Tales of Change

Cornel West on Barack Obama

From Chris Hedges' The Obama Deception: Why Cornel West Went Ballistic:

“Can you imagine if Barack Obama had taken office and deliberately educated and taught the American people about the nature of the financial catastrophe and what greed was really taking place?” West asks. “If he had told us what kind of mechanisms of accountability needed to be in place, if he had focused on homeowners rather than investment banks for bailouts and engaged in massive job creation he could have nipped in the bud the right-wing populism of the tea party folk. The tea party folk are right when they say the government is corrupt. It is corrupt. Big business and banks have taken over government and corrupted it in deep ways.

“We have got to attempt to tell the truth, and that truth is painful,” he says. “It is a truth that is against the thick lies of the mainstream. In telling that truth we become so maladjusted to the prevailing injustice that the Democratic Party, more and more, is not just milquetoast and spineless, as it was before, but thoroughly complicitous with some of the worst things in the American empire. I don’t think in good conscience I could tell anybody to vote for Obama. If it turns out in the end that we have a crypto-fascist movement and the only thing standing between us and fascism is Barack Obama, then we have to put our foot on the brake. But we’ve got to think seriously of third-party candidates, third formations, third parties.

“Our last hope is to generate a democratic awakening among our fellow citizens. This means raising our voices, very loud and strong, bearing witness, individually and collectively. Tavis [Smiley] and I have talked about ways of civil disobedience, beginning with ways for both of us to get arrested, to galvanize attention to the plight of those in prisons, in the hoods, in poor white communities. We must never give up. We must never allow hope to be eliminated or suffocated.”

Register for the next Democracy School in Seattle June 17th - 18th

Democracy School teaches citizens and activists to reframe exhausting and often discouraging single issue work (such as opposing ill-advised highway projects, stadium funding and corporate tax breaks, or proposing sick leave legislation, bans on toxic chemicals and common sense drug policy, etc.) in a way that we can confront corporate control on a powerful single front: people’s constitutional rights.

Our next Seattle school will focus on activists and organizers interested in helping lead a rights-based movement in Seattle, similar to what Spokane began in 2010. Specifically, graduates of the school will be encouraged to participate in community building efforts to draft a bill of rights for a future Seattle ballot initiative.

The next school will be held Friday evening, June 17th (6:30 pm - 9 pm) and all day Saturday, June 18th (9:30 am - 5:30 pm) in the Ballard neighborhood. Cost will be $150 per person. Space is limited and we expect this to fill up - so send in your registrations early. Need-based scholarships may be available upon request. Visit http://www.peoplefirst.us for more information.

The Democracy School will be led by Thomas Linzey of CELDF whose recent accomplishments include working with the city of Pittsburgh to pass an ordinance banning fracking/natural gas drilling within the city limits and the adoption of Constitutional language granting rights to nature in Ecuador.

Full payment is due at sign up. You can either ask to send payment by mail (ask jeff at newscloud dot com for the mailing address) or click the buy now button below or send payment from PayPal to paypal at skymail dot me. 

Rachel Botsman: The case for collaborative consumption

"Own a power drill, right? That power drill will be used around 12 to 13 minutes in its entire lifetime. It's kind of ridiculous, right? Because what you need is the hole, not the drill." That's part of the case Rachel Botsman makes for collaborative consumption. Sharing physical goods is one of the collaborative scenarios we'll be building back into our open source NewsCloud platform soon.

Thomas Friedman on Leadership: Cut Here, Invest There

As I’m about to start a four-month book leave, I need to get a few things off my chest: President Obama understood, rightly, that our economy needed more stimulus, so, given the G.O.P.’s insistence on extending the Bush tax cuts for all, he struck the best deal he could. The country, we are told, is now in a better mood, seeing our two parties work together. I, alas, am not in a better mood.

via www.nytimes.com

I really appreciated Thomas Friedman's latest column. He speaks about the role of political leaders and the right and wrong ways to approach obstacles.

