Regulation as Organizing

U.S. PIRG’s Ed Mierzwinski writes in American Prospect special supplement

Georgia PIRG Education Fund

WASHINGTON, July 6  – Taking to the streets or voting someone into office are not the only ways to bring about change. 

And lobbyists aren’t the only ones who write laws.

Writing this month in an American Prospect magazine special report entitled The Credit Crisis and Working America, Ed Mierzwinski, Director of the Consumer Program at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, tells some stories that would convince even the most skeptical critics of our democracy that citizens can and do have a say… when they are organized, and when they get regulations passed.

In “Regulation as civic empowerment,” Mierzwinski tells tales of regulatory laws that “began as a strategy conceived by community organizers and then became the basis for even more effective organizing.” 

The Community Reinvestment Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act and a host of other laws and regulations were brought to us courtesy of organizing and organizers, who then turned around and used them to organize some more.

Mierzwinski suggests similar tactics for dealing with the financial system, also.

“All of these citizenship strategies address the same broad problem: the imbalance between the concentrated power of affected industries and the diffuse power of ordinary people,” Mierzwinski writes.

“By designing regulation so that it engages and informs citizens, facilitates organizing, and puts citizens into direct encounters with the industry as well as with regulators, these policies energize citizenship, and they begin to redress the structural power imbalance,” he concludes.

Mierzwinski’s article and The Credit Crisis and Working America are available inside the July/August issue of The American Prospect. The special report is also available online.