Just going over notes from the Tides Foundation’s Momentum conference.

I’ve been debating how best to write up what I encountered, given the eclectic range of the attendees and diverse subject matter. (If you’re familiar with the Ted series of talks, this was a bit like that, but with an explicitly progressive political focus and lots of chat time.) The best path may just be to jot down some of the more interesting thoughts a la carte, much as they were received. So, here’s a batch of ten, and I’ll follow with more as time allows.

• “Social change is historically facilitated by war or economic despair,” mused Drummond Pike, Tides Founder and CEO. “The good news is, we’re currently blessed to have both.”

• As Senator John Edwards put it, “half the bankruptcies in America are caused by health care costs.” Surprised at the stat, I checked; the language is a tad strong, but basically, yup.

• Gihan Perera, executive director of the Miami Workers Center, noted that a large part of the Katrina disaster happened long before the storm ever arrived; neglected infrastructure has created vulnerable communities in many American cities — tragedies still waiting to happen, lacking only a proximate cause.

• Residents of the Ninth Ward in New Orleans were forbidden from returning home for weeks — but somehow in the interim, bulldozers had moved in and knocked down many houses. Tanya Harris, head of ACORN in New Orleans, had to begin organizing while slapping large “No Bulldozing” signs on numerous privately-owned homes. Says a bit about official regard for the lives and property of the people who lived there.

• Angelica Salas, director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrants Rights of Los Angeles, noted that 12 million people are now living in the US without legal status. (That’s about 1 person in 30.) Immigration is not just about people crossing borders illegally; it’s a human response to economic policies, environmental degradation, and other external factors. People move to try to build a better life. From any political perspective, addressing the basic humanity of the situation is the only sane starting place.

• Salas also noted that immigrants will be the first in line to fight for labor rights, for health care, for environmental protection, and so on — because they’re already first in line for the difficulties without them.

• Salas wondered aloud: what moral obligation does the United States have to the 500,000 Iraqi refugees created by the U.S. invasion, since the war was supposed to be about their welfare, after all?

• According to Maria Teresa Petersen, executive director of Voto Latino, Latinos are currently a full third of the young electoral vote in Florida, Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico, four key swing states. The potential importance of the hispanic vote is already historic — and will only increase in the future.

• Web 2.0 organizing technologies used disproportionately by young people have the potential to increase the influence of young voters in an unprecedented manner.

• Peter Leyden, former managing editor of Wired, suggested that historic periods of rapid progressive change in the US have shared three characteristics in common with the present: the emergence of new, more horizontal media (think of the penny press at the beginning of the muckraking progressive era); the entry into the electorate of a new and energized demographic; and changing technology that decentralized and democratized the economy. (I found this a bit of facile shoehorning that neglected numerous large factors that didn’t fit the model, but hey, I could be wrong.)

More notes to come. I’ll add this: some lefty gatherings I’ve attended have been a tad heavy on idealism and factionalism at the expense of practical discussion. A few have even played a bit close to stereotype — small clots of social exiles named, I dunno, stuff like Moondance and Star-Kist and Astroglide, all advocating pet causes like hemp lingerie (finally, someone taking on the power of Big Underpants!) while abandoning a broader, coalition-building political agenda that to (a) we’re not getting anything done, so (b) let’s agree with each other even harder, and (c) see if things improve in some inspecific way.

Not here. This was a bunch of people actually getting things done in a variety of fields, sharing ideas on what works and pushing each other to think.

Kinda the whole point of living in a democracy. Cool.  My thanks to Momentum for the invite.