All you get is some downloaded data and a highly restricted set of permissions for where and how you use that data, mostly within the walled gardens provided by Amazon and the Content Providers. So it’s really more like renting than buying [...]

What’s more, the seller can also change the licensing terms at will [...]

By losing the free and open Internet, and free and open devices to interact with it — and even such ordinary things as physical books and music media — we reduce the full scope of both markets and civilization.

But that’s hard to see when the walled gardens are so rich with short-term benefits.

This, she warns, is a new model "that can be replicated elsewhere": where in effect interactive media becomes a new kind of bread and circus and "a full-ranging public discourse about the nation's political future is thus constrained and stunted." To her credit, MacKinnon then turns this same critical lens on her home country, the United States, and lambastes current government initiatives to expand online censorship and surveillance. "We have a problem," she writes, "the political discourse in the United States and in many other democracies now depends increasingly on privately owned and operated digital intermediaries. Whether unpopular, controversial, and contested speech has the right to exist on these platforms is left up to unelected corporate executives, who are under no legal obligation to justify their decisions."

Just as we paternalistically bar people from selling themselves into slavery, we must paternalistically bar people from privacy-related choices that constrain their freedoms, opportunities, and dignity. Paternalistic interferences with liberty are called for where market failures, psychological realities, and certain other factors impair the capacity of mature adults to protect themselves from significant harms. It’s hard for individuals to bargain about privacy with large business concerns. The complexity and novelty of privacy-compromising technologies makes it extremely difficult for individuals to protect their own privacy. Not only do educated individuals not necessarily understand the ramifications for privacy of the technologies they use, but we as a society don’t have a clear idea of how voluntary disclosures we make today will bear on our future opportunities.

regulating institutions of advanced economies are assumed to be efficient; policy-making in developing countries is experimental, "more almost a business mindset, in a way" [...]

the willingness to constrain and for the people to accept constraints is an advantage as we enter into an era in which we don't have unlimited natural resources...[policy makers in developing economies] impose constraints we would view as infringements on the territories we have traditionally viewed as free choice [...]

in the US, 27 million tradable jobs (value creating, ie: manufacturing, farming, raw materials, education, tech svcs.) have been swallowed up by non-tradable jobs (value transference, ie: construction, retail, health care, legal, restaurants) as enabled by over-consumption

part V re: Germans under Schroeder circa 2000 found themselves with a productivity problem, and they were hurt more than helped by the global economy. They focused on unions, job creation and wise outsourcing in order to address inequity of income distribution (though they did not have inequity of income distribution to the extent US does now). Schroeder lost the next election, but his leadership seems to have increased Germany's resilience.

If this concept of “political disobedience” is accurate and resonates, then Occupy Wall Street will continue to resist making a handful of policy demands because it would have little effect on the constant regulations that redistribute wealth to the top. The movement will also continue to resist Cold War ideologies from Friedrich Hayek to Maoism — as well as their pale imitations and sequels, from the Chicago School 2.0 to Alain Badiou and Zizek’s attempt to shoehorn all political resistance into a “communist hypothesis.”

On this account, the fundamental choice is no longer the ideological one we were indoctrinated to believe — between free markets and controlled economies — but rather a continuous choice between kinds of regulation and how they distribute wealth in society. There is, in the end, no “realistic alternative,” nor any “utopian project” that can avoid the pervasive regulatory mechanisms that are necessary to organize a complex late-modern economy — and that’s the point. The vast and distributive regulatory framework will neither disappear with deregulation, nor with the withering of a socialist state. What is required is constant vigilance of all the micro and macro rules that permeate our markets, our contracts, our tax codes, our banking regulations, our property laws — in sum, all the ordinary, often mundane, but frequently invisible forms of laws and regulations that are required to organize and maintain a colossal economy in the 21st-century and that constantly distribute wealth and resources.

In the end, if the concept of “political disobedience” accurately captures this new political paradigm, then the resistance movement needs to occupy Zuccotti Park because levels of social inequality and the number of children in poverty are intolerable. Or, to put it another way, the movement needs to resist partisan politics and worn-out ideologies because the outcomes have become simply unacceptable. The Volcker rule, debt relief for working Americans, a tax on the wealthy — those might help, but they represent no more than a few drops in the bucket of regulations that distribute and redistribute wealth and resources in this country every minute of every day. Ultimately, what matters to the politically disobedient is the kind of society we live in, not a handful of policy demands.