All Durango streetlights now dark-skies compliant

The community of Durango, Colorado has completed replacement of all of its street lights to keep light from shining up into the night sky. This is part of an initiative to be dark sky compliant - to prevent light pollution and contribute to a more natural evening environment. See Stargazers Look Up.

The “full cut-off lenses,” which replace traditional teardrop-shaped bulbs, shine down and not out, and are meant to save on energy costs, reduce light pollution and limit the impacts of artificial light on wildlife.

BP Sued in Ecuadorian Court For Violating Rights of Nature

Democracy Now reports briefly today on a lawsuit filed against BP for the Gulf Oil Spill for violating the rights of nature (see the clip in the video below at 6:25). The Rights of Nature was added to the Ecuadorian Constitution September 28, 2008 by an overwhelming margin through a national referendum. You can read the English language complaint here (I've also embedded it below the video):

We are filing this lawsuit because the international system of rights is clearly biased towards protecting the interests of transnational corporations that make excessive, irresponsible and predatory use of their rights to property and free enterprise, based on a development philosophy that is antagonistic to nature.

We are filing this lawsuit to break with the longstanding colonial logic of positive rights, which closes the doors to us for demanding fulfilment of the rights of Pachamama in formal spaces and limits us to alternative spaces such as Courts of Opinion, where, although we honourably exercise our right to have and to demand our rights, decisions are not binding on the transnational corporations or on the governments who back them, and thus they do not serve as an effective means to guarantee that the crimes denounced will not be repeated.

We submit as grounds for the admissibility of this suit both factual and legal grounds. With regard to the former, as we will presently demonstrate, the oil spill has global impacts: it impacts the ecosystems of every one of the countries of which the plaintiffs are nationals.

With regard to the latter, we base our claim on the Ecuadorian Constitution of 2008, which obliges all public officials, including constitutional court judges, to protect subjects of rights, establishing as duties of the Ecuadorian state, among others: To guarantee the rights of nature (Art. 277), To protect nature from the negative effects of anthropogenic disasters (Art. 389), To establish effective mechanisms for the prevention and control of environmental pollution, for the recovery of degraded natural areas, and for the sustainable management of natural resources (Art. 397-2).  

Ecuador worked with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) which helped draft the language for the rights of nature based on other work that it had been doing with communities in the United States. CELDF recently helped Pittsburgh pass an ordinance to ban natural gas drilling/fracking within the city limits.

I appreciate CELDF's work because of the way they get activists to break out of failed regulatory fights which end up permitting certain levels of corporate harm and into right's based local lawmaking which allows communities to once again choose a path of self-determination. 

Bob Herbert on Winning the Class War

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert acknowledges "the class war that no one wants to talk about" .. saying "[it] continues unabated."

There is no way to bring America’s consumer economy back to robust health if unemployment is chronically high, wages remain stagnant and the jobs that are created are poor ones. Without ordinary Americans spending their earnings from good jobs, any hope of a meaningful, long-term recovery is doomed.

Beyond that, extreme economic inequality is a recipe for social instability. Families on the wrong side of the divide find themselves under increasing pressure to just hold things together: to find the money to pay rent or the mortgage, to fend off bill collectors, to cope with illness and emergencies, and deal with the daily doses of extreme anxiety.

Read his whole column here

NOW IS NO TIME TO SLEEP: Why We Must Re-create the World - Pastor Rich Lang Speaking at WPSR Fundraising Dinner

Pastor Rich Lang of Ballard's Trinity United Methodist Church speech on hope and purpose at this year's Washington Physician's for Social Responsibility fundraising dinner. Transcript below (with permission).

