.
Malthus resurgence was short-lived in popular culture. neo-liberalism once
again vanquished him and his ideas, and in fact over the past several decades
few economic thinkers have taken as much vitriol as old Mr Malthus. The last 25
years saw the re-triumph of the economy of infinite growth, a great virtuous
chain of production rewarded by consumption expanded across the globe.
Industrialization spread across the planet. Nations such as South Korea, Taiwan
and Singapore joined and were followed in the last decade by China, India, and
Brazil. A grand vision was shaped, a world of over 6 billion people could live
like the United States, despite the one simple hard fact - the United States
with 300 million people, 5% of the world's population, was using over 25% of
the world's resources.
Malthus reborn
If in fact the planet's 6 billion people were to live like the United States
several other planets would need to be available, and despite all efforts to
date, we are still very much Earthlings. In the last few years, as a billion or
so new people have embraced the philosophy of infinite economic growth, it is
increasingly clear Malthus must once again be reckoned with. It is increasingly
clear, the model of infinite growth on a finite planet is facing serious
obstacles. One might say it is endangering survival for much of the human
species. It is time we move beyond the dismal science.
If we are to alter and reform the two centuries old patterns of industrial
society, we must also completely reevaluate our understanding of economics. We
can begin to do this quite easily by first rejecting the notion of economics as
a science and understand that economics is at its foundation a cultural system.
In order to change our industrial society, we will need to change our culture
and we can begin by putting the political back into the economy.
There are several fundamental pillars in reforming political economy:
1. Ending the idea of infinite linear production and consumption in the closed
system that is Earth.
2. Moving away from a fossil fuel-based energy system.
3. Corporate and government reform.
Concentrating on these three interlinking subjects will allow a comprehensive
though in no way exhaustive look at evolving political economy.
The first thing that must be changed is the linear production and consumption
model. We must accept the fact that we live on a finite planet, which means the
doctrine of infinite growth is an eventual doctrine of disaster. The first rule
we must adopt is to bend the current linear production and consumption process
into a circle, which means most importantly, we must realize on a closed system
like the earth there is no such thing as waste or garbage. We must look at
everything we produce as recyclable and if it presently isn't, it must become
so.
Secondly, we have to move people off the production and consumption hamster
wheel. This is the wheel that requires people to work to produce ever more
things so they can be rewarded with ever more consumption. An ethic must be
developed of not wanting more, but simply wanting enough - the system as whole
must embrace this ethic. People must be enabled to work less and have more time
to do other things than just consume.
For breaking out of the linear production and consumption model, the robust
evolution of information technologies is going to play a critical role. To this
point, information technologies have simply been used to enhance the linear
production and consumption model, that is to simply produce more stuff.
However, the real value of information technology lies in design, that is,
eventually creating more livable societies that use less stuff. Most of our
economic institutions will need to be retooled so their most important element
is not production, but design. We need to figure out how to design our economy
to not produce the most stuff, but more elegantly produce enough. Design is
measured not by quantity, but by quality.
The most important element of the modern economy that will need to be
redesigned is energy. If there is one thing that can be said that separates the
industrial age from all preceding it, it is the exponential rise in energy
consumption. Fossil fuels - oil, coal, and natural gas - have provided
industrial society with incredibly cheap and portable sources of energy. Modern
society is founded on this simple fact. Yet, we are fast reaching the limits of
oil availability and the environmental problems of burning fossil fuels in a
closed system like the earth are growing, including the increasing
inevitability of altering millenia old weather patterns.
The interesting thing about industrial society and energy is that energy has
been so relatively cheap and plentiful, little thought and even less practice
has been given to using it efficiently and conservatively. For example, the
automobile, thousands of pounds of steel powered by the internal combustion
engine can also be looked at as one of the most energy-inefficient methods to
move around a 150-pound person. Yet, it has been the automobile that has
defined development for the last century. The automobile is the ultimate symbol
of infinite growth economics.
On a planet with 6 billion people, the use of energy can be looked at better
than any other thing in defining what cultural economist Thorstein Veblen
called "conspicuous consumption," which is simply extravagance to publicly
display wealth. Now, most Americans look at the use of automobiles or
electricity as utilitarian, but looked at from a global perspective, American
energy use is an extravagance of historical magnitude. The average Japanese
uses 60% less energy than the average American. While, the nation of Tanzania
has the same population of California's 35 million people, but an economy 2%
the size. The annual generation of electricity in Tanzania is less than 0.1% of
California.
Time to examine energy cost
While over the course of industrial society, the cost of labor has been
scrutinized extensively, in most processes, the cost of energy has been paid
too little attention. The United States needs to redesign its energy economy,
looking to how all its processes can become much more efficient. This includes
food production, where Richard Manning in an article in Harpers Magazine
writes, "In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of
food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year
in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1."
It also includes redesigning our conspicuous consumption transportation systems
and the redesign of all our buildings and communities. It means redesigning
every aspect of American economic life.
