Of, By, For: The New Politics of Money, Debt & Democracy
Joe Costello has been at the confluence of politics, communications, economics, and energy for over three decades. Costello worked for over a dozen years running election campaigns from the city council to presidential level, starting with Edward M. Kennedy's presidential campaign in 1980. In 1992, he was Communications Director for California Governor Jerry Brown's presidential campaign where he very successfully helped redefine political communications and campaign fundraising. In 2004, he was a Senior Adviser to Governor Howard Dean's ground breaking presidential campaign. In the late 1990s, working with a coalition of energy companies and environmental groups, he devised and helped organize a successful statewide campaign to promote solar, wind, and geothermal energy generation to California businesses and local governments. In recent years, he led a marketing campaign for Tree Media's and Leonardo DiCaprio's award winning environmental documentary, The 11th Hour. He has worked with personal computer entrepreneur – Lotus 1,2,3, and Internet pioneer, Mitchell Kapor. He was a United Nations NGO representative for Mikhail Gorbachev's Global Green USA to the “United Nations Global Summit on Sustainability” in Johannesburg, South Africa 2002, and the “United Nations Convention on Climate Change,” in Bali, Indonesia, 2007. He is a graduate of Boston College. Over the last two decades, Costello became increasingly concerned with the growing corruption and dysfunction of the American political economy. He believes political and economic reform is a necessity and will only be accomplished by the individual political will and collective action of the American people.