It's expensive to be poor. Bank accounts make it cheaper.

It sucks to be poor. It's even worse to try to work your way out of poverty.

That is next to impossible. There are dozens and dozens of traps that keep people from moving up economically.

There's one trap we can eliminate: currency exchanges.

Currency exchanges make a lot of money off of working people by charging hefty fees for basic services like cashing a check or cutting a money order. The people who own them do very, very well. And the people who use them … not so much.

Trouble is, banks don't like to open in poor neighborhoods. There's a bank on almost every corner in rich neighborhoods, but not in poor neighborhoods. Into that gap come the currency exchanges, charging a fee just to cash a check.

Imagine that! Imagine every time you deposited a check you paid a 1% or 2% fee. Every time! That's a whole week's worth of pay, just to cash your checks. Getting into a free checking account at a bank means an entire week's extra pay. For working people living on the edge, that's a big deal.

10 years ago, this would be a really tough problem to solve. It's hard to make banks open up branches in poor neighborhoods. And it's politically hard to regulate the fees that currency exchanges pay because they have so much money to throw around to block any bills.

Today, though, online banks are everywhere. All you need is a phone with a camera and you can deposit your check by taking a picture of it. Some of them don't charge any fees. This is a big opportunity to get working people out of expensive currency exchanges and into cheap banking.

It's still a little bit isolated, though, without any branch or in-person institution to connect to the online bank account. This is where government can step in, especially local governments with lower-income residents.

Governments deal with residents all the time. They collect fees. They collect taxes. They mail to residents. Kids go to school and parents sign up. People sign up for park programs and set up accounts.

What we don't do – and we should – is connect them with a free, online bank account when they financially interact with the government. So when they pay local taxes or pay for a school field trip or even pay a parking ticket our local governments should offer to set them up with an online bank account. And even better, because the governments will be marketing these accounts to thousands of potential customers, they should negotiate with the banks a great package for very low overdraft fees (as working poor people don't have much of a cushion week-to-week to keep a positive balance).

Every high school kid should get a free bank account online as part of going to high school. One study suggested how powerful a simple bank account it – the professor found that of those kids who graduated high school and intended to go to college but just didn't, for whatever reason, the number on statistically significant factor for those kids who actually went to college is whether they had a bank account in their own name.

Just having the bank account made a major difference in the lives of these kids. Perhaps it's a sense of autonomy or self-direction that a bank account provides. But whatever the reason, it helps.

For those of us who are fortunate enough to have been born into a culture and wealth bracket of banking and relative prosperity, we should extend those privileges to people who aren't so lucky and make it slightly less expensive to be poor.

This is a great issue for local elected officials to champion. We just need someone to run around and convince them to do it – ideally after working it out with a few different online banks so the potential vendors are ready to go.

Social progress requires a longer time horizon

Making big changes takes decades. Not months. Decades.

We're ultimately changing the minds of millions of people. That doesn't happen quickly. Gay marriage is a good example. This is a social change that is like lightning. Most people (including me) 8 or 10 years ago thought gay marriage wasn't quite right. Civil unions were fine, but marriage? Nah. And in the last decade, most people changed their mind.

That was fast! And I can imagine how frustrating it must have been for the people trying to change it.

Accepting the long time horizon inherent in any big social progress is a tough pill to swallow -- especially because we rely on "the fierce urgency of now" to inspire us to work on the cause and invest our time and money into it. It's a paradox: we have to be impatient enough to actually demand progress and work on building support, while at the same time, patient enough to recognize how long it takes to be successful.

Moving an issue like free college tuition from having the support of 30% of the people to 40% of the people seems like a pretty insignificant accomplishment. But that's a huge step forward! And that can take years to build that support, one person at a time. So hammering away at a cause to change a few more minds and help elect a few more politicians who agree with the proposal sure feels frustrating in the short-term, because we don't ever get to enjoy a dramatic change. By the time we get to implementation, things seem obvious, not audacious.

I wish I knew how to balance respect for the long game with the fire of short-term inspiration. There's a risk that we get too comfortable with the long-term nature of social progress and stop pushing. It's easy to think progress is inevitable and coast for a while without rocking the boat. That's dangerously seductive, especially as one gets closer to power. Tomorrow I'll push for that unreasonable change, but for now, I don't want to be ostracized...when I finally get my seat at the table, that's when I'll really change things. Sound familiar?

