Chris Hedges at Occupy Princeton

On Tuesday, a dear little bird landed in my email inbox and told me that the author Christopher Hedges would be speaking at Occupy Princeton last night.  I deserted the annual Oldwickian ladies' Christmas Tea early, to arrive just in time to actually have a conversation with him, which was a huge honor.   Chris is a brilliant writer, and a larger-than-life hero who has braved life-threatening situations in a long and distinguished career to bring the truth about armed conflicts, imperialism and revolution home to the rest of us armchair activists.

I also admire him because he consistently and unflinchingly reports the unvarnished reality, not just about the social consequences of the ruthless economic exploitation of the 99 by the 1%, but he also links it to the dismal prospects our species now faces thanks to our relentless exploitation of nature.  Before the program began, one student asked him if he thought humans would ever rise above these endless wars.  He looked discomfited for a minute, before replying, essentially, that we have so degraded our environment that any such evolution is going to be overtaken by dire ecological consequences already set in motion.  Poor, poor students.  You will see from the video embedded below how gently he coaxes them into assuming a moral stand with no guaranteed reward...without terrifying them, but also without pandering to them by giving them any false illusions.  What a remarkable man.

His assessment of the damage we have done by rendering the climate uninhabitable has been reinforced by the recent presentation about the condition of the Arctic melting.  The average temperature of Earth is of course rising, but not evenly.  By far, the poles are at the most extreme increase.  The danger is that methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas frozen over millions of years, is escaping from the permafrost and the seabed.  It takes an awfully unprecedented threat for those reticent scientists to go so far as to shriek ALARM!!!  But guess what?  They are squealing like stuck pigs when they publish a booklet, from the Arctic Methane Emergency Group, and title it Arctic Methane Alert wherein they demand immediate international intervention - and if their calls for insane geoengineering to stop it don't scare the bejesus out of you, try flipping through their flipbook!

A Slow Awakening

A new study reveals that trees are dying in Africa, and of course blames less precipitation from climate change.  Following are some pictures taken in the past week of trees in Africa which were posted to facebook by Larry Schweiger, President of the National Wildlife Federation.

These gorgeous photos are listed as being taken in Botswana which, if you look at a map of Africa, is far from the Sahel, which was the area studied in the research linked to above.

The Sahel stretches from west to east, comprised of the countries that are brightly colored.  Botswana is the country centered just above South Africa, at the very southern part of the continent.  It should be the beginning of summer in that hemisphere, so why there are so many trees without leaves, so much grass that is brown, and even bare earth, is concerning.  Here's my response on Climate Progress, to the study saying trees are dying from drought:

But, trees are dying in places that have become wetter, too. As is finally becoming more widely recognized, trees are dying in all sorts of habitats everywhere around the world.

Does anyone remember when I was ridiculed for saying so? And banned by Real Climate for suggesting models should take into account the loss of a major carbon sink?

Now even the New York Times is reporting: “With Death of Forest, a Loss of Key Climate Protectors”!

– but they are still blaming irregularities in precipitation from climate change which, although certain to drive trees to extinction eventually, isn’t the underlying reason they are dying so fast.

If it’s not more or less precipitation they have in common, what is behind this unmistakable trend, then?  It seems only logical to ask, what do trees everywhere share in common?

The atmosphere!! Ozone precursors from burning fuel and other industrial processes are traveling around the globe, going in and out of complex chemical reactions. The persistant background level is inexorably rising. Scientists have been publishing research for decades indicating that ozone is toxic to vegetation.

I am afraid we have hit a tipping point where trees and other plants are suffocating in our pollution, either dying directly from exposure, or so weakened they are succumbing to secondary attacks by insects, disease and fungus. This increased vulnerability has been demonstrated in many controlled experiments, which have also shown that trees exposed to ozone are more likely to suffer damage from drought, wind and winter cold.

There is something quite peculiar about the reluctance of scientists, foresters, agronomists and government regulatory agencies to acknowledge what is rather obvious – we are killing the very species that are at the bottom of the food chain. Why wouldn’t they want people to understand this salient fact?

oh, wait…

Here's another story from the New York Times just yesterday, about a study trying to understand why there is such a widespread dieback of trees, this one focussing on the effects of drought on aspen in the western US.  Ho hum, WOULDN'T you think that at some point, some actual scientist might wonder what universal factor underlies a universal trend??  Here's my comment to that one!

I really don't understand why the NYT refuses to even consider including the underlying role of inexorably rising, persistant background levels of tropospheric ozone. There exists vast amounts of published research, including biomonitoring and open-air fumigation experiments, indicating that ozone is toxic to vegetation, and NOTHING ELSE - not drought, insects, disease or fungus - explains why young trees being watered in nurseries are exhibiting the exact same well-known symptoms of exposure to ozone that mature trees in the wild show, as for that matter, do annual crops and ornamentals being watered in pots. As Mr. Gillis has at last acknowledged, insects are opportunists. They and the disease, fungus and certain lichens are preying on trees that are already dying from air pollution.

Get Ready

Frack 'em

I have always thought that happiness, or at least contentment, is based on the perception of fairness and expectations.  In other words, it's not based on the actual amount of creature comfort, but rather the relationship between what you think you should have, compared to what you really do have.  Remember the series of books by Laura Ingalls Wilder?  When I was young, I read them over and over again, entranced.  By today's standards, that family was living quite primitively, in conditions that would be considered much worse deprivation than the lowest class of contemporary America's consumer society.  But they didn't know it at the time, and they were not just content, but genuinely happy, despite their hardships.  Of course, they were living in a natural abundance which has since been decimated.

