- Prominent progressive blog from 2007-2010
- Helped
craft Democratic legislation for net neutrality
- Shut down its operations in February 2011
Established in July 2007, OpenLeft (OL) was a
popular blog “committed to building a strong and
progressive movement and an enduring progressive (not just
Democratic) majority.” As part of the Netroots
nation, OL sought to strengthen the progressive movement in the
Democratic
Party by criticizing moderate Democrats, particularly
those in the Democratic Leadership Council and the New Democrat Coalition.
Chris Bowers, Mike Lux, and Matt
Stoller were
OL's founding partners. Like Markos
Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily
Kos, all three OL founders wrote for MyDD.com,
considered to be the father of the progressive blogosphere, before
starting their own blog.
- Chris Bowers worked as an editor at MyDD
from 2004 to 2007 and as a consultant for MoveOn.org,
Media
Matters, SEIU,
and the Progressive
Change Campaign Committee.
- Mike Lux, author of The
Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be
(2009), has a long history in the Democratic Party and the
progressive movement. Named to the Obama-Biden transition team in 2008, he previously served at the White House as a special assistant to the president during the Clinton
administration. In 1995, Lux became senior vice president for political action at People
For the American Way. He also founded American
Family Voices and the Progressive
Donor Network. He was a co-founding board member of
Americans
United For Change, the Center
for Progressive Leadership, and Progressive
Majority. He was the co-founding CEO of
Progressive
Strategies, LLC, and he played a founding role in
the Center
for American Progress, Air
America, the Ballot
Initiative Strategy Center, and Women’s
Voices, Women Vote. Lux also has served on the board of the Arca
Foundation.
- Matt Stoller, the final founder in OL’s
triumvirate, has served as a senior
policy analyst for Congressman Alan Grayson (D-Florida). Stoller began
blogging in 2002 and was an editor for MyDD from 2005 to
2007. He has consulted for the Sunlight
Foundation, Working
Assets, and the net
neutrality advocate Free
Press.
From its inception, OL helped lead
the progressive charge for net
neutrality, a concept whose objective is to empower the federal government to ration and apportion Internet bandwidth as it sees fit, and to thereby control the Internet's content. In 2007, OL teamed
up with Senator Dick
Durbin (D-Illinois) to help write legislation for net
neutrality. During the 2008 election season, Matt Stoller and
OL succeeded
in getting every Democratic challenger for the Senate to support the concept.
OL was a member of BlogPac,
a political action committee that includes a number of prominent
blogs – among them, Daily
Kos, MyDD, Atrios, Talk Left, BOP News, AmericaBlog,
Pandagon, and Annatopia – which fundraise through ActBlue
“to wage progressive politics online.” BlogPac aims to build a
new progressive infrastructure, and to fund local blogs in all 50 states.
The BlogPac coalition utilizes online strategies like
googlebombing
to influence the ranking of political information on search engines.
During the 2008 presidential campaigns, OL targeted
John McCain in an effort to raise the page-ranking of negative
stories associated with the Republican candidate. In 2009, BlogPac
teamed
up with ACORN,
Color
of Change, and MoveOn.org
“to hold Blue Dogs, conservodems, and other center-right Democrats
accountable for supporting Wall Street and conservative groups
instead of supporting their own constituents.”
Open Left shut down its operations in February 2011.
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