The point is that Google doesn’t have to dominate any of these industries to be successful, provided that they dominate content monetization. They merely have to make these industries more competitive, lowering the barriers to consuming a lot of content online.

The broader lesson is that monopolies will provide public goods in complementary industries, meaning that they are not as economically harmful as a static analysis would suggest.

Turner ended with a plea: Mainstream economics needs to embrace the radical notion that people are not rational actors after all. “Good economics leaves us”—policymakers, regulators, and consumers—“with far wider degrees of freedom to make political and social choices than has frequently been asserted,” he told the gathering. “The role of good economics is to inform those choices, not to deny their possibility.” [...]

More than two years after what many authorities called the worst financial crisis in history, neither Obama nor GOP leaders in Congress have embraced a new form of economic reasoning that explains either what has happened or where we are going. The economy is simply too complex, and the global financial system too inter­dependent, to be viewed through the prism of old theories that hold that free markets—or well-timed government spending—can solve almost anything. No one in Washington is challenging those doctrines with any strength [...]

New and emerging models try to explain economies with all their humanity involved. Some incorporate psychology; others, social norms; others still, the power of storytelling to move markets. One branch presumes that markets never have all of the information they need to function properly. Another uses supercomputing to aggregate enough information to begin to predict the sort of catastrophic market failures that other theories dismissed as impossible, that other models call “unpredictable”—the future bubbles that we would neglect until it’s too late, in the same way we neglected the Internet stock bubble in the late ’90s and the housing bubble of the 2000s [...]

Until the financial crisis, says W. Brian Arthur, an external professor at [The Santa Fe Institute], the supercomputing advancements “kind of lay dormant, like an underground river.” Now, academics are slowly starting to rediscover the institute’s work. Policymakers have barely sniffed at it, even though its possibilities are immense. Arthur envisages an open-sourced economic modeling effort to “stress test” major policy proposals—like Obama’s health care law—and run them through simulations to see how the economy might react and what might go wrong.

But in Washington, new thinkers are easily drowned out by the high priests of rational expectations, who have resurfaced, post­crisis, to espouse their doctrine[...]

What both parties are searching for, of course, isn’t necessarily the optimal economic policy or philosophy: They want the policy, consistent with their political-belief system, that plays best with voters. That’s a double challenge for economists to solve. It’s not enough to build a new and better understanding of the economy and its trapdoors. We need a simple narrative to explain it, too. The one that took root under Reagan and Clinton—that deregulating markets and expanding global trade would benefit everyone—worked for 30 years. Now, opinion polls suggest, that narrative doesn’t play. Americans don’t trust the government or the markets [...]

lawmakers might end up making radical changes in how they judge economic progress—perhaps adopting Turner’s suggested shift away from favoring GDP growth toward a more explicit effort to achieve full employment. Those changes, as Turner proposes them, would require lawmakers to invert some of the basic cost-benefit calculations they rely on to guide economic policy. If stability is more important to the U.S. economy than growth, Turner says, then lawmakers should stop worrying about the costs, in lost growth, of stabilizing the global banking system or counteracting greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Banks should hold whatever level of capital is necessary to forestall runs on the system and a potential repeat financial crisis—even if that means slowing down lending and curbing the economic activity that grows from it. Countries should pay whatever it takes to dramatically improve energy efficiency and transition from fossil fuels to low-carbon ones, even if the increased price of energy stunts growth by far more than the 1 percent of global GDP that a British blue-ribbon panel estimates is the price of climate stability.

The basic assumption of your draft regulations appears to be that top down, Washington driven standardization is best. This is a "one size fit all" approach that ignores the vast diversity of our federal system and the creativity inherent in local communities. What we have at stake are the impressionable minds of the children of America. You are not collecting data or devising standards for operating machines or establishing a credit score. You are funding teaching interventions or changes to the learning environment that promise to make public education better, i.e. greater mastery of what it takes to become an effective citizen and a productive member of society. In the draft you have circulated, I sense a pervasive technocratic bias and an uncritical faith in the power of social science.

calculating the amount of the historical federal subsidy of the Internet “depends on how one parses government spending—it’s fairly modest in terms of direct cash outlays. But once one takes into account rights of way access that were donated and the whole research agenda (through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, etc.), it’s pretty substantial. And if you include the costs of the wireless subsidies, tax breaks (e.g., no sales taxes on online purchases), etc., it’s well into the hundreds of billions range.”4 For context, Meinrath’s estimate puts the federal investment in the Internet at least ten times greater than the cost of the Manhattan Project [...]

