My resolution for 2012 is to be
naive - dangerously naive. I'm aware that the
usual recipe for political effectiveness is just
the opposite: to be cynical, calculating, an
insider. But if you think, as I do, that we need
deep change in the United States, then cynicism is
a sucker's bet. Try as hard as you can, you're
never going to be as cynical as the corporations
and the harem of politicians they pay for. It's
like trying to out-chant a Buddhist monastery.
Here's my case in point, one of a thousand
stories people working for social change could
tell: all last fall, most of the environmental
movement, including 350.org, the group I helped
found, waged a fight against the planned Keystone
XL pipeline that would bring
some of the dirtiest energy
on the planet from Canada through the US to the
Gulf Coast.
We waged our struggle against
building it out in the open, presenting scientific
argument, holding demonstrations, and attending
hearings. We sent 1,253 people to jail in the
largest civil disobedience action in a generation.
Meanwhile, more than half a million Americans
offered public comments against the pipeline, the
most on any energy project in the nation's
history.
And what do you know? We won a
small victory in November, when President Barack
Obama agreed that, before he could give the
project a thumbs-up or -down, it needed another
year of careful review. (The previous version of
that review, as overseen by the State Department,
had been little short of a crony capitalist
farce.) Given that James Hansen, the government's
premier climate scientist, had said that tapping
Canada's tar sands for that pipeline would, in the
end, essentially mean "game over for the climate",
that seemed an eminently reasonable course to
follow, even if it was also eminently political.
A few weeks later, however, congress
decided it wanted to take up the question. In the
process, the issue went from out in the open to
behind closed doors in money-filled rooms. Within
days, and after only a couple of hours of hearings
that barely mentioned the key scientific questions
or the dangers involved, the House of
Representatives voted 234-194 to force a quicker
review of the pipeline. Later, the House attached
its demand to the must-pass payroll tax cut.
That was an obvious pre-election year
attempt to put the president on the spot.
Environmentalists are at least hopeful that the
White House will now reject the permit. After all,
its communications director said that the rider,
by hurrying the decision, "virtually guarantees
that the pipeline will not be approved".
As important as the vote total in the
House, however, was another number: within minutes
of the vote, Oil Change International had
calculated that the 234 congressional
representatives who voted aye had received $42
million in campaign contributions from the
fossil-fuel industry; the 193 nays, $8 million.
Buying congress I know that
cynics - call them realists, if you prefer - will
be completely unsurprised by that. Which is
precisely the problem.
We've reached the
point where we're unfazed by things that should
shake us to the core. So, just for a moment, be
naive and consider what really happened in that
vote: the people's representatives who happen to
have taken the bulk of the money from those energy
companies promptly voted on behalf of their
interests.
They weren't weighing science
or the national interest; they weren't balancing
present benefits against future costs. Instead of
doing the work of legislators, that is, they were
acting like employees. Forget the idea that
they're public servants; the truth is that, in
every way that matters, they work for Exxon and
its kin. They should, by rights, wear logos on
their lapels like NASCAR drivers.
If you
find this too harsh, think about how obligated you
feel when someone gives you something. Did you get
a Christmas present last month from someone you
hadn't remembered to buy one for? Are you going to
send them an extra-special one next year?
And that's for a pair of socks. Speaker of
the House John Boehner, who insisted that the
Keystone approval decision be speeded up, has
gotten $1,111,080 from the fossil-fuel industry
during his tenure. His senate counterpart Mitch
McConnell, who shepherded the bill through his
chamber, has raked in $1,277,208 in the course of
his tenure in Washington.
If someone had
helped your career to the tune of a million
dollars, wouldn't you feel in their debt? I would.
I get somewhat less than that from my employer,
Middlebury College, and yet I bleed Panther blue.
Don't ask me to compare my school with, say,
Dartmouth unless you want a biased answer, because
that's what you'll get. Which is fine - I am an
employee.
