You have to exercise your core muscles. That’s what any physical trainer worth his or her salt will tell you. The same goes for your “moral core.” And Michael Brune, head of the Sierra Club, assures us our president has a strong one.
What kind of morals Obama has, well that’s another matter, but he likes to exercise them everyday, whether it’s giving his kill list a good once over or playing golf with an oil and gas tycoon while climate protesters are ringing his doorbell. You know, the kind of not-so-hopie-changie stuff that would have made liberals livid if George W. Bush had pulled it.
The logo for Sunday’s innocuously titled Forward on Climate rally looked a lot like the emblem of the president’s 2008 campaign, back when he promised that we’d remember his election as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Showing just how far we’ve come since then, the swooping road leading to a rising sun — tacked to so many American lawns in ’08 — was replaced on Sunday by a swirl representing a hurricane.
Billionaire Tom Steyer spoke for the 1 percent at the rally. “The Keystone XL pipeline is a bad investment,” he told the mostly broke and debt straddled young people on hand, even as the hedge fund he manages has oil, coal, nuclear and fracking holdings.
Previously, Steyer pontificated to the Washington Post: “I feel like the guy in the movie who goes into the diner and says, ‘There are zombies in the woods and they’re eating our children.” As often happens in horror movies, those who you think are your friends turn out to be brain eaters.
Organizers of Sunday’s rally might do better to encourage their bases to use their brains, but it appears they’ve chosen to dumb down their politics in the interest of casting as wide a net as possible.
And then there was Van Jones. “I have had the honor of serving this president,” said the former White House green jobs adviser whom Obama fired at the first wiff of a right wing smear campaign months into his first term. Jones continued, “What I want to tell the next generation is this: Don’t be a chumps!” The phrase caught on. Chants of “Don’t be chumps” rippled through the crowd.
While a petition in the run up to the February 17 demonstration from the Public Interest Research Group urged signatories to let the president know they “have his back when it comes to tackling global warming,” former Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein asks, “Why should we have Obama’s back when he keeps stabbing us in ours?”
The crowd on Sunday was truly an awesome sight. This is in large part because tote bag environmental groups (you send them money, they send you a tote) like the Sierra Club and the PIRGs encouraged their membership to attended the Forward on Climate rally — more evidence that simply lobbying the White House has gotten them no where. An estimated 35,000 to 50,000 people turned up. Meanwhile a recent poll found an estimated 64 percent of Americans believe it’s time we take action on climate change. Rather than guarding the president’s back, why not use these numbers to push back instead?
Apparently it was worse than golf with Tiger Woods. Obama was “in Florida, playing a round of golf with two directors of Western Gas Holdings, a subsidiary of Anadarko Petroleum focused on natural gas fracking.”
http://grist.org/news/while-protestors-surrounded-the-white-house-obama-was-golfing-with-oil-executives/
For shame.
So, what does that look like, besides… organizing protests that target the President and tell him to do the stuff you want him to?
Thanks, Peter – I was there, and certainly was not liking the pro-Obama, “he just needs a little push” vibe. I understood the calculus behind it, but it’s no way to build a climate movement. Yours is the first critical analysis of the event that I’ve read.
Thanks, Jennifer!
Dear Duncan,
We’re big on science in the climate justice movement. How about a little political science to boot? Let’s not hitch our saddle to the flying unicorn of the climapocalypse. Sunday’s numbers were historic but eventually a climate movement independent of the Democrats and billionaire hedge fund managers must arise.
Pete – The whole point of having Tom Steyer there was that he had a personal transformation. He realized that the hedge fund he managed wasn’t dealing with the most critical issue of our time, and he quit. Now, he comes to climate protests and encourages students hoping to divest their colleges from fossil fuel corporations: http://middleburycampus.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/SteyerLetter.pdf
We’ve spent plenty of time attacking Obama on climate. Really, all of his first term. Now, it’s time for us to show him that he has an opportunity to leave a legacy. We won’t let up, and we’ll keep fighting along the pipeline route, with our indigenous friends who live with the Tar Sands every day in Alberta. We have lots of tools in our toolbox from mass rallies to civil disobedience, from lobbying to social media – we’re going to need to use all of them if we’re planning on winning.
Great discussion, here. Thanks to all for joining in. Phil’s point about Steyer’s transformation is an important one. Oftentimes, these stories of transformation become powerful tools for discrediting the opposition. I think of people like Howard Zinn, Daniel Ellsburg, Ray McGovern or Ray Anderson (featured in The Corporation). These people became more than just allies, but great activists in their own right, challenging Americans (most of whom are plugged into or entangled in the systems of oppression) to rethink their own positions and see that it is possible to change.
I mean, all I asked was an example of what we could do. Or a plan. Or… anything. This just seems like posturing to me.
Thank you, Peter, for this helpful analysis of the climate moment. I was in DC for the demo and definitely appreciated the serious but small presence of groups calling for a clear break with the Democrats with chants like “hope and change / that’s a lie / Obama don’t care if the planet dies”. If we are to be successful stopping the pipeline and tar sands, we need to break with Obama who boasts about the amount of pipeline that has been laid under his watch or the way he has cut red tape opening the way for more deep sea drilling. We need a movement strong enough to counteract the economic and political costs the US government will face for blocking the XL pipeline.
WNV columnist George Lakey responds to this post in his latest column, “Want Radical Actions? Build Strong Action Groups.” Check it out!