The early Internet was not only noncommercial, it was also anti-commercial. Prior to the early 1990s, the National Science Foundation Network, the forerunner to the Internet, explicitly limited the network to noncommercial uses. If anyone dared to sell something online, that person would likely be “flamed,” meaning that other outraged Internet users would clog the individual’s email inbox with contemptuous messages demanding that the sales pitch be removed. This internal policing by Internet users was based on the assumption that commercialism and an honest, democratic public sphere did not mix. Corporate media were the problem, and the Internet was the solution. Good Internet citizens needed to be on the level; they should not hustle for profit by any means necessary [...]

In the realm of the Internet, a state-corporate alliance has developed that is matched perhaps only in finance and militarism. It makes a mockery of traditional economics, with its emphasis on an independent private sector responding to a competitive market. It also makes a mockery of the traditional liberal notion that capitalist democracy works because economic power and political power are in two distinct sets of hands, and that these interests have strong conflicts that protect the public from tyranny. Examples of how large communication corporations and the national security state work hand-in-hand are beginning to proliferate. The one that was exposed—and is singularly terrifying—concerned how, for much of the past decade, AT&T illegally and secretly monitored the communications of its customers on behalf of the National Security Agency.27 The more recent stories of how Amazon and PayPal/eBay cooperated with the government in the WikiLeaks affair may not be in the same league, but they point to the demise of the separation of public and private interests at the heart of liberal democratic theory [...]

The future increasingly looks like one where the wireless Internet world will come to equal or exceed the traditional wireline broadband sector, and this will be a proprietary system that does not practice “network neutrality” or have the openness long associated with the Internet. We should expect more great mergers among and between the largest media, telecommunication, computer, and Internet corporations, along the lines of Comcast-NBC.

As the authors of a 2011 report by the New America Foundation put it, we are entering a world of digital feudalism, where a handful of colossal corporate mega-giants rule private empires. Advertising will be given every opportunity to exploit the system, and any meaningful notion of privacy will have to be sacrificed. “For once the fate of a network—its fairness, its rule set, its capacity for social or economic reformation—is in the hands of policymakers and the corporations funding them,” one of the earliest champions of the democratic Internet recently observed, “that network loses its power to effect change.” It is a world that would have been considered impossible not too long ago, but it is the destination at which one inevitably arrives, if capitalism is behind the steering wheel.

the seeming inevitability of Orszag-like migrations points to a potentially fatal tension within the progressive strand of liberal thought. Progressives laudably seek to oppose injustice by deploying government power as a countervailing force against the imagined opressive and exploitative tendencies of market institutions. Yet it seems that time and again market institutions find ways to use the government's regulatory and insurer-of-last-resort functions as countervailing forces against their competitors and, in the end, against the very public these functions were meant to protect.

We are constantly exploited by the tools meant to foil our exploitation. For a progressive to acknowledge as much is tantamount to abandoning progressivism. So it's no surprise that progressives would rather worry over trivialities such as campaign finance reform than dwell on the paradoxes of political power.

In education, as in so many other aspects of society, money is being used to squeeze out democracy.

Waiting for Superman and its surrounding campaign reflect an influential trend that has proven adept at dominating education policy in both Republican and Democratic administrations. This bipartisan alliance unites 20th Century conservatives closely aligned with the Republican Party who made the bulk of their money before the dawn of the digital era, and 21st Century billionaires more loosely aligned with the Democratic Party who generally made their fortunes through digitally based technology. (These two groups can loosely be described as analog conservatives and digital billionaires.)

Despite their differences, both groups embrace market-based reforms, entrepreneurial initiatives, deregulation and data-driven/test-based accountability as the pillars of educational change. Under the banner of challenging bureaucracy and promoting innovation, both groups chafe at public oversight and collective bargaining agreements. Above all, both rely on money to get their way.