Still, in contrast, by any objective measure, I should be thrilled to be living at the degree of comfort I enjoy.  I can have a hot shower whenever I want, using perfumed shampoo.  I can eat oysters, or steak or cauliflower or raspberries.  I have machines to wash my laundry and dishes.  I can hop in a car, train or plane to be transported with incredible power  and speed, anywhere on earth (at least, I could before I became one of the poors!).  I should be just ecstatic...but I'm not.

At the most fundamental level I'm miserable, it's fair to say, because I had believed all this magical capability and security should be passed on to my children for their lifetimes, and then to their children...and now I know, it won't be.  Far from it - how converging catastrophes will unfold in the future is unpredictable, but the Great Convulsion is certain to be cataclysmic.  Here's a comment I left this morning on an article warning of food shortages due to drought, at Climate Progress, that explains why I anticipate irreversible decline for industrial civilization and indeed, the human species itself:

Scientific research and reports from government agencies such as NASA, the US Dept. of Ag., and EPA also tell us that in addition to increasingly vicious droughts and floods from climate change, crop yield and quality is reduced from exposure to air pollution. Since the background level of tropospheric ozone is persistant and inexorably rising, this is a global problem for critical crops such as wheat, soy, rice and corn, and in fact for every annual crop. There isn’t going to be any relief to be had for regions that are impacted by extreme weather.

Even worse, atmospheric pollution is at such a level that trees are now dying all over the world. Weakened by ozone, they fall prey to rampant insects, disease and fungus. We are going to lose not only nuts, fruit, lumber and shade…the entire terrestrial ecosystem is collapsing.

All anyone needs to do to verify this for themselves (believe me, the government won’t tell you, for fear of panic, and neither will the scientists, for fear of ridicule) is take a walk outside and really look at some actual trees.

Their bark is cracking and splitting, holes are oozing sap, cankers like lethal tumors are growing on trunks, branches are snapping off, you can’t find a pine that you can’t see through because so many needles have fallen off. And there are so many that are already completely dead.

Don’t let anyone tell you it’s because of insects, disease, and fungus. That’s like blaming a smoker’s lung cancer on eating too many potato chips.

We should make drastic cuts in burning fuel, and ration its use for only the most essential purposes, before there is widespread famine, and riots in the empty grocery stores.

See why I am not exactly happy?  And so, as often as I can, I try to annoy, if not impede, the 1% who have ruthlessly engineered this debacle for the simple stupid reason that they are profiting handsomely - obscenely - if only temporarily, in doing so.  The latest foray into New York was yesterday, where I once again learned the hard way that even green activists can be obtuse, self-absorbed tin-pot dictators.

I, and my fellow occupiers via our intertube listserve, had been invited to support an anti-fracking protest directed towards Governor Corbett of PA and his wealthy backers who were to be assembled and dining in lavish style at the Waldorf-Astoria.  We were encouraged to be creative.  Ah hah, I thought - a little street theatre...I can never resist.  I sent the anti-frackers this picture from my last cupcake impersonation, which got me evicted from the climate denialpalooza conference in Washington DC last July, and even forwarded my blogpost from that incident so they could read the flyer I hand out, titled - Climate Science is Baked in the Cake!

Everything seemed copacetic as we emailed back and forth, so I dutifully showed under the big clock in the main concourse of Grand Central Station at 5 PM to meet my fellow demonstrators, and thence to march to the hotel.  I was counting on them to lead the way because without my real glasses I'm not quite blind, but I have no idea where I am or where I'm going.  And I was really hoping the police weren't going to nab me because I would have felt conspicuously idiotic spending the night in jail looking like this:

But the police were distracted by the drunken revelries of boisterous swarming multitudes of Santacon participants, an annual event of which I had never heard before.  It's quite depressing how many people can find the time to dress like Santas and elves to cavort and frolic all over mid-town Manhattan, and how few can be bothered to join an effort to save clean water...Anyway, once we had all collected in the hubbub, the organizers handed out signs, stickers and the words to be sung to a familiar Christmas Carol.  Here they are:

Jingle bells, Jingle bells,
Jingle all the way...
Oh what fun
It is to run
When the water is on fire...

Jingle bells, Jingle bells,
Jingle all the way...
Oh Gov Corbett
What will be the obit
When all P_A_ is dead?

I kid you not.  Practice though we might, nobody could actually sing it without mangling the lyrics, and there obviously wasn't a prayer in hell anybody hearing it would have the slightest clue what we meant to impart!  It was too late to come up with a replacement so I suggested, why don't we just say, "Whose Water? Our Water!"  That caught on for a bit as we marched around the hotel, but then we were back to:  "Governor Corbett, Come and Drink it!"  Not exactly rousing either.

I have to say having become something of a veteren of marches and chanting, it's really important to have some rhythm and rhyme to keep up the enthusiasm for mindless repetition.  So for a while I got them to say a rather satisfying:  "Fracking is a Corporate Crime!" but never found any enthusiasm for "This is What Democracy Looks Like" let alone "Occupy the Delaware" or anything radical like that.