But you'd be a fool to let me
referee the homecoming football game. In fact, in
any other walk of life we wouldn't think twice
before concluding that paying off the referees is
wrong. If the Patriots make the Super Bowl,
everyone in America would be outraged to see owner
Robert Kraft trot out to midfield before the game
and hand a $1,000 bill to each of the linesmen and
field judges.
If he did it secretly, the
newspaper reporter who uncovered the scandal would
win a Pulitzer. But a political reporter who
bothered to point out Boehner's and McConnell's
payoffs would be upbraided by her editor for
simpleminded journalism. That's how the game is
played and we've all bought into it, even if only
to sputter in hopeless outrage.
Far from
showing any shame, the big players boast about it:
the US Chamber of Commerce, front outfit for a
consortium of corporations, has bragged on its
website about outspending everyone in Washington,
which is easy to do when Chevron, Goldman Sachs,
and News Corp are writing you seven-figure checks.
This really matters. The Chamber of
Commerce spent more money on the 2010 elections
than the Republican and Democratic National
Committees combined, and 94% of those dollars went
to climate-change deniers. That helps explain why
the House voted last year to say that global
warming isn't real.
It also explains why
"our" representatives vote, year in and year out,
for billions of dollars worth of subsidies for
fossil-fuel companies. If there was ever an
industry that didn't need subsidies, it would be
this one: they make more money each year than any
enterprise in the history of money. Not only that,
but we've known how to burn coal for 300 years and
oil for 200.
Those subsidies are simply
payoffs. Companies give small gifts to
legislators, and in return get large ones back,
and we're the ones who are actually paying.
Whose Money? Whose Washington? I
don't want to be hopelessly naive. I want to be
hopefully naive. It would be relatively easy to
change this: you could provide public financing
for campaigns instead of letting corporations pay.
It's the equivalent of having the National
Football League hire referees instead of asking
the teams to provide them.
Public
financing of campaigns would cost a little money,
but endlessly less than paying for the presents
these guys give their masters. And it would let
you watch what was happening in Washington without
feeling as disgusted. Even legislators, once they
got the hang of it, might enjoy neither raising
money nor having to pretend it doesn't affect
them.
To make this happen, however, we may
have to change the constitution, as we've done 27
times before. This time, we'd need to specify that
corporations aren't people, that money isn't
speech, and that it doesn't abridge the First
Amendment to tell people they can't spend whatever
they want getting elected. Winning a change like
that would require hard political organizing,
since big banks and big oil companies and big
drug-makers will surely rally to protect their
privilege.
Still, there's a chance. The
Occupy movement opened the door to this sort of
change by reminding us all that the system is
rigged, that its outcomes are unfair, that there's
reason to think people from across the political
spectrum are tired of what we've got, and that
getting angry and acting on that anger in the
political arena is what being a citizen is all
about.
It's fertile ground for action.
After all, congress's approval rating is now at
9%, which is another way of saying that everyone
who's not a lobbyist hates them and what they're
doing. The big boys are, of course, counting on us
simmering down; they're counting on us being
cynical, on figuring there's no hope or benefit in
fighting city hall. But if we're naive enough to
demand a country more like the one we were
promised in high school civics class, then we have
a shot.
A good time to take an initial
stand comes later this month, when rallies outside
every federal courthouse will mark the second
anniversary of the Citizens United decision.
That's the one where the Supreme Court ruled that
corporations had the right to spend whatever they
wanted on campaigns.
To me, that decision
was, in essence, corporate America saying, "We're
not going to bother pretending any more. This
country belongs to us."
We need to say,
loud and clear: "Sorry. Time to give it back."
Bill McKibben is Schumann
Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College,
founder of the global climate campaign 350.org, a
TomDispatch regular, and the author, most
recently, of Eaarth:
Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. To
catch Timothy MacBain's first Tomcast audio
interview of the new year in which McKibben
discusses how the rest of us can compete with a
system in which money talks, click here,
or download it to your iPod here.
Copyright 2012 Bill McKibben
Reprinted courtesy of TomDispatch.
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