I think this is big news: the airlines are using mass emailing to try to influence Congress.

I got an email this morning from United, asking me to go to a petition site, which asks me to enter my zip code and send a note to my MOC to "Stop Oil Speculation" and lower energy costs. Tracy Russo reports she got the same email from Northwest. The entire coalition list is at the bottom of this post, and includes the Petroleum Marketers Association of America and Agricultural Retailers association, as well as Delta, Continental, US Air, American, Airtran...

I don't think this is big news in the good way, mind you--its important because it signals that corporations are willing to use their massive databases to try to leverage political will in Washington. I'm sure this isn't the first of its kind, but its the first of such a scale that its caught my attention (I'm happy to be rebutted in the comments). We're talking tens of millions of emails (possibly nearing a hundred million? Jose Antonio Vargas, can you find out?) if all the airlines' lists are involved. This is clearly just the beginning, and its a crude one--a few years from now you'll see more organizing, including international organizing, to leverage corporate databases to influence policies that help corporate wealth. At least as of 2004, the airlines were among the biggest email/database owners in the country (along with casinos). As someone concerned about concentrated power in any form, this is not a great development.

It will be interesting to see how, indirectly, this massive list weighs in on other matters, including big topics in the Presidential race. You could easily see "SOS" sending out an email a day after a big debate, mentioning neither Clinton nor Obama, but stressing some issue that is politically important to their coalition, and was mentioned in the debate.

A few years ago, I argued that there were three powerful forces in modern society--civic democracy, corporations, and religion--and which ever of these learned how to harness the collective action power of the internet would, in effect, win--would define the basic framework for society for generations to come. Its an oversimplified argument, but has a serious refrain; one of the pieces of hope, for those of us rooting for civic democracy, has been how slow corporations have been to leverage collective action power of the net for political purposes.

They're getting faster. What this means, I think, is that there is even greater urgency on the part of those of us who want a society organized around groups of interest, not groups of corporate interest, to figure out how to do it better, more, and bigger.

The list of SOS supporters:

ABX Air, Inc.
Agricultural Retailers Association
Air Carrier Association of America
Air Line Pilots Association, International
AirTran Airways
Air Transport Association
Alaska Airlines, Inc.
American Airlines, Inc.
American Association of Airport Executives
American Bus Association
American Trucking Associations
Association of Corporate Travel Executives
ASTAR Air Cargo, Inc
Atlas Air, Inc.
Continental Airlines, Inc.
Delta Air Lines, Inc.
Evergreen International Airlines, Inc.
Federal Express Corporation
Frontier Airlines, Inc.
Gasoline & Automotive Service Dealer's of America
Hawaiian Airlines
National Business Travel Association
National School Transportation Association
Northwest Airlines, Inc.
Petroleum Marketers Association of America
Regional Airline Association
Southwest Airlines Co.
Spirit Airlines, Inc.
International Brotherhood of Teamsters
United Airlines, Inc.
United Motorcoach Association
UPS Airlines
US Airways, Inc.