Nevertheless, most everybody seemed to enjoy the cake message, lots of people wanted their picture taken with me, then they asked what my signs meant (the other one says, "Where's my cake?), one person thanked me for coming, and some guy said "There's our cupcake!" approvingly as our circular parade passed by.  As usual little children adored the costume.  Eventually though, the woman who was clearly the lead organizer came over to me and said, "Maybe since you've got so much stuff (pointing at my little wheeled bag which held my computer and cameras) you'd like to stand at the end of the block, on the corner, and hand out fliers.

"Well," I said somewhat dubious, "then I wouldn't be able to hold the signs I brought.

"You could lean them on your bag," she said helpfully.

"I didn't know we could stand in one place and hand out fliers," I said.  "I heard the police said we had to keep moving".

"It's okay at the corner," she assured me.

"Oh...in that case I have my own I would like to hand out," I said.

"Are they about this?" [meaning fracking] she asked.

"Um...they're about environmental pollution," I responded.

"Oh..WELL...we want to have a unified message," she informed me frostily.

I resisted the temptation to tell her that she didn't own the fucking sidewalk.  I resisted the temptation to ask...WHY???  It's all connected!  Why invite occupiers if you want to restrict the message to fracking?

After that I headed back to Penn Station, totally disgusted with this typical activist crap.  It costs over $30 just for tickets to New York from Wit's End, and requires three transfers, lugging the bag up and down several stories of stairs - what was I thinking!?  In the end though, it was redeemed, because the train home was really crowded and a lively conversation ensued.  I was one of the first to arrive, so I took a seat by the door where there were outlets to recharge all my electronic equipment, expecting to read on my laptop during the long ride.  When the car was was getting close to filled I moved all my squiggly cords and offered the seat they had been covering to the next passenger coming aboard, who happened to be a big black guy.  He was a bit confused about whether he was on the right train.  Once we got that straightened out with the help of a nice suburban mom sitting across the aisle with her two teenage daughters, she asked me if I go in to the city regularly.  I said, well, I have been lately because I've been occupying Wall Street.  The teenagers lit up with excitement, and the guy next to me stuck out his hand to shake mine.  I showed them my signs.

Then he told us that he had been an administrative assistant at Deutsche Bank for sixteen years, devotedly worked insane hours ("I gave them my whole life"), until he was summarily dismissed last June.  He said, his facial expression a heart-breaking mixture of anger, sadness, and resignation, "I'm 53.  Who's going to give me a job now?"  I thought for a second about asking if I could interview him on video.  It was that tragic.  But I didn't want to impose on his grief and worry, he actually looked close to tears while he described the futile efforts he had been making to obtain even temporary work.  We all talked about the disaster this country has become, the terrible disappointment we felt in Obama, and the grim prospects for any economic recovery.  It was an amazing moment of solidarity with strangers.

December 12 - West Coast Shut Down the Ports! All of Them!

eXtinction

Super Shorts 2011: eXtinction by SRmanitou

Can it get any worse? Oh, yeah.

I had to coax myself into clambering out of my doomer sanctuary yesterday, where a cardinal shivered in the rosy rain of the Japanese maple outside my kitchen window.  I took a trip into the city, headed towards a reception for Judith Joy Ross, an amazing photographer I had met at the Tar Sands Protest in Washington DC, and who had kindly invited me to the reception for her latest exhibit at the Pace MacGill Gallery, just off Fifth Avenue.  Very swish.

While I was in Manhattan I took some photographs myself, and even though it has very little directly to do with the purpose of writing this blog at Wit's End (you know, trees dying from air pollution and if you don't, go up up up to the BasicPremise link!), I thought I would post some images - alternating with a letter to the editor written by an occupier... a letter that eloquently exposes the sham that our democracy has become.  It's a very frightening raw glimpse into the fascist control that is quickly destroying American democracy.  Aside from that essay, there are several interesting things to note about the images.  One, is the dearth of Christmas lights.  I'm not complaining - I think they are a hideous waste of energy.  But what does it portend that there are none?

Looking up and down Fifth Avenue...nothing?

I don't know if it's city budget cuts, or not.  By the end of the evening, there was but one star.

A fountain was the only gleam I found.

  Another concern of course of mine, is the sickly condition of the tree at Rockefeller Center. 

The rest of this post will be the letter mentioned above, and the opulent jewelry to be seen at Harry Winston's, Van Cleef & Arpel's, and Tiffany's.  OCCUPY them!

My name is Patrick Meighan, and I’m a husband, a father, a writer on the Fox animated sitcom “Family Guy”, and a member of the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica.

I was arrested at about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning with 291 other people at Occupy LA. I was sitting in City Hall Park with a pillow, a blanket, and a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Being Peace” when 1,400 heavily-armed LAPD officers in paramilitary SWAT gear streamed in. I was in a group of about 50 peaceful protestors who sat Indian-style, arms interlocked, around a tent (the symbolic image of the Occupy movement). The LAPD officers encircled us, weapons drawn, while we chanted “We Are Peaceful” and “We Are Nonviolent” and “Join Us.”

As we sat there, encircled, a separate team of LAPD officers used knives to slice open every personal tent in the park. They forcibly removed anyone sleeping inside, and then yanked out and destroyed any personal property inside those tents, scattering the contents across the park. They then did the same with the communal property of the Occupy LA movement. For example, I watched as the LAPD destroyed a pop-up canopy tent that, until that moment, had been serving as Occupy LA’s First Aid and Wellness tent, in which volunteer health professionals gave free medical care to absolutely anyone who requested it.