It is with the redesign of American energy economy where the conflict between
the value system of industrial capitalism (infinite quantitative growth) and
the value system of an information intensive society (qualitative design),
becomes readily apparent. The American economy must be redesigned not to use
the most energy possible but the least, and for this industrial society has no
value.
In large part, it requires information to be released from the constraints of
market valuation and to develop a cultural value more similar to the political
value of the 1st Amendment and the Jefferson and Madison imperative of the
distribution of information through education being the life blood of
self-government, so it will be too for a society that values design.
Next, a revaluation of political economy will require a reformation of its
institutions of power - corporations and the government. Taking people out of
the production and consumption cycle, giving them more extensive education,
greater roles processing information, and greater design controls, requires the
flattening of decision making. Corporations are very centralized in decision
making, or as the Adams brothers stated in 1870, corporations had introduced
Caesarism into the republic. It must be noted with little irony that in recent
years, the term Czar, which is Russian for Caesar, has become ever more
prevalent as a government solution. Decision making in the institutions of the
republic itself has over the last century gone from flat to a very centralized
hierarchy in DC.
In getting real value out of information, design must become an integral
component to all aspects of society, and that means decision making must become
a larger and more meaningful aspect of everyone's life, whether it is
individual decisions or those taken with association. This means our corporate
and government institutions, which have symbiotically grown more centralized
and powerful over the course of the 20th century, must be most simply broken-up
and restructured. This means more power to localities, not as independent
entities, but as nodes in a distributed network.
The Internet has provided the model for a workable horizontally distributed
network. Opposed to millenia old traditional hierarchies, the Internet has
shown that order can be gained not just from centralized control, but through
distributed simultaneous actions. To this point, the Internet has been used
most effectively as means to consolidate corporate power, which is a little
ironic. It should be a warning that we have a long way to go in understanding
how to make this work. Yet the simple answer to begin corporate reform is to
break them up. All corporations should face a limit on their size.
Luckily for Americans, the American system was founded as a mixed
horizontal-vertical system. It's hard for Americans to understand given both
their atrocious history educations and the centralist propaganda that all who
are alive today have been fed their entire lives, that at the beginning of the
republic and for most of its first century, any Americans interaction with
government power was overwhelmingly at the local level.
Today, after two centuries, government has both centralized and atrophied in
Washington DC. Power needs to devolve from DC, not to the states, but to cities
and counties, then connections must be made between the cities and counties.
There's no need for intercity policy having to be made in state capitals or DC.
The cities can interact amongst themselves and develop appropriate actions.
Most importantly, the reformation of corporations and government will call for
a revitalization and a necessary evolution of the role of citizen. It will call
for people to take time previously given to the production and consumption
cycle and devote it to what might best be defined as an expanded role of the
citizen.
Considering today most Americans have at best a most limited role as citizen,
making a joke of the very notion of modern self-government, expanding the role
of the citizen will not be hard. But it means much more than people re-engaging
in the traditional citizen affairs they have abandoned. It means creating new
roles in information processing, valuing design, and distributed decision
making.
Some will immediately attack the notion of a revived citizen as naive or
romantic, but it is nothing of the sort. Culturally we must value these roles
to as great a degree as we today value work in the production cycle, or as a
responsibility as important as parenting. Citizenship must be stripped of the
notion that it is voluntary and must be understood to be necessary. It must be
looked at not as shining and exemplary, but more like work, much of the time
simply an unavoidable drudgery, with the inescapable sad but nonetheless
enlightening conclusion that the nirvana of democracy is meetings.
Thus we stand at an amazingly necessary cultural turning point in history. We
must put the political back into the economy and in so doing we must evolve
both. Some who have read this short essay will gripe it is too short on
specific answers, but this is by design.
In bringing about this change, a crucial insight of democratic historian
Lawrence Goodwyn must be kept in mind. Any movement for democratic change
inherently relies on experience. The institutions and new roles of the citizen
will come out of actual actions and implementation. We must regain the courage
and wisdom of this republic's founders who looked at their work as an
experiment in self- government. We must do the same.
So much of the change we face is cultural, a revaluation of value, and history
shows this is never easy. In many ways, the era we live in is most analogous to
Europe right before the Reformation, where one doctrine held almost complete
sway over life and was reinforced by centralized institutions speaking a
vocabulary the vast majority couldn't understand.
Yet the rot and insufficiencies became so great, the old doctrine proved
untenable for a new era. If we are to provide change that is now so obviously
necessary, we'll have to have the fortitude of that little Augustinian monk and
state, "Here I stand, I can do no other."
Joe Costello is a communication and energy consultant. He served as
communications director for Jerry Brown's 1992 presidential campaign and senior
advisor on Howard Dean's 2004 campaign.joecostello@gmail.com
(Copyright AlterNet.org 2008 . Reprinted with permission of
AlterNet.org )
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