Whatever happened to Widgets Made in USA?                      Though very young during the Second World-War, I've never forgotten the spirit displayed by the American people in supporting the president and their great efforts and sacrifices towards winning the war. Our factories and shops would meet the challenge as they worked around the clock to convert their assembly lines from making washing machines, refrigerators and automobiles, etc.,  to guns, tanks, fighter planes, bombers and battleships. I believe this was one of our nation's finest hours, As the war drew to an end, we  became the envy of the entire world. Our workers would enjoy the highest standard of living ever attained by a nation's rank-and-file working force at any time, or place, in history. The  "American Dream" now included owning our own homes and automobiles while enjoying our religious freedom and many other privileges.

It was no accident that our prosperity came at a time when we made and sold more widgets around the world, that were of quality and at low prices, and couldn't be matched by any other industrialized country. In fact the rest of the world would copy our ways of manufacturing and distribution  for many years to come. America's wealth wasn't just in our workers but that we were blessed with an abundance of the natural resources needed to make our widgets. We have always had everything from raw materials to energy right under our foot, in our hills and valleys, and fields and plains. Our workers, when given the chance, are still the most productive and best in the world.

We now move ahead to the time when the American Way of Life began to change. The change-makers consisted of a new breed of people on Wall Street alongside groups of private equity firms.  The change-makers were emboldened by newly relaxed federal regulations and the resurgience of free-market economics. Our once-proud widget makers were told they were out-dated and had to change their ways.  Prevailing was the argument that the folks who made the widgets together with the Labor Unions and Skilled Worker Guilds were a big part of the problem. What's more, we believed it.

Suddenly our basic industries began a downward slide as the country experimented with the new economics and with free markets. Youthful managers trained in the "free market" approach to commerce and economics entered the scene, bringing along, in most instances, nothing more than their theoretical business models, etc., to ease the forced exit of the more experienced managers. The next logical step for the new managers was, as we have seen, sending widget-making operations overseas and outsourcing the widget maker's jobs.  

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Earlier this week, Chris Bowers fired up the 2008 Use It or Lose It campaign.  For those who are new to the campaign, the idea is simple but powerful: get Democratic Representatives and Senators who are in non-competitive races to pay all of their dues (which can be quite substantial) to the DCCC and DSCC, respectively.  These kinds of transfers are a legal, quick way to raise a lot of cash for the committees, and thereby to make a lot of new races competitive.  Chris estimates that we can raise as much as $6.5 million this way, and the campaign was very effective in 2006.

I think this is a brilliant idea, but I'm intrigued by the crowdsourcing (that is, distributed data collection) angle.  Distilled to the basics, this is a fairly straightforward crowdsourcing campaign, a couple of times over: get a group of volunteers to collect data about which Democratic Congresspeople are safe this year and how much money they have; then get volunteers to call those Congresspeople and ask them to pay their dues.  The key to success of the campaign is putting together a database which volunteers can use collaboratively to post updates and track progress in a systematic way.  Chris is using Google Spreadsheets for this purpose; that's a great tool and it's a great way to get the job done in a pinch.

However, it occurs to me that this kind of crowdsourcing task will only become more important in the future, and I think there's a way to streamline these kinds of campaigns and to make them even more powerful and robust.  Below, I propose the creation of a general-purpose crowdsourcing platform which can be used to fire up a distributed progressive pressure campaign on a variety of public institutions - Congress, the media, state legislatures.  The platform would make the lives of crowdsourcing organizers a little easier; it would enable our crowdsourcing campaigns to be more broadly distributed; and it would enable those campaigns to carry second-order effects which could help the progressive movement accrue and organize power over the long run.

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