As it happens, my family had personally contributed that exact canopy tent to Occupy LA, at a cost of several hundred of my family’s dollars. As I watched, the LAPD sliced that canopy tent to shreds, broke the telescoping poles into pieces and scattered the detritus across the park. Note that these were the objects described in subsequent mainstream press reports as “30 tons of garbage” that was “abandoned” by Occupy LA: personal property forcibly stolen from us, destroyed in front of our eyes and then left for maintenance workers to dispose of while we were sent to prison.

When the LAPD finally began arresting those of us interlocked around the symbolic tent, we were all ordered by the LAPD to unlink from each other (in order to facilitate the arrests). Each seated, nonviolent protester beside me who refused to cooperate by unlinking his arms had the following done to him: an LAPD officer would forcibly extend the protestor’s legs, grab his left foot, twist it all the way around and then stomp his boot on the insole, pinning the protestor’s left foot to the pavement, twisted backwards. Then the LAPD officer would grab the protestor’s right foot and twist it all the way the other direction until the non-violent protestor, in incredible agony, would shriek in pain and unlink from his neighbor.

It was horrible to watch, and apparently designed to terrorize the rest of us. At least I was sufficiently terrorized. I unlinked my arms voluntarily and informed the LAPD officers that I would go peacefully and cooperatively. I stood as instructed, and then I had my arms wrenched behind my back, and an officer hyperextended my wrists into my inner arms. It was super violent, it hurt really really bad, and he was doing it on purpose. When I involuntarily recoiled from the pain, the LAPD officer threw me face-first to the pavement. He had my hands behind my back, so I landed right on my face. The officer dropped with his knee on my back and ground my face into the pavement. It really, really hurt and my face started bleeding and I was very scared. I begged for mercy and I promised that I was honestly not resisting and would not resist.

My hands were then zipcuffed very tightly behind my back, where they turned blue. I am now suffering nerve damage in my right thumb and palm.

I was put on a paddywagon with other nonviolent protestors and taken to a parking garage in Parker Center. They forced us to kneel on the hard pavement of that parking garage for seven straight hours with our hands still tightly zipcuffed behind our backs. Some began to pass out. One man rolled to the ground and vomited for a long, long time before falling unconscious. The LAPD officers watched and did nothing.

At 9 a.m. we were finally taken from the pavement into the station to be processed. The charge was sitting in the park after the police said not to. It’s a misdemeanor. Almost always, for a misdemeanor, the police just give you a ticket and let you go. It costs you a couple hundred dollars. Apparently, that’s what happened with most every other misdemeanor arrest in LA that day.

With us Occupy LA protestors, however, they set bail at $5,000 and booked us into jail. Almost none of the protesters could afford to bail themselves out. I’m lucky and I could afford it, except the LAPD spent all day refusing to actually *accept* the bail they set. If you were an accused murderer or a rapist in LAPD custody that day, you could bail yourself right out and be back on the street, no problem. But if you were a nonviolent Occupy LA protestor with bail money in hand, you were held long into the following morning, with absolutely no access to a lawyer.

I spent most of my day and night crammed into an eight-man jail cell, along with sixteen other Occupy LA protesters. My sleeping spot was on the floor next to the toilet.

Finally, at 2:30 the next morning, after twenty-five hours in custody, I was released on bail. But there were at least 200 Occupy LA protestors who couldn’t afford the bail. The LAPD chose to keep those peaceful, non-violent protesters in prison for two full days… the absolute legal maximum that the LAPD is allowed to detain someone on misdemeanor charges.

As a reminder, Antonio Villaraigosa has referred to all of this as “the LAPD’s finest hour.”

So that’s what happened to the 292 women and men were arrested last Wednesday. Now let’s talk about a man who was not arrested last Wednesday. He is former Citigroup CEO Charles Prince. Under Charles Prince, Citigroup was guilty of massive, coordinated securities fraud.

Citigroup spent years intentionally buying up every bad mortgage loan it could find, creating bad securities out of those bad loans and then selling shares in those bad securities to duped investors. And then they sometimes secretly bet *against* their *own* bad securities to make even more money. For one such bad Citigroup security, Citigroup executives were internally calling it, quote, “a collection of dogshit”. To investors, however, they called it, quote, “an attractive investment rigorously selected by an independent investment adviser”.

This is fraud, and it’s a felony, and the Charles Princes of the world spent several years doing it again and again: knowingly writing bad mortgages, and then packaging them into fraudulent securities which they then sold to suckers and then repeating the process. This is a big part of why your property values went up so fast. But then the bubble burst, and that’s why our economy is now shattered for a generation, and it’s also why your home is now underwater. Or at least mine is.

Anyway, if your retirement fund lost a decade’s-worth of gains overnight, this is why.

If your son’s middle school has added furlough days because the school district can’t afford to keep its doors open for a full school year, this is why.

If your daughter has come out of college with a degree only to discover that there are no jobs for her, this is why.

But back to Charles Prince. For his four years of in charge of massive, repeated fraud at Citigroup, he received fifty-three million dollars in salary and also received another ninety-four million dollars in stock holdings. What Charles Prince has *not* received is a pair of zipcuffs. The nerves in his thumb are fine. No cop has thrown Charles Prince into the pavement, face-first. Each and every peaceful, nonviolent Occupy LA protester arrested last week has has spent more time sleeping on a jail floor than every single Charles Prince on Wall Street, combined.

The more I think about that, the madder I get. What does it say about our country that nonviolent protesters are given the bottom of a police boot while those who steal hundreds of billions, do trillions worth of damage to our economy and shatter our social fabric for a generation are not only spared the zipcuffs but showered with rewards?