Cass’s work points out that parties who disagree on basic things — such as a would-be polity that wants to produce a constitution for the first time — risk coming away empty handed if they insist on their own views. But they don’t want to compromise, either. So what they do is strategically punt: they come up with texts that are intentionally vague, leaving it for another day to figure out what they mean in practice, so they can move on with a joint endeavor of some kind. There are lots of vague statements of that sort in the proposal, some of which are drawn from another likely-intentionally vague set of FCC principles about the Net. So, for example, under the proposal, carriers can’t engage in undue discrimination. They can do reasonable network management. There’s to be transparency, but not neutrality, for wireless at this time. These definitions would have to be much more fleshed out to understand what the agreement means, and lawyers use terms like these so that the parties’ different ideas of “undue,” “reasonable,” and “now” can be parked in peace under the same roof [...]

The proposal is aimed for Congress to adopt in part to clarify the FCC’s ability to regulate here, and it can be divided into two types of suggestions: one about the ground rules (limited by the vague language sampled above) to be observed by ISPs, and one that’s meta, i.e. about who should make and enforce whatever rules there are to be [...]

At the very least, it’s clear that the substantive ideas represented in the Google/Verizon proposal are important enough not to simply be left to these two players. Both freely admit as much — they call the framework simply a starting point, soliciting others’ views, and acknowledging that it’s ultimately up to bodies like the U.S. Congress to decide what the rules will be and how they’ll be refined and enforced. But their opening bid is to ask Congress to lay down a few rules and then butt out — leaving the FCC to play a limited role in enforcement, and making the bar for adjustment one where Congress would have to revisit the issue, such as for wireless, if trouble is seen there.

1. stifles mp3 innovation
2. supports telecom monopolies
3. app store policy
4. browser banning
5. blocked google voice

policymakers should be cautious about accepting industry self regulation at face value, because it redounds to the industry's benefit and it is ineffective [...]

Philip Morris USA and RJ Reynolds, and their trade association coordinated to mobilize ideologically diverse constituencies to help defeat health care reform under President Clinton. Actions included getting smokers' rights groups to heckle legislators at town hall meetings, and other tactics recently seen in opposition to reforms under President Obama, according to the authors. In some cases, groups appeared to have worked against their own interest, perhaps without full knowledge of who was funding these organizational efforts

I didn't like the management culture. I still wanted to be a person who worked with his hands, and everybody there, except in the research area, was aspiring to get into management [...]

There was a very close linkage between people who were doing technical work and people who were trading or doing sales [at Goldman Sachs in the 1980s]. There weren't a lot of barriers to dealing with different people. It was a place that valued you if you had a skill, no matter what it was [...]

Most of the models that had been developed in the financial world for treating the risk of bonds or the risk of options or valuing options were all essentially diffusion models, related to diffusion of heat in classical physics [...]

To build a model of options — there are a lot of little things that can go wrong. If there is a gap between the person who understands the model and the person who does the implementation, then a lot of little things can go wrong which you have an incredibly hard time rooting out because the person who understands the theory can't implement it and the person who understands the implementation can't understand what might be wrong when you get some mistake [...]

The difference between being an economist and being a physicist is that most economists have never really seen a successful model. So they don't know what constitutes a good model and a bad model. They either denigrate models too much or they respect them too much and think they are much better than they are.

Physicists, going back to what I said earlier, know the difference between a really accurate theory and between a more or less pragmatic model and they understand where to make approximations and what not to take too seriously. It's that sort of understanding of how much theory is useful, but not too much, is one of the skills that physicists bring. The second is really a hands-on approach to doing things yourself [...]