We've all got to navigate the Scylla of burned-out frustration from a lack of speedy progress and the Charybdis of delaying aggressive advocacy in exchange for access to power. It's a long game. But we have to keep playing it.

Lobbying is awesome. You should try it.

I am a lobbyist.

I love it.

It is really the most fun thing I do. It's my hobby. It is really fun.

I want you to try it.

Government and the history of the world....it's a never-ending drama. And when you lobby, you get to be a part of it! You get to shape the future! What a privilege.

When you convince a politician to file a bill, that becomes part of the permanent record. In 100 years, if there are libraries with dusty books, someone can pull out the record of the government's actions in the year you lived and look up and see the bill that got filed because of you. And maybe they will read it and realize that you were on to something and then finally implement it. Or better yet, they'll have enjoyed that great policy for decades and look back and wonder how anyone would have argued against the idea. Or wonder what life must have been like before everyone took that policy for granted. Like the way we take women voting for granted. Or free schools for everyone, no matter how poor they are. Or water that doesn't have any diseases in it. At the time, those were hugely controversial ideas, mocked mercilessly by the establishment as hopelessly romantic and stupid suggestions.

The best feeling is when you convince a politician to vote for an idea. They don't have to. They can say no. But when they say yes....there's nothing better. It's exhilarating. Every time there's a vote on the floor or in committee on a bill I'm working on, even when I know that it is going to pass, I get nervous. I start to breathe harder. My heart pounds. And when it passes, such relief. And when the bills fail – despair! Devastation. But (and this is comforting), it never ends. Bills never really die. We can always come back later that session or next year with a slightly different bill or, perhaps, a different perspective from the politicians.

The progressive movement is all about making our economy and our government work better to improve all of our lives. And to do that, our elected officials need lobbyists to help them implement the thousands of potential improvements to government and navigate as many of them as we can through the legislative process.

Think of each particular improvement to government as a person. It starts out as an idea – just a little baby. That baby needs to grow up and become a full-fledged adult: passed into law, fully implemented and fully funded to be part of our government and society. And a lobbyist is like the parent of that baby who has to help it grow. And then think of us as living in a world where the infant mortality rate is medieval: 95%. Most babies die. Most children die. Only the very strong survive. Well, most bills die. They never become a law. Most good ideas never even get introduced as a bill. They just live as a white paper somewhere, or an op-ed or blog post. Even for those bills that do get passed into law, many laws never get implemented. Or they never get funded. It's a massacre out there!

As it turns out, it is really difficult to pass a bill and implement it. It's very easy to kill a bill. And it's very hard to transform an idea into a bill and then into a law, and then a program, and then into a part of everyday life. That's what lobbyists do – we shield that idea from all the many enemies (including inertia and indifference) and help move it along at every one of the dozens of steps along the way.

This is a sample of the big legislative steps an idea must take to become a law.

1. Get introduced as a bill. Thus, one of the legislators needs to be convinced to sponsor the bill.
2. Get assigned to a substantive committee Thus, the legislative leadership must be convinced to assign the bill and not just let it stay unassigned, as many, many bills remain.
3. Get called for a vote in that committee. Thus, the chair of that committee needs to be convinced to allow the bill to be called for a vote.,
4. Earn a majority of the votes of the members of that committee.
5. Get a vote from the full body on the floor of each chamber. The leadership needs to be convinced to call the bill for a vote.
6. Earn a majority of votes from the members of the full chamber.
7. Repeat the entire process in the second chamber.
8. Get the Governor to approve the bill.

Any time the opponents of the bill can stop any one of those steps from happening, they win and the bill is dead. They only need to win once out of the dozen or so steps to pass a bill. We advocates need to win at every single step to pass the bill – we need to go 12 for 12. That is much harder than finding one step along the way to kill a bill (say, recruiting one committee chairman who refuses to call a bill for a committee vote they don't like).

Imagine a state senator. (Maybe it's you one day). She has a great idea. So she files a bill. And she works it. She asks the Senate President to assign the bill to a committee, she asks her colleagues to vote for the bill in that committee, and she asks her colleagues to vote for the bill on the floor of the Senate – and she is successful! That's great.

Now the bill goes to the House. And someone else has to take the bill from there. Our state senator is done. A state representative has to pick up her bill and then he has to go to a House committee and ask his colleagues to vote for the bill, and then go the floor of the House and ask his colleagues to vote for the bill. What if there isn't a state representative who is as passionate about the bill as the state senator? What then? Well, the bill will probably die. Because while the bill is supposed to be moving through the House, our state senator is busy at the exact same time working in the Senate, trying to pass bills through that chamber.