In any event, believe it or not, I’m really not angry that I got arrested. I chose to get arrested. And I’m not even angry that the mayor and the LAPD decided to give non-violent protestors like me a little extra shiv in jail (although I’m not especially grateful for it either).

I’m just really angry that every single Charles Prince wasn’t in jail with me.

Thank you for letting me share that anger with you today.

Patrick Meighan

Feckless Hope

I guess, I must have got a little hopey, which is dumb...but I was just bowled over to find the work of this brilliant activist from Portland, Paul Cienfuegos, who I've never heard of before.  If only I had read his thoughts about corporate financial control of government, the judiciary, media and even ostensibly "green" organizations as the root of humanity's ignorance and inability to take logical action to avert the converging catastrophes long ago, I could have been spared the mental anguish of thinking it up myself oh these many painful years.  I'm going to reprint parts of a rousing speech he gave well before the Occupy movement began, with screen shots taken this morning from a network of webcams depicting sick trees, many covered with lichens, ranging from New Hampshire to Oregon (if you missed the significance of this, check the Lichen Post).  But first, here's a video of yesterday's Occupation I was sent by the YesMen.  When it started I was more or less like, meh, but by the end I was a little weepy, to tell the truth.  Watch out for the Hope.


~ by Paul Cienfuegos, February 2010

We humans on this stunningly beautiful planet have never experienced anything remotely like what we are experiencing today. There is a sense of unreality. Outside our windows everything seems pretty normal.  Life appears to be flowing by just as it did a year ago, 10 years ago, 50 years ago. But we know there are enormous changes taking place all around us.  Twenty-five years ago, when I was still a young man, I was aware that there was a lot of ecological destruction going on around me, but I hadn’t yet realized how close to the abyss we already were on this beautiful planet.

Woods Hole, Massachusetts

The groups I worked with at the time, fighting clear-cut logging, trying to stop the construction of a nuclear submarine base, just to name two of them, we didn’t really understand that we were nearing the end of life as we knew it.  I was a very politically well-read young man.  I knew we had big problems everywhere.  My eyes were wide open.  But I was not aware of anyone who was sounding the alarm about the end of oil, about an impending climate catastrophe, about larger and larger areas of our ocean no longer able to support marine life.

In a very short amount of time, in just a few decades, a large percentage of the planet’s inhabitants have woken up to the reality that that we have very little time remaining to literally recreate our lives and our communities, to start living as if we really get it — that our Mother Earth, Gaia, is a finite, floating sphere and offering us her amazing services if only we would live in a way that is truly sustainable for the next thousands of years.  The problem is, we have to act quickly and boldly.

For example, most climate scientists now agree that we must cut our greenhouse gas emissions by 80% to 90% within 20 years or less if we want to avert global catastrophic climate destabilization. To succeed at making such drastic cuts, according to George Monbiot, one of Europe’s leading writers on climate change, the only way to reach such goals is to end almost all private driving of cars, to end almost all commercial flights, to end all long-distance transport of food and manufactured goods, to shut down all of our coal-fired power plants, to insulate and retrofit all of our existing homes and offices. That’s a tall order in 20 years.

But that’s not the only immediate crisis we face.  Energy analysts tell us that it’s likely that we reached peak oil in the last year or so, and we will reach peak coal, it’s estimated, in 15 to 20 years.  And our global oil consumption is still increasing so rapidly that we may not even have enough oil left, according to World Watch Institute, even to use as a bridge to get us to a renewable energy-based society.  In other words, to build all of the necessary photovoltaic panels and solar water systems and wind turbines and micro-hydro systems and all of the other parts of a sustainable energy future, that absolutely massive new infrastructure may require more oil and coal and raw materials simply to get it built than we can spare or that would be allowed as we work feverishly to cut our greenhouse gas emissions. These projections make it clear that the days of so-called normal are over.

South Carolina

But that’s not all.  Just at the moment that people are waking up and demanding bold action from our local, state, and federal governments, our economy is in crisis, too.  There are fewer and fewer government dollars available to spend on the bold and rapid policy changes that
are urgently needed.  The last thing I said isn’t completely true, because our federal government spends 51% of the tax money it collects on the military budget.  Fifty-one percent. This next year that estimate is $1,450,000,000 will be spent on paying for past and
present wars and planning for future wars.  So there actually is an enormous amount of capital that could be spent on these urgent matters, but our elected officials refuse to do so thus far.  It’s the year 2010.  We have until 2030 at the latest to have completed a fundamental restructuring of our entire society.

Is it the greatest opportunity we have ever been handed to create a truly sustainable society?  Yes.  Is it also the largest emergency we have ever faced as modern beings?  Yes.  So let’s take an honest look at what people are doing to respond to this growing emergency in the
U.S. so that we can determine whether our efforts are sufficient for the task.

I mainly see two kinds of activities taking place.  Americans are taking a fresh look at how our own personal behaviors affect the planet.  We are rethinking our daily personal decisions about what we choose to eat, how we choose to transport ourselves, how we choose to
heat and cool our homes, what we choose to buy in the stores, how we choose to make a living, etc.  In other words, every day we’re making hundreds of very private decisions that influence our personal consumption patterns.

In addition, many of us are involved in activist groups, almost entirely focusing on single issues.  Literally thousands of specific campaigns, like making it safer to bike on city streets or keeping GMO crops from being planted or stopping the construction of more big-box
stores, or demanding universal health care or changing our agricultural practices so we don’t keep losing our topsoil or trying to stop salmon from going extinct or trying to get people to stop buying plastic water bottles.  It’s an endless list.

