The Climate Change Movement and Obama--Getting One Thing Very Right

[Like the piece I did last week about crowd estimates on steroids, this is a response to the Climate Change rally I attended in Washington DC earlier this month. Like that one, it is from the vantage point of a movement veteran so aged that my first DC demo was in 1965.

This one is primarily aimed at folks who, like me, are members (or sympathizers or exes) of revolutionary socialist organizations in the US. These have not generally covered themselves in glory when it comes to taking part in or even acknowledging, let alone building, the current crucial and vibrant incarnation of the decades-old environmental movement. I hope others will find it of some use as well.]


One thing that several old school lefties have commented on since the February 17 Climate Change rally in DC is how much the event revolved around Barack Obama. Among the main speakers was Van Jones, who spoke of having had the "honor of working with this president" in his first administration and addressed his remarks to his former boss.

Many hand-made signs and banners in the crowd featured Obama's picture and/or anodyne pro-environment quotes from his speeches. And the most widely distributed preprinted sign featured one of those Big Blue Marble shots of Earth from space on a black background—and on the other side had a big graphic based on Obama's 2012 campaign logo.

This certainly wasn't what you'd see at a rally of the remnants of the anti-war movement or, say, civil liberties activists. Generally the old heads I have spoken to or whose reflections I have read have felt this was a real problem and indicative of the low level of political understanding among the participants. I plan to argue in a later article that this misreads to some extent the dynamics and the strategic thrust of the movement.

What I want to deal with here is the fact that the environmental movement, and especially the struggle to stop the Keystone XL pipeline which is presently at the core of that movement, is doing exactly what a lot of leftists and socialists said they were going to be doing right about now.

I refer to those groups and individuals who argued in early 2012 (if not before) that revolutionaries and socialists should work hard for Obama's re-election or at the very least get out and vote against his opponent. Generally, their argument was based on the dangers posed by a possible Republican victory in the aftermath of the 2010 mid-terms (an argument which developed real weight as the GOP's racism and voter suppression efforts escalated).

"Of course," they would insist, "on the day after the election, we have to get back into the streets and organize against him, or at least his worst policies."

Well, you know who did that? The anti-Keystone XL people, that's who.

As the strong current of Obamoptimism at the rally shows, these are not exactly folks who were voting Romney. A few Green Party locals were present and the party's 2012 presidential candidate Jill Stein (who centered her candidacy on environmental issues, unlike Obama and Romney, neither of whom said a mumbling word about them the whole time). That hardly meant that the majority at the rally went third party last year, though.

Let's look at how this movement carried itself around the election and since. On Monday, November 5, the day before the election, several dozen activists barged into the Washington DC office of McKenna Long & Aldridge, the main law firm lobbying for TransCanada's pipeline project. They knew that this brief occupation, in solidarity with the ongoing Tar Sands Blockade, was not going to get major media coverage on the eve of the election. They were making a point--that the movement was going ahead no matter what happened the next day.

On Thursday, November 8, two days after the election, Bill McKibben, the most prominent anti-Keystone XL leader, kicked off a four-week Do The Math tour, speaking at an indoor rally/teach-in of 2,000 in Seattle. By early December, the tour had made 20 more stops in cities around the country, drawing similar numbers each time. This helped lay the groundwork for further development of the movement, including last week's Climate Change rally.

News kept coming in the weeks after the election. In early December two protesters chained themselves to 600 pound concrete barrels inside a section of pipe slated to be added to the section of the pipeline under construction near Winona TX. This was the latest, and riskiest, of a long series of civil disobedience actions that have been bedeviling companies trying to finish pipeline segments to create "facts on the ground" arguing for its completion.

A week later a Texas judge granted a temporary injunction to a Texas landowner whose property had been seized by eminent domain to build the same pipeline section. On college and university campuses across the country, scores of powerful student campaigns ramped up their demands that their schools' endowments divest all stockholdings in fossil fuel corporations. All this before Inauguration Day. Then the DC rally.

Obviously this is a powerful movement, with impressive organization and equally impressive room for initiative and a variety of tactics. I would suggest that one reason the movement is so strong and vibrant is that it didn't dissolve itself into the Obama campaign, but fought right up to the election and was fully prepared to hit the ground running the minute it was over.


[As I mentioned above, I hope to write one more piece, with observations on several aspects of the rally, and the movement that held it. Among those topics will be the thinking behind and problems with the movement's overall soft approach to Obama and how revolutionary socialists should respond to it.]

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10.2.10: Some Cranky Points

Herewith a few points about the 10.2.10 rally, held under the bland signboard, One Nation, Working Together. I emphasize the word “points”--this is not an actual summation. It is not undertaken collectively, based on an initial analysis and a plan on how to take part in what was obviously going to be one of the more significant political events of 2010. I hope different forces produce such summations for us to study, compare and learn from.