A lobbyist, however, will work with that state representative and remind him that the bill is up in committee, and ask him to ask the chair to call the bill for a vote, and will ask each of the members of the committee if they will vote for the bill, and report back to the state representative that the bill is looking good, and provide talking points and analysis to the state representative about why the bill is such a good idea, and when the opponents try to kill the bill, the lobbyist will counteract each one of the opponents' arguments (or else the state representative, who has lots of other bills to try to pass and lots of other bills before him he needs to weigh in on, so not much time or capacity to develop the arguments and nuances of every bill he supports, is more likely to lose a vote to the opponents). We have to push, fight, amend, beg, cajole, plead, trade, accommodate and adjust along the way to keep bills alive.

And we've got to develop and mobilize a constituency so the legislators will know there really are people who want this thing to happen.

It's hard to pass a bill. The more the bill does, the harder it gets, because it generates more opposition. And it's easy to kill a bill. That's why most bills that pass are small but significant steps, not massive changes, because massive changes pick up too much opposition to survive the treacherous path and become a law.

That's why lobbyists get a bad name. When people try to pass a big change, it's a lobbyist who kills the bill. And most lobbyists are bill killers. I call them assassins. They lie in wait and, on behalf of their clients (usually big businesses or trade associations that represent big businesses) they do their best to kill those bills that would benefit most people at the expense of their client. It's a rare idea that makes life better for everyone – usually, a few people are worse off in the short-term (high-income taxpayers or companies making a lot of money) when progressive improvements happen (like buying affordable college or making insurance companies pay for more medical claims). So the lobbyists for the special interests work very hard to kill any bills that would do that.

On the others side, of course, charging up the hill, pushing against the forces of the status quo, are the lobbyists and legislators trying to make a change. The odds seem impossible. So many bills die. But then again, every year, lots and lots of bills make it. Why can't it be ours?

Guess what – it can be! No one is in charge! Put another way: you're as much in charge as anyone else. You just have to start acting like it. So look at the government, figure out how it works, figure out how to improve it and get to work making it happen. Because it is a blast. An absolute blast.

Lobbying is at the heart of the First Amendment to petition your government for a redress of grievances. It's the highest form of citizenship. And it's what I hope to encourage you to do.

Educating voters a permanent campaign for social progress

Ultimately, we get to decide what sort of economy we want. We voters get to decide whether we want everyone to have a decent standard of living (or some are forced to grind out in poverty). We get to decide whether we want to live in pollution and suffer the health consequences or whether we want clean air and water. We get to vote for who runs the government. That's a precious power.

But it's difficult for someone to do that if they don't understand some of the basics of government.

How do people learn about politics? Public education only gets us so far, as it's the rare high school student who is too young to vote who will really learn about government and politics. Political campaigns aren't likely to spend a lot of their time educating voters -- their job is to get their candidates elected, by any means necessary.

Newspapers are pretty good at teaching people about politics, especially editorial boards and columnists. That's how I first learned about politics. I liked reading editorials and magazine articles and columnists who would tell a story about how things worked. But then again, I was interested. What about the people who aren't interested enough to seek out the information?

This is a particular problem for Democrats and progressives. People with less education and less income are less less likely to understand that voting for progressive policies and candidates is the right move for them. People with more education and more income vote more often and understand that voting for Republicans is in their interest. The strong correlation between education and income means that candidates who focus on raising incomes -- not perpetuating wealth -- have a harder time convincing their base to understand the connection between voting and increasing income. The Democratic base is just less educated.


Educating lower-income voters about politics is a permanent feature of electing Democratic candidates. It's also a good thing to do for society as educated voters are a good thing, no matter what. But to implement the progressive agenda, we've got to elect more Democrats. And to elect more Democrats, we've got to educate more low-income voters.

I think it means a media company.

We ought to have a newspaper. The content matters but the distribution is more important. We should be mailing this newspaper to the less-educated voters and potential voters. Maybe it gets thrown away, but I think some of these papers get read. And with that infrastructure in place, mailing regularly (every other week) we can, over time, turn our base of potential voters and voters who pick the wrong side due to a lack of knowledge into a governing majority.

That's the base upon which progressive policy gets built: one voter at a time.

We haven't figured out sustainable economic growth yet

There's a big picture problem that we haven't figured out yet.