There’s very little overlap between the groups.  We tend to not work with each other because it’s hard to see how our issues are connected. We frequently don’t have much awareness about what other groups are doing.  Our single-issue groups tend to be underfunded and
understaffed.  Most of us still need to work for a living, so we scratch out some extra hours in our hectic schedules to do our activism.

Quebec

Many of us also join regional and national advocacy organizations, but they tend to be so isolated from their members that they barely request more of us than writing a letter to an elected official or to the editor of a local paper or signing an online petition or sending a
donation.

These larger groups are also almost always focused on a single issue, and frequently much of their funding comes from large corporations.  Sometimes their boards of directors are CEOs of large corporations.  Two examples are the Natural Resources Defense Council and the American Cancer Society.

These are all fine things for us to be doing, to be reexamining our daily, private lifestyle decisions so we consume less and to be joining mostly single-issue organizations.  But I have to ask you: Is this sufficient to get Portland, to get Oregon, to get the U.S. turned
180 degrees in the next 10 to 20 years?  I think we need to be honest and say no.  The harsh reality is that even given the gazillion hours that activists work year after year, almost every single ecological and social trend continues to get worse and worse and worse.

Lester Brown, the World Watch Institute founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute, recently gave a speech in which he said — this is an excerpt — “I’ve realized that the trends that are undermining the world food economy — soil erosion, aquifer depletion, overgrazing,
and grassland deterioration, collapsing fisheries, deforestation and all the problems that leads to — we have not reversed a single one of those trends.  We’ve been tracking them now for decades at the World Watch Institute, going back to the mid-1970s, and you don’t have to be
an ecologist to realize that if we don’t get these trends turned around, we’re going to be in trouble on the food front.  You can’t over-pump aquifers forever.  You can’t have soils eroding at the rate they’re eroding in the world today without eventually paying a price for it.”

Washington State

Let’s be honest with ourselves.  Our personal consumption choices and our single-issue activism aren’t having much impact in reversing these trends.  And let’s not make the same mistake that single-issue activists make so often, thinking that if we just work harder at what
we’re already doing, that we’ll start to win our battles. It isn’t that simple.

The problem is structural.  What most of our activist groups continue to ignore, at their peril, is that our governmental institutions are mostly so corrupted and overwhelmed by corporate demands that they simply do not function as they were designed to.  I think every one of
you in this room knows this in your gut.  Yet we act as if we still believe that our government institutions are functioning to serve us. There is a huge disconnect here.

Can it really be this bad, we ask.  Surely our elected officials will do the right thing if only we work a little harder to convince them.  One more letter, one more phone call.  I’m afraid that path is a dead end. We simply have to examine some current legislative efforts to be
understand how bad things have become.  Here are just two examples.

What do a majority of Americans want regarding health-care reform?  We want single-payer, universal health care, like every other industrialized nation.  Am I right?  That’s what we want.  The polls have been showing it for decades.  The Nurses’ Association wants it, the unions want it, even doctors’ associations are finally wanting it.  People are better organized around this issue than perhaps any other issue in the country today.  But what are we going to get?  Nothing.  Why?  Because health insurance company executives like it just the way it already is.  It’s that simple.

Another example.  What do a majority of Americans want regarding government response to the financial crisis?  Again the polls are clear.  We want a massive new green jobs program.  We want the tens of millions of Americans who are about to lose their homes —tens of
millions — to get some sort of legal protection so they have time to renegotiate their mortgages before they end up on the streets.  We want an end to giant bonuses for corporate leaders who created this mess and for criminal charges to be filed against them.  What are we going to get instead?

More nuclear power plants subsidized with our money, a tiny jobs program, no end to the huge bailouts of the companies which created the mess in the first place.  Why?  Because the financial industry likes it just the way it already is.  It’s that simple.

How did it come to pass that large corporations wield so much political clout?  People tend to think it’s because they have lots of money to throw around, but that’s actually not the main reason at all.  Corporations have so much power because their leaders have been winning Supreme Court case after Supreme Court case going way back to the early 1800s.  You’ve probably all heard of the Santa Clara corporate personhood decision in 1886.  But that’s just one story among many.  If you can picture all of those wins as picture-puzzle pieces, they’ve now pretty well succeeded in creating a mosaic of corporate constitutional so-called rights that effectively blot out our Constitutional rights.  Here are some highlights from that history.

Michigan

In 1819, in what is now referred to as the Dartmouth decision, the Supreme Court ruled that a corporate charter was a contract and could not be altered by government.  This was the first time in our history that the courts claimed that corporations could use the Constitution for legal protection.

Beginning in the 1870s, the Supreme Court began using the commerce clause of the Constitution to overrule one local and state law after another that had been passed to protect the health and welfare of the people in all of those local places.

In 1886, in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, the Court claimed that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which provided equal protection under the law to freed male slaves also applied to corporations.  For the first time it was claimed that the
word “person” also included the corporation.  Corporate personhood was born.  In 1893, corporations won Fifth Amendment protections against the taking of their property without due process. In 1906 corporations won the Fourth Amendment, protecting them against search and seizure. In 1908, corporations won the Sixth Amendment, guaranteeing them the
right to a jury trial in criminal cases.  In 1919, the Court ruled that corporate boards of directors must prioritize the maximizing of profit as their central goal.  Large companies that had until then balanced profit making with other goals were forced to comply.  In 1936, corporations won the First Amendment, giving them protected free speech for the very first time.

