Time to Stop Being Cynical About Corporate Money in Politics and Start Being Angry
By Bill McKibben, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch
My resolution for 2012 is to be naïve -- dangerously naïve.
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 this country, 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 outchant 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 U.S. 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 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 naïve 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 U.S. 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 naïve. I want to be hopefully naïve. 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 naïve 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.
Friday, January 6, 2012
Armed With Naïvete
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