This is no time to sleep dreaming of what was once long ago. We must awaken to the seriousness of this moment and awaken further into the opportunity of this moment to radically change the world, to alter history’s script, to rewrite a vision of what is possible and what is desirable. This is our moment to reclaim the glory of our mortality even as we limit and tame and reduce the immortality of Corporate Persons so that they begin to serve human need, and earth’s fertile, fruitful evolution. This is our moment to organize for freedom: to organize around a new vision of human being, and a new possibility of living cooperatively. It is not the time to shy away from liberal progressivism and creation-centered values. Rather, it is the time to ramp it up and become even bolder, certainly more creative, and absolutely more persistent.

NOW IS NO TIME TO SLEEP: Why We Must Re-create the World(PSR Keynote: 11/14/10)

(Ezekiel 37:1-6) The hand of God came upon me, and brought me out by the Spirit and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. The Spirit led me all round them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. The Spirit said to me, ‘Mortal, can these bones live?’ I answered, ‘O God, you know.’ Then the Spirit said to me, ‘Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of God. Thus says the Spirit to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I AM!’

 *************** We are here for hope. Ezekiel, in the passage just read, was out of hope. All was lost, he and his people were exiled into Babylon, the Temple where God lived had burned to the ground, which meant that their God had either been defeated or that there was no God, and history was just a bunch of power struggles between bullies, bullies who had come in and devastated his country. My bet is that most of us can relate to Ezekiel. We are a lot like Ezekiel. He was a priest in the Temple, which meant he was part of the establishment, a person who benefited from Israel’s prosperity. Just like us, we who can afford to attend this fund raising dinner, just like Ezekiel, we are watching the bullies brutalize our country.

But, I want to speak of hope. I want to talk about where we go from here. Because, just as those dead bones were not the end of the story, so too the current plight of our planet, the current plight of our nation, is not the end of the story. The moral arc of history tells us it never is. I’m here to breathe fire into the bones. I’m here to say that these bones will rise again, they will live again, they will lead again, and they will prosper again. I’m here to say that these dead bones will resurrect the future. These dead bones ARE THE FUTURE. These dead bones are not shaking and rattling in vain. But these dead bones are being given new life, new instruction, new purpose, new meaning, new destiny. And you are those bones and this IS our finest hour and for this moment we have been made. So take hope, gird yourself with courage, prepare your hearts, because tonight is not simply a feast to eat, tonight is meant to spark the flame of renewal within you and amongst you. As a people we need a new word that will reanimate and re-inspire and re-imagine a future worth living. What I want to say to you is this: it is for now, it is for this very moment that you have been made, not in vain, but it is this very moment for which you are needed, for which all of your skills, and all of your talents and all of your time and all of your treasure has been made, this very moment, this very moment is the beginning of liberation, a moment of awakening, a moment to return to our senses, to restore our destiny, to bring us back to our original purpose: to care for creation and to help life grow. There is no better moment to be alive! And there are no better people than what’s in this room: Jesus had twelve, we have more. The revolution starts now!

 So, I have hope today. I have hope that as our nation rocks bottom there is a growing cry for deeper meaning, and deeper purpose. I have hope today that our nation will soon begin to see that we belong to each other, that we need each other, that it really is US --- “we the people” who must become an US to fight back and reclaim the high calling of our heritage. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all are created equal, that all are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among human flesh and blood, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

A heritage rooted in the idealism of self governance, an idealism that all are created to be free from slavery to corporations and kings, that all are free to pursue their happiness, that all are free to love the “other”, the “stranger”, the one who comes to our shores “poor, tired, huddled masses, yearning to breathe free:” Our heritage as a city on the hill, a beacon of light, a sign of hope that Pharaoh is dead and we the people live …corruption and politics are dead but we the people, we the neighbors, we the decent and loving and caring --- WE LIVE! That’s why we’re here tonight. That’s why you’ve come. Because your dead bones are shaking and awakening from slumber. Despite it all your DEAD BONES LIVE!

