Passing the buck from the IRS to the FEC to Congress

There's a new job opening at the top of the IRS. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are calling not just for resignations, but criminal inquiries. The Op-Ed pages are full of insights about how 501 c 4s are broken, not just the IRS. In truth, these insights have been well known to those who track campaign finance and nonprofits, it just takes a scandal to make others aware.

So, now that the great secret of how broken c 4s are is on the nation's front pages - of the Times, The Wall Street Journal - it's time to ask the question some of us have been raising since January 2010 - where is the Federal Elections Commission in all this?

That's that group that (in theory) regulates campaign finance. The decision in the Citizens United case is often pointed to being at the root of the problem. (Our first clue should be the full name of the case - Citizens United v The FEC). The case opened the floodgates to 501 (c) (4)s becoming the campaign finance vehicle of choice - there have more than 4000 applications for new c4s since 2010 - few of them are the homeowners associations and sports leagues that used to dominate this class of organizations. C4s as political funding channel began with the 2010 midterm elections and made itself fully visible in the 2012 Presidential election. It is at that point that legislators (the same ones calling for IRS heads to roll) should have written rules to add FEC oversight to these organizations. The FEC is far from perfect, but at least it has experience and reporting requirements about campaign expenditures (monthly, not retrospectively as the IRS was in the position of doing)

Firing the Acting Commissioner is Washington's oldest "buck stops here" kabuki theater move. Heads will no doubt continue to roll from the IRS. The reality is, responsibility for the fiasco that are 501 (c) (4)s lies with the Citizens United decision, campaign finance rules, campaign finance overseers, and, ultimately, Congress itself.

The problems with 501 (c) (4)s

Regular readers of this blog know that I've been like a dog with a bone about the threat to the social economy and charitable organizations inherent in the Citizens United decision. I've written about it, held charrettes on it, spoken about it, and - at least in part - changed my career because of it.

The news about the IRS's activities regarding politically conservative social welfare organizations is both a surprise and, upon reflection, almost completely predictable. Intentional or stupid, witch hunt or botched effort at streamlining an impossible task - the IRS doesn't have the tools it needs to oversee 501 c 4s. We the people have written and approved rules that allow these organizations to:

• self declare tax exempt status
• keep their donors anonymous
• participate in campaign politics to an unspecified (and, therefore, difficult to police) degree

There may be problems with the IRS. There are definitely problems with the 501 (c) (4) organizational structure and oversight mechanism in today's world of campaign finance.

MOOC for Philanthropy

The Learning By Giving Foundation, funded by Warren Buffet's sister, is offering a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on philanthropy. Participants will learn about giving and then give. More information is here.

Re-discovering the digital divide

The New York Times has discovered that all is not fair in the land of digital technology. Janet Maslin, a book critic for the paper, doesn't usually review tech books. So I was a bit surprised to see her review of Jaron Lanier's Who owns the Future, in Monday's paper (yes, the actual paper version). And admittedly more surprised to hear her praise the book - not only for its writing but for its message. As Maslin notes:

"Mr. Lanier bucks a wave of more conventional diatribes on Big Data to deliver Olympian, contrarian fighting words about the Internet’s exploitative powers. A self-proclaimed “humanist softie,” he is a witheringly caustic critic of big Web entities and their business models"

I haven't yet read Lanier's newest, though I was a fan of his previous book, You Are Not A Gadget. And, as I continue to organize my "futurist" bookshelf from dystopian/negative to utopian/positive* I will gladly fit this onto the shelf when I am done. I plan to go hear Lanier speak about the book in Menlo Park on May 15th. (Yes, most of my copies are printed versions on an actual shelf.)

Sunday's New York Times saw Jenna Wortham, a regular tech columnist at the paper, also worrying about the growing gaps of tech haves and havenots. Her column, More Tech Magic, If You Can Afford It, is ostensibly about Google Glass, the latest, "too expensive for the masses" contribution to digital gadgetry. Wortham admittedly enjoys her brief experience with a borrowed pair of Google Glass and then notes that she, on her columnist salary, won't be buying a pair (at $1500 per) any time soon. Then she jumps to her real topic, which is shaped by price disparities but are rooted in principles of justice:

"Surely, wearable computers are in our future, whether they are embedded in glasses or smart watches or even contact lenses. But the experience of wearing Glass raised questions for me about the future of new technology and who gains access to it first — part of a much larger debate concerning the undercurrents of power and privilege that course through the Web.

At the very least, the release of Glass could shape how we think about human and computer interactions, and — considering Glass’s abilities to quietly take photographs and record videos — how we influence policies about privacy and public spaces.

And it would be a shame if the only people who participate in this leap forward are those who can afford it."

Wortham and Lanier are both writing about an issue of great importance - the expanding divide between owners and others. Lanier focuses more on the company owners making billions off of individuals' private data; Wortham notes that we are heading toward a world where the rich live by different rules of personal privacy then the rest of us.

That's not the world I want to live in. It's one reason civil society matters.  Civil society is where each of us, regardless of wealth or other status, voluntarily contributes to a greater good. The space of civil society is framed by rules about privacy, ownership, speech and association. We are in the process of writing these rules for digital spaces.  We need these rules to honor and protect the same values of civil society that we have set forth in the "analog" world.




*Morozov, Lanier, Gorbis, Zuckerman, Shirky, Berlin Johnson. Others, who I tend to keep off the spectrum, include - Lessig, Zittrain, Benkler, Ullman, Turkle, and Rainie and Wellman, On my "to read" list next to Lanier are Schmidt/Cohen.

It's not about gadgets, it's about governance

I've been researching and talking a lot lately about Digital Civil Society. These are the elements of our society where we use our private resources for public good in and on digital platforms.

It includes "digital activism," civic technology, social network organizing, open data sharing, and nonprofits built on digital assets - such as WikiMedia, Creative Commons, Mozilla Foundation, Kiva, DoSomething, the Digital Public Library of America, Public Library of Science, Reg4All and many, many others.

To make talking about it easier, I refer to the non-digital ways of using private resources for public good as "analog" civil society - the ways we've been doing things like organizing, protesting, helping, sharing our private resources for centuries. The distinction is rhetorically easy, but also makes it sound as if the activities are more distinct than they might be. We are doing many of the same things - giving, volunteering, sharing, protesting, helping - but using digital tools.

So, is it the tool that matters? No. I don't think it's the gadget - phone, tablet, computer - that makes the distinction between digital and analog worth considering. I think it is the underlying economics of the assets that really matters.

In technical terms - digital stuff works differently than analog stuff. Think about a digital book. One original is all you need to make countless copies. The copies are indistinct from the original. Everyone can access online digital material simultaneously. You'd never really need to produce (ooops, almost wrote "print") more than one original if you put it in a digital library.  Everyone who wanted to could have free, immediate access to it.

Except for the impact that this is feared to have on authors and publishers, there's nothing (technologically) preventing digital books from working this way. But they don't - because as much as we care about libraries we also care about authors. The Digital Public Library of America, and the decisions it's making to thrive in the current complicated environment of technical possibility, legal requirements and business model concerns is a good example of how the digital assets that underlay this library require it to be quite different from the Carnegie-building library in your community.

Analog actions tend to be about money or time, and the regulations and rules we've written to structure this sector of our economy have been about money.

Digital actions require us to think about how digital assets (data, bits, ones and zeroes) work. How they can be copied, owned, shared, stored, scaled, and preserved. We need to think about how we use, share, preserve, and protect private digital assets for the public good.

Digital civil society is not about gadgets. It's about governance.