Our population keeps growing and the amount of stuff we build and create keeps growing - but there's only one planet. Eventually, we're going to run out. We're going to run out of clean water. We're going to run out of fossil fuels to burn for our energy. We're going to run out of lithium and iron. There's only so much stuff and if we keep growing at 3 or 4 percent a year, that growth will hit the limit.

To demonstrate the point more insightfully than I can do, I'll quote from an essay from the Chief Investment Officers of a $100 billion company (actually condensed in a Guardian column by George Monbiot) on the impossibility of sustained compounded growth.

Let us imagine that in 3030BC the total possessions of the people of Egypt filled one cubic metre. Let us propose that these possessions grew by 4.5% a year. How big would that stash have been by the Battle of Actium in 30BC? This is the calculation performed by the investment banker Jeremy Grantham.

Go on, take a guess. Ten times the size of the pyramids? All the sand in the Sahara? The Atlantic ocean? The volume of the planet? A little more? It's 2.5 billion billion solar systems. It does not take you long, pondering this outcome, to reach the paradoxical position that salvation lies in collapse.

That's something else.

Let that sink in.

It's like the bad side of collecting interest in a bank account for 30 years. Instead of getting rich on wealth, we're getting buried in the stuff we're consuming.

Taking the long-term view (a dozen generations or so) means our current social model of perpetually increasing consumption won't work. It will break when we hit the limit of our resources. And we're bumping up against the limits of oil, natural gas and coal in the next few decades (not to mention we've basically passed the limits of what the atmosphere can handle from our pollution).

On the other hand, creating a perpetually higher living standard (healthier, wealthier, smarter) is fundamental to ... humanity. The best reaction to recognizing the impossibility of sustained compounded growth isn't to give up on a progress. There's got to be a way to raise our standard of living without relying on ever-increasing consumption.

What a great problem to solve! Sustainable societies and economies!

I don't know what the answer is, but I'm really interested in trying to figure it out. I think renewable energy has to be at the center of the solution. Stamping out inefficiencies in our industries (like health insurance financing) has to part of it.

But it also probably involves the very nature of work, money and wealth. We probably need to find a way to value (and pay for) services more than goods. We need better measurements of economic prosperity that value services more than goods so more people can make a living from services.

It's a big problem. I can barely get my arms around it, but it's exciting to think about in order to generate the inspiration and the fuel to start changing our economy now to move in the direction of that sustainable society.

Policy: Electrify transportation for climate change, prosperity backed by utilities

Burning oil for transportation as we all do for our cars, trucks, buses and trains, is an expensive habit. Most of us live in regions like Chicagoland or Illinois that don't have any oil, so we have to import it. That reduces our wealth, leaving less to go around for everything else. And to get that oil out of the ground in the first place, whether from under the sands of the Middle East or under the water in the Gulf of Mexico, is very expensive. Thus, oil costs more than $100 a barrel this week and gasoline costs more that $3.50 a gallon. Those prices are likely to rise.

Even worse, burning that oil pollutes the atmosphere and contributes to climate change, which is a very expensive habit. Extreme weather and coastal flooding (Hurricane Sandy in NYC and New Jersey as one of the most expensive examples) is, to put it mildly, not cheap.

To quit polluting so much and reduce climate change, we need to largely stop burning coal and natural gas for electricity and switch to solar and wind. That's the push for clean energy.

But we can't use any renewable energy like solar or wind for any of our vehicles that run on gasoline. They only run on oil.

That means we need to electrify our transportation network and run electric-powered cars, trucks, buses and trains in order to use non-polluting energy.

That isn't widely appreciated, even among leaders who are pushing to stop climate change. There's a policy gap. Most of the environmentalists (for lack of a better term) push for changing the existing electrical distribution mix from fossil fuels to renewables (phasing out coal in favor of solar). They are right to do it.

But we need to also expand the reach of electrical distribution to those sectors that use oil (like transportation). Otherwise we could have a 100% solar and wind powered electric grid and be burning oil for all our cars and trucks -- clearly, not good enough to hold us back from the tipping point of global warming.

The natural political power in this policy campaign would be the electrical companies that would benefit from new customers. Our utilities are among the most influential entities in politics. It would be ideal to harness their power for such an innovative improvement to our economy and our environment. We do make electricity here, so substituting domestically-produced electricity for imported oil would generate more prosperity. Shrinking imports is the same as expanding exports -- and the latter is a clear policy objective.