Turn to your neighbor and say ---- “I’m glad you’re here” ---Turn to your neighbor and say “ it gives me hope that you are here” ---- turn to your neighbor and say --- “together we are better” --- turn and say --- “together we’re gonna make things right”. ***** So what do we need to do to make things right? What do we need to do to give birth to hope in such a time as this?

Now I’m a preacher so I want to speak my own language first. I think most of us grow up with an image of God as an object “out there”; just like mommy and daddy, sister and brother are objects “out there”. And the notion of God as an object … God as Creator not dependent on creation is comforting because that means that God is outside the process and can’t be captured by creation, can’t be captured by Rockefeller or the Koch brothers: God is free. That’s what transcendence means … the ability to rise up out of the pit, the ability to open the shackles that bind you. God is not limited by the constraints of a body, or of time or of space. God is not bound to those who have resources. But the downside to such an understanding of God is that the world quite often makes no sense. There are too many Haiti’s, too many Katrina’s, too many slaughters and massacres. There is too much grinding poverty and disease --- what good is a Creator who is free of the creation if the creation is suffering and hurting and without hope?

There is another image of God that is paradoxical but increasingly an image that I find fertile, fruitful and fulfilling. I have begun to think of God (the Creator) not so much as an object out there but as a process that is both relational and dialogic. I have begun to understand that what I mean when I say God is the experience of creativity, the experience of insightful imagination, the experience of getting up when I get knocked down, the experience of compassion, the experience of a heart warmed with affection towards another even when the other might be a tree, or a river or a sunset. When I talk about God I’m talking about certain human experiences that are universal and common to us all. So when I say that the first step of hope is an openness to God’s Spirit moving within history towards new promise and possibility; what I’m not saying is that you should all become Christians like me. What I am saying is that there is a universal connection, a universal commonwealth that summons us to care for each other and to care for this earth, a universal summons to help life grow and evolve. That summons, a summons rooted in universal human experience, a summons acted out through human agency, IS GOD at work and play in our daily lives.

As a Christian preacher when I say to my church, “return to God”, what I’m saying is “return to our humanity, our universal humanity, our universal connection as living, breathing creatures. We are but mortal, body bound and time limited, but it is our mortality that is our glory. We are chapters in a book but the book is deeper and bigger and asks us to contribute to a far larger and more complex adventure. And here is my point: the spirit of God, the spirit of breaking free into new possibility, new imagination, new creation emerges not from a revelation that falls down out of heaven, but it emerges from within us as we resist the forces and powers of death that try to separate us one from the other.

After countless meetings and strategy sessions, and trainings, years and years of this, but when Rosa Parks sat down a ready people stood up and broke apart the structure of apartheid in this country. When pockets of ordinary people (the Nuclear Freeze movement) politically agitated against the rhetoric and the reality of nuclear war, the rhetoric changed and the powers of death alive in our government stood down and gave us breathing space to rethink the world. When awakened women met in Seneca Falls, to insist on their equality they started on a long journey that eventually resulted in the vote, and there’s still a long way to go but the Day is closer now than it was then, and nothing would have happened unless ordinary women took the risky and courageous first step of acting on their imagination for a better world.

We’re living in dark times and I think it’s going to get darker. These next years are going to be astonishingly cruel. Bad things are going to happen. The powers of Death are deconstructing the creation. On a practical, pragmatic level we are in a global class war of a wee tiny elite stepping up to crush the vast majority: in Biblical language a new Pharaoh has been unleashed, and we are all enslaved into the Pharaoh’s permanent warfare debt economy. In political language, the separation of powers (of checks and balances) has collapsed and we are now living at the very beginnings of a post-democracy. In the poetic language of the street, “we’re fucked”.