In 1976, the Court ruled that money and free speech are equivalent.  Unbelievable.  From that day forward, limits on campaign expenditures by corporations were severely limited.  Money equals speech.  Also in 1976 the Court expanded a corporation’s First Amendment free-speech protections to include advertising.  In 1977 the Court ruled that corporations have the same rights to the First Amendment as do real people and can spend unlimited money to “speak” in ads to overturn referenda.

In 1986, the Court ruled that corporate free speech includes the right not to speak, which dramatically impacted the government’s ability to pass new product labeling laws, because the words on their label, corporate lawyers claimed, was their property and their speech.

This is just a small sampling of hundreds of Supreme Court cases granting rights to corporations.  Corporate directors have skillfully molded these rights into an impenetrable barrier that has successfully overwhelmed our government’s capacity to do its job.

North Carolina

And let’s not forget the icing on the cake, the latest Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission, removing some of the very last legal limits on how much money corporations can give to influence elections.  Much of our media, including our
activists and independent media, have misreported the story, claiming that this recent decision gave corporations personhood rights.  As you can clearly see from this short history,
the latest win is just one more expansion of corporate personhood rights.  Yes, it is a very significant expansion.  For the first time ever the corporation may spend unlimited piles of cash directly from its general fund, which will have an immediate chilling effect on any
elected official who wants to go against the corporate agenda.

Most of the previous court decisions also took place with very little attention from the public.  This latest decision has awakened a firestorm of public anger.  ABC News published a poll showing that a staggering 80% of Americans are opposed to the Court’s decision and want it overturned.  And it’s not just progressives who feel this way.  It’s 85% of Democrats, 76% of Republicans, 81% of independents...

How can we create a sustainable society in just 10 to 20 years?  Is it possible?  I believe it is, but only if we end our addiction to single-issue campaigns as quickly as we possibly can and start challenging corporate Constitutional rights head on.  I’m not saying we should stop working on health-care reform or bank reform or climate change or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or the humanitarian crisis in Haiti.  I’m saying we need to change the framing of our campaigns away from just being about single issues.

Let me offer some examples.  I would claim that the problem is not that corporations are clear-cutting our forests.  That’s just the symptom of the problem.  The real problem is that we, the people, are allowing corporations to clear-cut our forests, that we the people are
allowing corporations to decide whether to clear-cut, how to clearcut, where to clear-cut, when to clear-cut.  Who gave corporations the authority to make those decisions?  If they had not won corporate personhood in the courts, they wouldn’t have the power to make those
decisions.  If we want to end clear-cutting, the fastest route is to end corporate Constitutional rights.  The same is true regarding the climate-change crisis, the energy crisis, the poisoning of our air and waters, the home mortgage crisis.  All of these are symptoms.  In all of these cases we, the people, are allowing corporations to pour poisons into our air and water.  We are allowing corporations to grow GMO crops.

We are allowing corporations to build nuclear power plants. We are allowing corporations to blow the tops off mountains to dig for coal.  We are allowing corporations to write laws, to lobby our government, to fund our candidates.  They wouldn’t be allowed to do any of these
activities if they had not won corporate Constitutional rights, corporate personhood.

So if we want to stop corporations from doing all of these things, the fastest route is to work to end their Constitutional rights. It’s very clear. I’m not claiming that this will be easy.  But just look at how effective our single-issue existing campaigns have been so far in responding to these ecological and social crises.  They have not been very effective.  It’s time to turn the corner and try something else. It’s time to remember who we are.  We are the people.  We are the sovereign people.  We are we, the people.  And in many cases we are the majority of the people in a country where majority rule is the law of the land.  The Constitution, for all of its flaws, is very clear about one thing, all legitimate power resides in the people.

Oregon

That’s us.  We have all the legal authority we need to govern ourselves.

Unfortunately, for a century now we Americans have been slowly forgetting where our power resides.  There are many reasons for this cultural change.  The primary reason is this: Large corporations have become such dominant players in all aspects of our lives that what I call corporate culture has become the dominant culture.  We swim in corporate culture; it’s everywhere around us.  We barely notice many of its manifestations.  It’s like the air we breathe.  For example, we tend to identify ourselves as consumers, as workers, as activists, as private individuals rather than as citizens acting in public.  But we are not just private individuals leading private lives. We are not just consumers.  That’s a term made up by corporate think tanks to try to convince us that all we have to do is vote with our dollars and
everything will be fine.  That’s our choice in the marketplace, that’s our real power.  That’s what they tell us.  It’s a lie.

A sovereign people don’t just decide between Coke and Pepsi, between paper and plastic.  A sovereign people exercise our political authority.  A sovereign people don’t just decide between organic produce and cancer-causing produce in the supermarket. That’s not where our power resides.  We exercise our legal authority and we decide that we will not allow toxic and cancer-causing foods to be produced, to be grown in the first place.  That it’s not okay to have a two-tier food supply: one for those of us who can afford food safety and the other for everybody else.  No.  We say you can’t produce toxic food in the first place.  That’s what a sovereign people does.

Consumer power is false power.  It’s a dangerous diversion for us to be engaging in.