One big gap in our knowledge: what is the actual economic impact for substituting an imported barrel of oil for domestically-created renewable power? Is there a multiplier of some sort? I would imagine so, but we don't know that. The first step would likely be a gathering of economists and policy makers to review the state of the literature and identify what we need to learn in order to adequately and concisely explain the job-creating impact of electrifying transportation. We should hire some economists to come up with that number.

Policy changes to implement electrification would include changing tax laws to favor electric cars, requiring licensed gas stations to install fast chargers, buying electric instead of diesel buses for transit agencies and running electric wires over railroads (like the Metra Electric in Chicago or the Acela on the Northeast Corridor) to phase out diesel-powered trains.

I hope some far-sighted utility executives see the light on a campaign to electrify transportation.

The Price is Not Right. Prince Charles is correct: global capitalism needs to change

One of the best things I learned in law school is the myth of a black-and-white debate between "capitalism" and its opposite (socialism or communism or sometimes just government regulations). Life and our economy are much more complicated and nuanced than that.

With that context, I'm glad to see Prince Charles calling for a fundamental transformation of global capitalism in order to avoid global warming's catastrophes. In this Guardian article, Prince Charles said business must “account properly for carbon dioxide emissions, the use of water and fertiliser, the pollution we produce and the biodiversity we lose." Today, of course, no one pays for their pollution. So we're collectively binging on it. Hey, it's free! Dig in!

This is the fundamental transformation we have to figure out how to implement: getting the price right. Right now, buying a shirt made from renewable energy costs the same as buying a shirt made from polluting energy. There's no pollution tax. And there should be. There should be a pollution tax built into the price of everything we buy or sell, so that we'll buy less of the things that pollute and more of the things that don't. There is a huge cost to all that pollution. Someone has to pay it, and currently, the people who are making that pollution just aren't paying the bill, because we haven't figure out as a society how to invoice the polluters.

This is where the anti-government reflex of way too many Americans kicks in. It's not that people think it makes sense to keep pollution free. It's that they just don't want government 'involved'. They'd rather have a 'private sector' solution. And so any attempt to get the price right runs into the anti-government crowd.


There is no such thing as a free market without government regulation. Private property doesn't exist without a government full of police and courts to enforce it. Government regulation is baked into any market. It's a question of degree, not kind. It's still 'capitalism' to quit letting polluters freeload and instead start to charge them for the damage they cause through a fee or a tax.

If we can earn more hearts and minds and convince more Americans to understand that's how government and 'free markets' work - regulation is part of the structure of any market and making pollution free is as much 'socialism' as charging polluters something -- then we're closer to building a consensus that we should get the price right. 

Manage the commonwealth wisely: another way to change the world

Some of our older states have better names than our younger states. Massachusetts, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Kentucky are all, legally, commonwealths.

That's the right way to think about the $3 trillion in assets held by state and local pension funds. They are the commonwealth. That tremendous pool of wealth is deployed to finance some activities and not others.

What are we doing with our commonwealth?

As the world's wealth distribution gets more unequal (hurting our economy and lowering the median standard of living) and as a maniacal focus on short-term strategy by many business leaders leaves us hurtling ever closer to the point of no return for coastal-flooding, drought-creating climate change, we should be investing our commonwealth into those institutions that are pushing us in a more sustainable direction. Companies that are building and buying renewable energy should get our commonwealth, not those that are building and buying climate-change-causing energy. Companies that pay their top managers 400 times more than their lowest-paid workers should not be financed; companies that pay their lowest-paid workers a high wage with great benefits should.

I don't trust Wall Street money managers to use our commonwealth wisely. Their investments in private prisons, predatory lenders, mega-polluters and manufacturers of weapons of mass destruction make the world a worse place. How can we find better stewards of our commonwealth?

One tactic is legislative -- passing new state laws and local ordinances that regular how the commonwealth will be invested to create the Great Society -- more equal, more just, more prosperous, more peaceful. I suspect European nations have some of these laws on the books for their pension funds. I'd like to know more about that.

Another tactic is entrepreneurial -- join the team of pension fund managers as a consultant for using the commonwealth to advance the Great Society. Advise the pension funds how to vote on shareholder resolutions. Represent the pension funds as internal advocates within publicly-traded companies for longer-term strategies and sustainable business practices. Recruit candidates for corporate boards who will insist on raising pay for workers, not CEOs, and get them elected. Find smaller scale companies who need access to capital and devote part of the commonwealth to those entrepreneurs.