1. Solidarity Day comparison

My sense of things is doubtless jaundiced by decades spent slogging to DC for big protests, but I am not alone in making a comparison to Solidarity Day in 1981, the first year of the Reagan era. A deep recession was devastating the country and the newly elected president was going all out to break the striking air traffic controllers’ union, PATCO. The shaken AFL-CIO bureaucracy issued an unprecedented call for a national, union-led March on Washington, and a fired-up rank and file responded. Hundreds of thousands poured into DC for a determined and angry protest.

Objectively, the trade union movement is very different from what it was in 1981, and substantially weaker. That one had big, big contingents from the United Auto Workers, the Steelworkers and other traditionally majority male bailiwicks. Those unions, like the Meatpackers and too many others, are a shadow of what they were then, devastated by outsourcing, union busting, technological change

While I saw Machinists and Teamsters in good numbers, from far afield--Ohio, Pittsburgh, etc., it was the service unions which dominated last Saturday. The SEIU was clearly the biggest the biggest single force this time. The United Federation of Teachers was another with big member turnout.

While 10.2.10 reflected changes in the economy and the trade union movement, it didn’t really reflect probably the most significant change. There were certainly contingents from the immigrant workers movement, but where were the numbers and the spirit of the great levantamiento of 2006, where millions waged one-day general strikes that slowed or stopped city after city?

Participation in general was spotty. Some unions didn’t take part at all, or participated only in a token way. I didn’t see big contingents from the two largest postal unions, the APWU and the NALC, even though they are facing the combination of management attack, non-union competition and technological obsolescence (courtesy of the Internet) that devastated many of the old “basic” industries in the run-up to 1981. It’s possible that I missed them in a large crowd, but I know for a fact that my own former local, NY Metro, the largest APWU local in the country, didn’t send a single solitary bus to DC.

Finally, the spirit was different. Though conditions are worse than they were in the Reagan Recession, we have a smaller, feebler union movement, with less of a sense of itself as a sleeping giant roused to anger. 10.2.10 was not only less angry but more tentative.

I have had to go through my initial draft of this and insert the word “rally” in a dozen places where I originally wrote “march” or “demonstration” (and even, once, “protest”). Although it was sometimes billed as A March for Jobs, Peace and Justice, there was no march, no central show of strength. Folks streamed into the rally site, stood or milled, listening to the speakers--or not--and trickled out in a growing flow even as latecoming contingents continued to stream in.

2. The Obama problem

And there was no clear target.

10.2.10 had an impressive list of Good Things it was calling for (I can’t say fighting for)--jobs, education, real health care reform, curbing the NAFTA version of free trade, stopping giveaways to the big banks, immigration law reform, rebuilding the infrastructure, and even, in passing, “peace abroad.”

Yet the main people denounced in 10.2.10 literature and by those speakers from the podium I heard were Republicans in Congress, corporate lobbyists, and the whole Glenn Beck, Fox News and Tea Party “Take Back America” crew. For all the mess left by the Bush administration and the obstructions posed by Senate Republicans, the fact remains that if goals like these are to be won, they won’t come from that lot. They must be demanded from the Democratic President, the Democratic House and the Democratic Senate and fought for. Hard.

Meanwhile, it was clear that a great many of the workers present were not about to listen to a bad word about President Obama. On my half-filled bus from the NYC Central Labor Council, I saw three people wearing their pins from Obama’s 2008 campaign and a woman with a tee-shirt that had his picture and the words “Commander-in-Chief” writ large in gold sequins above it. The heart of this sentiment was captured in one of those loomed-acrylic throws that usually depict woodland scenes or poker-playing dogs. This one was being carried as a small banner by two Black women who came on the other CLC bus--It had a picture of Obama superimposed on his current residence and the inscription “From Slavery To The White House.”



You could see the contradiction vividly in the plaintive pre-printed signs some unions distributed: We Want The Change We Voted For. And you could see it in what can be characterized as the main demand of the rally, directed not at the powers that be, but at rally participants: we should go home and plunge deep into Get Out The Vote operations for the Democratic Party in the mid-term elections. The alternative, it was suggested, will be certain doom if the Republicans do too well.

3. The crisis of legitimacy

A much more recent benchmark for 10.2.10 than Solidarity Day was the well-publicized turnout for the Restoring Honor rally in DC called a month earlier by Glen Beck, teevee lunatic and semi-official Tea Party mouthpiece, I confess that it was heartening that the trade unions and their allies also drew in the low six figures.