We’re not mere activists either.  That’s exactly where the corporate elite wants us, isolated from each other in thousands of single-issue groups, and mostly pleading and begging with government and corporate authorities to do the right thing.  Perhaps the most dangerous
manifestation of corporate culture is something I just mentioned — that we organize ourselves in isolated single-issue groupings whenever we’re trying to tackle a social or ecological problem.  This began in the late 1800s.

Vancouver Island

Just as large corporations were starting to overpower a century of law and culture that had given governments the power to define what a corporation could and could not do.  Once corporations began to win the right of personhood under law, defining law was no longer
possible.  Now governments could only regulate corporate harms rather than prohibiting them in the first place.

Regulatory agencies were set up to regulate entire industries in the late 1800s.  The first regulatory agency was the ICC, the Interstate Commerce Commission.  These agencies were given the authority to decide what amount of harm would be permitted in the manufacturing process.

That’s why they’re called permits: they permit harm, they legalize harm.  It has created the absolutely absurd situation where a regulatory agency can now give a permit to a pulp mill to dump 8 parts per million of mercury into a bay, having decided that that’s the safe allowable limit of mercury, rather than prohibiting the releasing of any poisons into our natural world.

Before the birth of regulatory agencies in the late 1800s, before corporations claimed Constitutional rights, we, the people, insisted that corporations cause no harm.  It was written into their charters.  After these monumental changes in law and culture, people were forced
into the single-issue arena.  That’s the primary reason activists today fight one corporation at a time, one corporate harm at a time, using regulatory law.  That’s the main reason we now have thousands and thousands of isolated organizations working so hard on thousands
of issues. It does not have to be that way.

Remember, all legitimate power resides in the people.  We have all the legal authority we need to respond to this growing emergency in a very different way, if we dare.  But to do so we’re going to have to learn again how to practice democracy.  Democracy isn’t just about voting every year or two.  It’s about the people governing themselves.  Do you know what the word democracy means?  It comes from the Greek words demos, the people, and kratia, power. It literally means people power, or the people rule.  It’s about who is in charge, about who gets to decide the important things that make a society the way it is. Remember, all legitimate power resides in the people.

Saskatchewan

Those of us in this room tonight, if most of us already knew this history and therefore already understood there is no force more powerful than we, the people, and already understood that corporate political power is fundamentally illegitimate, then we would already be acting en masse, very differently than we are, which is why it is so critical that we take the time to learn this hidden history.  It is only because we have mostly forgotten this history that we’re even
willing to contemplate consumer power or single-issue activism as our primary involvement in the world.

The first step in transforming our involvement in solving these critical problems is to rethink our relationship with these issues.  Here are some examples.

Every month when you pay your gas and electric bill, who gets to decide where all of your money goes?  Will it be invested in building a new nuclear power plant, a new solar array or wind farm?  Will it be turned into deep discounts for homeowners wanting to solarize their
homes?  Will it end up in million-dollar year-end bonus checks for utility company executives?  Who gets to make those decisions? Those of you who pay your bills every month?  Are we contesting who makes those decisions?

No.  If we continue in the mode of single-issue activism, we see ourselves merely as ratepayers, battling rate increases.  But if we act as a sovereign people, whole new pathways appear in front of us.  We start organizing to replace private utility companies with public
utility companies, which is going to be starting in California this year.  Or, alternately, we can allow large corporations to continue to provide our energy, but rein in their decision-making authority so that we decide the priorities.  To do this, we must end corporate Constitutional rights.

So many of the crises we face could be transformed very quickly into much less daunting campaigns if we only understood how central corporate Constitutional rights are in determining who or what is pulling the strings.  Thus it is urgent that we pay close attention to
how these corporate rights manifest themselves in almost every significant issue we’re grappling with.  We’re used to doing symptom-based organizing.  It’s time for a change.

Harvard Forest, MA

Here are two key arenas where corporate rights make democratic society literally impossible.  Corporations now claim the legally recognized right to decide — that’s the key word, decide — which products get produced, how the products are made, where they’re made, how the labor is organized to make them, whether poisons are created as a byproduct in the process of making them, and what happens to that poison.  Yes, the decision making itself about production, investment, and work is now a protected property right of corporations.  It’s one of the many intangible property rights that corporations now claim as persons.

And corporations now claim the legally recognized right to lobby our elected officials, to make huge donations to their re-election campaigns, to fund and create phony citizens organizations with names like Americans Against Food Taxes, which is sponsored by and run by soda-pop corporations, and the Coalition for Responsible Health Care Reform, which is funded by and run by —you guessed it — health insurance corporations.  Groups like this are created explicitly to confuse we, the people, about where we should stand on the issues.
The only reason they can legally do all these things is because they have Constitutional First Amendment rights.

Corporations have been winning ever-expanding free-speech rights for decades.  And the Citizens United case gives them even more overwhelming power to manipulate our elections, our airwaves, our public discussions.

We have a very critical choice to make, and we need to make it soon. As long as we continue to struggle one issue at a time, most of the critical decisions that impact our world will continue to be made by corporate boards of directors, behind closed doors. What if we say no more?

What if we decide that the future of life on this planet is too important to be left up to corporate executives in their boardroom suites?  Let’s not forget what Abraham Lincoln said in his first
inaugural speech: “This country with its institutions belongs to the people who inhabit it.  Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their Constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”  Can you imagine a modern president saying those words in their inaugural address?  Unbelievable.  We’re not used to thinking this big.  But these are extraordinary times...


Mother Earth is in danger.  It is time to stand together as citizens, as the sovereign people, as human beings.  Time is short.  I thank you.

Harvard Forest, MA