There isn't going to be an elegant solution to any of this. That's the way of human affairs, and in terms of leadership, perhaps the best we can hope for is that occasional, miraculous, moment when people who are in a position to make a difference cease to behave mechanically — to take some recent examples, Mandela and de Klerk, perhaps Gorbachev — and who, rather than fulfilling their preprogrammed destiny, break the cycle of karma.

how can the government change the framework of choices that particular people are faced with so that their own small errors in risk perception don’t expose the whole of society [...] taking human idiosyncrasies into account, might revive an old technocratic hope: that society could be understood so perfectly that it might be improved. The elaboration of behavioral economics, which seeks to uncover the ways in which people are predictably irrational, “is the most exciting intellectual development of my lifetime" [...] OIRA's administrators require that federal agencies express the costs and benefits of their proposed rules (lives saved, swampland preserved) in dollars. Moral principles, filtered through this cost-benefit analysis, find their way into confounding little boxes. A human life, the E.P.A. figured in a 2001 rule about arsenic and drinking water, was worth $6.1 million. (If an environmental regulation would save one life but cost $4 million, it ought to be put into effect; if it cost $8 million to save that life, the regulation would be scuttled.) Each I.Q. point a child lost because of exposure to lead was worth $8,346 over the course of a lifetime. A lost workday was worth $83. Many of these estimates used data from surveys — taken at malls, among other places — that asked passers-by how much more they would need to be paid to take on a job that carried, for instance, a 1-in-10,000 risk of death. Richard Posner, who has the most magnificent and chilly mind in this realm, used similar projections to price the benefit of preventing the extinction of the human race at $600 trillion.

Sunstein, steeped in the literature of behavioral economics, suggests that this abstract, utilitarian method might be humanized and reconciled with the world in which people actually live.

[interesting handling of climate crisis economics in the 2nd half]

If your market doesn’t work to set reasonable prices, then you need to acknowledge that and start thinking like serious regulators; you’re going to have to get a lot deeper into cost-of-service regulation than you ever imagined.

And setting rates is more than making consumers happy; you also have to allow premiums that keep the insurers from withholding service or withdrawing completely. Welcome to cost-of-service regulation of essential public services.

If Facebook wanted radical transparency, they could communicate to users every single person and entity who can see their content. They could notify then when the content is accessed by a partner. They could show them who all is included in “friends-of-friends” (or at least a number of people). They hide behind lists because people’s abstractions allow them to share more. When people think “friends-of-friends” they don’t think about all of the types of people that their friends might link to; they think of the people that their friends would bring to a dinner party if they were to host it. When they think of everyone, they think of individual people who might have an interest in them, not 3rd party services who want to monetize or redistribute their data. Users have no sense of how their data is being used and Facebook is not radically transparent about what that data is used for. Quite the opposite. Convolution works. It keeps the press out.

The battle that is underway is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It’s a battle over choice and informed consent. It’s unfolding because people are being duped, tricked, coerced, and confused into doing things where they don’t understand the consequences. Facebook keeps saying that it gives users choices, but that is completely unfair. It gives users the illusion of choice and hides the details away from them “for their own good.” [...]

What pisses me off the most are the numbers of people who feel trapped. Not because they don’t have another choice. (Technically, they do.) But because they feel like they don’t. They have invested time, energy, resources, into building Facebook what it is. They don’t trust the service, are concerned about it, and are just hoping the problems will go away. It pains me how many people are living like ostriches. If we don’t look, it doesn’t exist, right?? This isn’t good for society. Forcing people into being exposed isn’t good for society. Outting people isn’t good for society, turning people into mini-celebrities isn’t good for society. It isn’t good for individuals either. The psychological harm can be great. Just think of how many “heros” have killed themselves following the high levels of publicity they received.

Zuckerberg and gang may think that they know what’s best for society, for individuals, but I violently disagree. I think that they know what’s best for the privileged class. And I’m terrified of the consequences that these moves are having for those who don’t live in a lap of luxury.

[ Calacanis' rant:
http://calacanis.com/2010/05/12/the-big-game-zuckerberg-and-overplaying-your-hand/ |

R Stross, NYTimes:

The company’s desire now to help out “the world” — an aim that wasn’t mentioned on its “About” page two years ago — has led it to inflict an unending succession of privacy policy changes on its members.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/business/16digi.html |

danah on Facebook as a utility that needs to be regulated:
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/15/facebook-is-a-utility-utilities-get-regulated.html ]

The other 21st-century wrinkle: technological systems are often too complex, their functioning not fully understood even by the people who build and run them. In the case of oil, it’s a drilling rig measuring nearly five miles from top to bottom, reaching into crushing, cold depths where bizarre chemical reactions are the norm. The equipment is just part of a complex hierarchical system – with responsibility dispersed between different locations and companies. Facebook is constantly growing and changing. And you, of course, don’t know how your privacy settings are supposed to work. Neither does Facebook – and they like it that way!