Lorry nose, there’s been a lot written about the Tea Party phenomenon in recent months. We’ve seen articles--some concerned, some comic--that say that the movement is in essence is a white supremacist backlash, against Blacks, against immigrants, against Muslims. Or it is a sophisticated and well-financed Republican Party astroturfing operation. Or it’s elderly white nostalgics panicked by change, or broke-ass folks in a barely coherent tax rebellion or just a sorry reflection of a deep inability to think at all among too many people of this country. I am not about to argue with any of these worthy assertions here.

But one thing which has not been sufficiently noted is that the teabaggers have seized ownership of the deepening crisis of legitimacy in this country. Tens of millions of Americans feel that the system is broken and have a deep distrust of politicians as unprincipled, blowhard, money-grubbing liars. They have worked hard only to watch their mortgages go underwater, their jobs vanish, their puny investments and pensions savaged by the economic meltdown. And all the while, a bunch of rich bankers and businessmen are getting fabulously rich hollowing out companies and running Ponzi schemes and avoiding taxes.

That’s unarguable.

In such a situation the left should be ascendant. Key to our basic critique is the idea that this system is run by the rich for the rich, that the government and the electoral system and the courts and the laws do not serve the great majority, that the mainstream media is owned by and kowtows to billionaires, that uncountable trillions in tax money are spent on unjust and unjustifiable wars and on bailing out financial criminals while, for most of us, poverty is one layoff notice or hospital bill away, that the US has a higher percentage of its population in prison than the most repressive regimes and state spying on citizens is at unprecedented levels.

Yet it is the half-baked, anti-government, rightwing libertarian version of these ideas that is the leading ideological edge of the teahadists. By making “big government” rather than capitalist rule the issue, they have put many progressives and radicals on the defensive. Much of the left is thus today found explaining why regulation of corporations is a good thing, why utilities and roads and schools should not be privatized, why social security and Medicare are necessary, why your right to live trumps your neighbor’s inalienable right to test small thermonuclear devices on his Private Property, and so forth. Is our best answer to a crisis of legitimacy to defend the existing order as superior to some brutal government-free dystopia?

That 10.2.10 was unable to mobilize, or even unite with, that anger and that sense that the system doesn’t work for everyday people means that it will likely wind up only as a quickly fading memory for participants.

4. Socialism, war and the contingents

Part of the plan was that folks focused on particular issues could organize themselves into contingents of groups and individuals. A bunch of these mobilized at a remove from the main rally to be able to move into it in an organized fashion and make their point. This useful approach seemed to be undermined by weak outreach, an early departure from the announced gathering points and rapid absorption into the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial. I want to make note of two of them.

The socialist contingent was the only one I actually ran into, with around 500 participants at that point. Called by a variety of groups on the socialist left, with the International Socialist Organization having the largest presence on the ground, its main message was that the Democrats suck as bad as the Republicans. Whatever the merits of this view, there was no way it was going to have much impact on the crowd.

The contingent was holding a mini-rally on the outskirts of the crowd when I arrived and the highlight was an excellent speech by Dan La Botz, the Socialist Party candidate for US Senator from Ohio. Paradoxically, the fact that Dan is the most prominent socialist candidate in this whole election cycle highlighted how little play any flavor of actual socialist politics has in the country in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

The anti-war contingent had left 14th and Constitution, entered the crowd and dissipated before I got out of the RFK Stadium parking lot and onto the Metro, and from what I’ve heard was larger but not qualitatively so. Some excellent work was done around 10.2.10. Just days before. Veterans For Peace did a huge banner drop at the Newseum, right down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. US Labor Against the War distributed literature to and got the very useful “Why Are We In Afghanistan” video shown on scores of buses.

Still, recent polls show 58% of the people in this country already oppose the war in Afghanistan (a country never even mentioned in 10.2.10 literature). The figure at the rally must have been more like 90%. Yet the desperate urgency of ending the occupations and the catastrophic effect they are having in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan simply did not come across.

5. Think I’m too cranky? Holler back!

Let me stipulate that it was a good thing that the One Nation Working Together rally was held, that the mobilization was fairly impressive, that the crowd was magnificently diverse and that many of the people attending were jazzed by it and even felt determined to take action, electoral or otherwise, in the coming period. I may well have missed other positive features of the rally or other possibilities arising from it.

Blog posts I have read and comments I have heard from other participants tend to be more upbeat, if short on specifics. And my views are certainly colored by a pessimistic sense of the historical moment we are in, but I also know I’m not alone. In an hour-long discussion I fell into with a couple grad students and an IT consultant from DC and a science teacher and a postal worker from Boston, the consensus seemed to be drifting toward “we are well and truly fucked.” Nothing any of us saw on 10.2.10 was enough to transcend that sense of where we are at now.

What did you see?

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