There is a growing hunger in my soul for revolution. I don’t like the American way of life: I don’t like an economy rooted in permanent war that pillages other nations for their resources and strategic value, strategic for Corporations and the profit of a few. I don’t like a nation that bloats its military budget beyond all rationality while homelessness increases, well over 15% of the population remains unemployed, Soup Kitchens, Food Banks and shelters become growth industries, and a very few (1% of the population) increase their financial power in a time of economic crisis for the many. Such a way of life is death. And we can feel this death in the hardening of the hearts of our fellow citizens: a hard rain of decreasing compassion is falling on America: there is a spiritual death moving amongst our people and its end will be the destruction of many. The cynicism of our politics and our increasingly bleak view of the future are symptoms of this. I hunger for revolution because I desire a new world.

In November of 2000 this country experienced a legalized coup-de-tat that was further enhanced through the events of 9/11, that unleashed the imperial hungers of our military-corporate elites, the manufactured economic crisis of October ‘08 cemented the coup and the Citizens United decision crowned a new king … that is, the only citizen of any significance anymore is the Corporate Citizen. Until we come to grips with this reality: that we the people are no longer sovereign, and that we the people have little influence in official decision making, until we come to grips with how severely democracy has been damaged and atrophied, until we realize we have become slaves nothing of any political significance or hope will materialize. We’ll keep sleeping in the dream that we are what we were and what we were was a nation of vision and idealism, a nation that thought itself to be kind and caring, with a universal desire that all nations not only survive but thrive. We thought ourselves benevolent. This idealism was our strength but now it has become our weakness because we keep getting played by both political parties, each Party dancing to the tune of their corporate-military owners.

I could say that the way out of this trap is to build a new political party, a strong Working Class Party with its own media, and a willingness to feed and clothe and shelter its members who get left behind --- such a political party of both politics and welfare could be a reforming game changer in America. I could say that we need to organize into multiple movements directed toward the legal dismantling of Corporate charters to bring them back under the control of we the people --- a much needed, necessary reform. I could say that we need to withdraw our money from Corporate banks, and we need to stop shopping at Corporate stores, that we need to focus on building a “local economy based” sustainable living alternative --- a crucial and practical revolt against the elites. I could say that we need to organize to elect a new state legislature whose members would charter a Washington State Bank (like in North Dakota) and to pass laws that redistribute wealth via the agency of a progressive tax structure --- hallelujah! I pray that day will come. I could say all that and much more --- ideas are the easy part. But the serious work and the hard work and the difficult work, the work that will breath re-inspiration and re-imagination into the dead bones of our neighbors and our nation, that work is going to take a whole bunch of ordinary folks like you and me. We’ve lost hope because we no longer have a vision we can believe in: and we can’t believe in visions because the messengers of those visions are all corrupted, the visions are shadows on the wall. The revolution we need won’t fall out of heaven and won’t come through messiahs, it won’t develop from movements led by prophets like a King or a Chavez, the prophet only comes when the people create her. … But today, the revolution we need will be something new in history.

Friends, listen to me. We’re in trouble. We’re in deep trouble. These are not ordinary times. The pendulum may well sweep Democrats back into office in 2012 (or not) but the Democrats are dead bones that are no longer shaking and rattling. Dead, meat-addled bones dragged to the kennel by corporate dogs too proud and oblivious to respond their masters – we the people. They have no vision, no message, no courage, no new creation. They bend the knee to Pharaoh not to “we the people”. Renewing the Democratic Party is a dead end. Our time calls us into greater complexity, a far more profound universal summons to re-distribute the assets of creation so that the earth itself is afforded the rights of citizenship. So that economies (and therefore ways of life) are rooted in sustainability and the limitation that is the glory of our mortality. There are “fair markets” but not “free”, there is a limit to what can be consumed, and a limit to what ought be made. Our times call us to build relationships structured around cooperation not perpetual competitive warfare. If we do not change the human heart, both the individual and social human heart, that is, if we do not lift up a vision that will reorient our desires then human life, as we now know it, and most certainly the future of democracy, as we once experienced it, will be forever extinguished from the pages of history. What is happening to us is not partisan politics, it cannot be healed through policies and brokered compromises through elected elites. What is happening to us is profoundly and deeply spiritual: it cuts to the core of what it means to be a human being. It calls us to ask anew, what is the meaning and significance of our life, of our moments on this earth, this garden, this faithful abundant habitat now under assault and siege?