The thing is, we don’t know where all this is going. The federal government cannot be relied upon to oversee any of this. Its reach is too short, its capabilities diminished by long stretches of anti-government stewardship and outpaced by the challenges it faces. Oil drilling is geographically remote and done by international corporations with powerful lobbying arms. Social networking is, for government agencies, a new frontier and one that doesn’t seem, on the face of it, like a good target for traditional forms of consumer regulation.

[links links links!]

People involved in the distribution of published material have tried their best to call such actions “stealing” since the beginnings of copyright. If you really want to understand what copyright is about, what its origins were, then please go and read this excellent piece. It tells you why copyright had everything to do with distributors, distribution and central control and very little to do with authors, musicians and artists. Why it had everything to do with censorship and exclusivity and very little to do with creativity and free expression. In fact, if you get the chance, spend time at questioncopyright.org; there’s some very useful material there, including this video, Copying is Not Theft

[...]

If internet copying was really stealing, then there would be an active disincentive to produce digital works. Yet, in the apparent heyday of internet copying, every form of digital publishing is on the rise. There are more books being written and published, more films made, more albums released [...]

The democratic process itself is being subverted, lobbyists are seeking to ensure that the Bill is not properly debated in Parliament before being passed. To me this is more criminal than anything the Bill seeks to prevent.

Here are my picks for the top ten worst things about the wretched period, which, however, will continue to follow us until the economy is re-regulated, anti-trust concerns again pursued, a new, tweaked fairness doctrine is implemented, and we return to a more normal distribution of wealth (surely a quarter of the privately held wealth is enough for the one percent?) It isn't about which party is in power; parties can always be bought. It is about how broadly shared resources are in a society. Egalitarianism is unworkable, but over-concentration of wealth is also impractical. The latter produced a lot of our problems in the past decade, and as long as such massive inequality persists, our politics will be lopsided. (10) Stagnating worker wages and the emergence of a new monied aristocracy (9) Health and food insecurity increased for ordinary Americans (8) The environment became more polluted (7) The imperial presidency was ensconced in ways it will be difficult to pare back (6) The Katrina flood and the destruction of much of historic African-American New Orleans (5) The Bush administration's post-2002 mishandling of Afghanistan (4) The Iraq War (3) The great $12 trillion Bank Robbery, in which unscrupulous bankers and financiers were deregulated (2) The September 11 attacks on New York and Washington (1) The constitutional coup of 2000, in which Bush was declared the winner of an election he had lost

In part, the prevalence of this narrative reflects the principle enunciated by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” As Democrats have pointed out, three days before the House vote on banking reform Republican leaders met with more than 100 financial-industry lobbyists to coordinate strategies. But it also reflects the extent to which the modern Republican Party is committed to a bankrupt ideology, one that won’t let it face up to the reality of what happened to the U.S. economy.

Unfortunately, this romanticized and sanitized vision of the economy led most economists to ignore all the things that can go wrong. They turned a blind eye to the limitations of human rationality that often lead to bubbles and busts; to the problems of institutions that run amok; to the imperfections of markets — especially financial markets — that can cause the economy’s operating system to undergo sudden, unpredictable crashes; and to the dangers created when regulators don’t believe in regulation...economists will have to learn to live with messiness. That is, they will have to acknowledge the importance of irrational and often unpredictable behavior, face up to the often idiosyncratic imperfections of markets and accept that an elegant economic “theory of everything” is a long way off. In practical terms, this will translate into more cautious policy advice — and a reduced willingness to dismantle economic safeguards in the faith that markets will solve all problems.

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http://change-congress.org/ al gore @ 37:00 - "democracy crisis" Q&A 42:00

We need investment in information infrastructure, and that, in the near term that is relevant for a recovery package, means massive public investment in Fiber To The Home (FTTH) and creating a fundamentally new system for adult education and its conversion into greater local involvement in education programs at local public schools.

In many parts of Silicon Valley, it seemed misguided to regard the U.S. economy as reliant solely on Wall Street. The future still depended on entrepreneurs and innovations and green-tech businesses getting “traction,”

...Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change.