I don't think there are many money managers of pension funds (or the vastly greater pool of private wealth) who deliver services beyond promising the highest rate of return -- no matter the costs to society of extracting that wealth. There can't be many managers of wealth who can show they have invested their clients' money in companies that are responsible for high wages, renewable energy and increased general prosperity. I suspect there's an untapped demand for that. And if there isn't much of one today, we need to convince our elected representatives to hire more far-sighted managers of our commonwealth.

If you know of any good managers, please let me know.

Memorial Day is an echo of horror unimaginable

We remember the veterans -- usually men who when they were boys or very young men were sent to a faraway hell on earth to maim and kill and hope to survive the carnage. We honor their service and remember the dead and try to reconcile the faded monuments from the Great Army of the Republic who defeated a slave-owning Southern empire and the very old men who defeated an alliance of genocidal nations in the Second World War with the younger veterans who were sent to Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan with more ambiguous results.

We hear the stories of war, if we want to hear them. They aren't pretty or comforting. They are often senseless and brutal. They are often kept from us. My wife's grandfather would lose his smile and his eyes would lose their focus when he talked of the Pacific. Butchery. Savagery. Scars of the soul that never heal.

We see the movies about the war in Iraq and they rivet us. For an hour or so. And then we can shrug them off and award the director wearing a gown and the actor in a tuxedo for their work. We can forget the fear after the film. But they can't forget.

We honor veterans more than any other government employee: more than police officers, more than firefighters, more than teachers. We elevate them to an unreasonable pantheon: our heroes. We upbraid those who don't sufficiently honor them with health care or employment. We do this because of what we do to them.

We tell them to kill in our name.

We wage war. We do. We have too much.

We can do better.

Policy: deploying our $3 trillion in public pensions for a better world

The 100 largest state and local pensions systems combined control more than $3 trillion. They -- I mean, we citizens -- hold $1.1 trillion in corporate stock.

This is a mega-opportunity to grasp a powerful tool to reshape the world.

The data is from the US Census quarterly survey of pension systems. The biggest 100 dominate the field with almost 90% of all the capital in public pension funds. What could we do with this money?

Consider the world's biggest problems: climate change, savage and rising inequality and a basic lack of investment in the poorer half of the globe. Imagine if every publicly-traded corporation decided to raise the wages they pay, implement aggressive supplier diversity programs and become carbon-negative (generate less pollution than if they didn't exist). And imagine they stopped funding political movements that slow down progress.

That can happen. We own these companies. We elect their boards of directors. We vote on corporate policy every year through shareholder resolutions. We just don't exercise our responsibility to shape the direction of publicly-traded corporations. Instead, we let Wall Street money managers who are focused on quarterly results and not on long-term sustainability vote for us.

Every state legislature and county board and city council could direct their pension funds to start using our enormous sums of capital as a force for a more sustainable, prosperous world. All we have to do is start electing board members and supporting corporate resolutions to do the right thing: pay higher wages, create less pollution and buy from diverse suppliers.

I suspect that very few of these 100 pension funds even have a public policy on how they cast their votes in corporate elections. I suspect that most of them just allow the money managers to decide how to vote -- which is basically voting for the status quo. And the status quo is not working very well.

There's a huge opportunity to shape policy to harness the power of three trillion dollars. And it's a state and local campaign, so it is winnable. (It's not like we need to somehow convince John Boehner to support something -- we need our blue cities, counties and state who are already predisposed to support the effort to take action).

This is a battleground for climate change. It should be. How do we get the fossil fuel companies to transition into clean energy companies? Well, we own them! We just direct them -- through our trillion+ of corporate stock -- to transition to energy development that won't cook the planet.

We're basically the landlords of corporate America, and we just let the Wall Street money manager tenants run the place.

Every publicly-traded corporation could take the view that long-term prosperity relies on lots of customers with lots of disposable income so as a policy, they pay wages significantly above what the market will bear. They could take the view that long-term prosperity relies on a planet that isn't cooked, so they will only buy renewable energy and only do business with suppliers that do the same. They could take the view that long-term prosperity requires an educated workforce so they will stop seeking special tax breaks from competing governments that have the affect of draining money from schools.

Wresting control over our three trillion in assets from the short-term-only money managers and instead investing in long-term prosperity for a better world through more enlightened corporate policies could be one of the most significant, high-impact, bang-for-your-buck political/issue campaigns in state and local governments.