Friends, listen to me. We are made for this moment. Within the glory of your mortality you are given time and talent and treasure. For this very moment your assets are needed. There are no insignificant people anymore. We truly need each other. We need to birth the best from each other. The Body Politic is under assault by an alien entity, a predator life form that consumes human flesh and earth’s resources, this artificial life form, this Frankenstein monster now loose from its laboratory, this Corporate Person well armed with weapons of mass destruction, this abomination of Death is seeking to enslave us. In Goethe’s words: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” But we are not created as slaves for other masters. We are created to be free. We are created to resist the forces of destruction. We are created to sustain and nurture the evolution of life. We are not created to be assimilated into a Corporate Borg, we are created to be a diversity set free to roam this earth and to pollinate possibilities throughout the nations.

Friends, in ways large and small we must open our life to creative, courageous resistance and revolt against this Frankenstein. This is no time to sleep dreaming of what was once long ago. We must awaken to the seriousness of this moment and awaken further into the opportunity of this moment to radically change the world, to alter history’s script, to rewrite a vision of what is possible and what is desirable. This is our moment to reclaim the glory of our mortality even as we limit and tame and reduce the immortality of Corporate Persons so that they begin to serve human need, and earth’s fertile, fruitful evolution. This is our moment to organize for freedom: to organize around a new vision of human being, and a new possibility of living cooperatively. It is not the time to shy away from liberal progressivism and creation-centered values. Rather, it is the time to ramp it up and become even bolder, certainly more creative, and absolutely more persistent.

Tonight we are here to sustain and renew and build the PSR network. But each of us belongs to other networks. Our task this coming year is to connect our networks together for the purpose of a coherent strategy to resist that which is, as we advocate for that which ought to be: the deconstruction of our permanent war economy, the redistribution of wealth so that all survive and thrive, the commitment to articulate the ethic that earth has its own rights to live free of pollution, exploitation and rape in all its forms. These are values worthy of our time, talent and treasure. They are life values and are worthy of our sacrifices.

America has become a valley of dry bones. But it is not our destiny to remain parched, nor to turn to dust. For the Spirit compels us to prophesy: to say to these bones, “You shall live again”. To say to these bones, “you will prosper again.” To say to these bones, “rise up, knit together and organize again.”

Things were tough in the Gilded Age at the turn of the 20th Century. Things looked bleak back then too. But extraordinary folks like Eugene Debs had the courage of his vision, and with others behind him he stood his ground. From Debs and others in the Progressive movement they started out as small little insignificant ants irrelevant to the Powers That Be. But in the end their witness and action gave birth to the possibility of FDR’s reforms. Remember, the Constitution gave no right to work less than 12 hours a day, no right to a living wage, no right to safe working conditions. Workers had to organize, to go on strike, to boycott, defy the law, the courts, the police. Workers had to make noise and be disruptive and bear the psychological costs of being called communists, of being slandered by neighbors and misunderstood by friends. Workers had to organize together and look out for each other’s families together, to practice solidarity in thought, word and deed. But in the end, fascism was defeated, not just over there in Europe, but also right here in our homeland. We are not the first generation to fight the “moneyed interests”. But it is our time now, and the question is, “are we up for this fight?”

I want you to know tonight that this is no time to sleep, no time to duck and cover, no time to run and hide. Now is the time for you to come fully alive, for now is the time you are fully needed.

(Ezekiel 37:7-10) So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them. The Spirit said to me, ‘Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Creating God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.’ I prophesied as the Spirit commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.

THIS is your future and your destiny. You shall live again in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Make it so.

Annie Leonard: The Story of Electronics

Annie Leonard, producer of The Story of Stuff, has a new video up called The Story of Electronics. In it, she describes how most electronic goods are designed to be thrown away, that the short period in which we use them is a blip in their lifespan as they decay in landfills and that the toxics involved in their creation are poisoning people and our communities. 

The root of the problem here is the way globalized corporations are allowed to externalize their costs on to poor countries and the environment. Leonard doesn't question the right of corporations to pollute or harm individuals - she just asks them to stop.

Leonard calls for a take back movement for electronics producers to make electronics products more cleanly and responsibly.

 

How To Save the Planet Now: Admit We've Failed

It’s time for climate activists to admit our tactics have failed. I commend the movement for all of its efforts but the recent congressional takeover by Republicans demonstrates how ineffective we’ve been. Karl Rove is right, “Climate is gone.”

And we’re not alone. The first two years of Obama’s presidency have seen the failure of many progressive groups: anti-war and health care activists most notably.

So, who is winning? The wealthy, especially executives of multinational corporations. In Sunday’s New York Times, Nicholas Kristof wrote:

“The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. … C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.”

We’re in the midst of a rapidly escalating class war marked by an increasingly successful movement by corporate leaders seizing power and rights from individuals.

Perhaps the greatest harm from this war is the nearly complete failure by Congress and the Obama administration to curb greenhouse gas emissions and move us in a significant way towards cleaner energy solutions.

The Supreme Court’s recent Citizens United decision was a massive victory that opened the floodgates for unlimited anonymous spending which helped Republicans gain control of the House on November 2nd. And, they’ll spend even more in 2012.

Thanks to Republican victories in state legislative races, they’ll be solidifying these gains for the next decade: the GOP gets to redraw 147 more Congressional districts than Democrats (see also gerrymandering).

The tactic of electing democrats to legislate sensible climate policy is clearly a dead end.

Time to Give Up on Failed Tactics

So, when the Democratic party starts rallying progressives and environmental nonprofits to get behind their candidates for 2012, it’s time to say, "No more!" When democrats say “if Republicans gain control of the Presidency and Senate, everything we care about will be lost,” we have to remember that President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid never even brought the climate bill up for a vote.

In fact, it’s democrats who solidified the conservative voting bloc for the Citizens United case. Twenty-two democrats voted to ratify the nomination of Supreme Court Justice John Roberts  and none filibustered the nomination of Justice Alito.

Similarly, when <insert large environmental nonprofit here> asks you to make an end of year donation, instead ask them if they are ready to abandon their failed tactics. Hold onto your wallet and ask them what they plan to do differently.

So, How Do We Save the Planet?

First, we have to recognize that our movement has failed because we’ve hitched its success to the votes of elected officials whose influence is legally bought and paid for by corporate interests on an ongoing basis.

Climate activism is doomed as long as corporate money retains a central role in elections and government policy.

Second, we have to begin questioning the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and its long history of granting rights not found in the Constitution to corporations. If not for the questionable Bush v. Gore decision, Roberts and Alito might not even be on the Court. Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito routinely rule on the side of wealthy shareholders. Says the People for the American Way:

“What is striking today, however, is how often the Roberts Court, like its predecessor the Rehnquist Court, hands down counter-intuitive 5-4 victories to corporations by ignoring clear precedents, twisting statutory language and distorting legislative intent. From labor and workplace law to environmental law, from consumer regulation to tort law and the all-important election law, the conservative-tilting Court has reached out to enshrine and elevate the power of business corporations --what some people have begun to call ‘corporate Americans’--over the rights of the old-fashioned human beings called citizens.”

Finally and most importantly, it’s time for environmental nonprofits and climate activists to work together in coalition to restore individual rights and reject this corporate takeover of our society.

We have to put as much effort as we’ve put into educating the public about climate change into educating people about how the rise of corporate power is blocking sensible climate policy, destroying our environment and putting future generations at risk.

With fifteen million unemployed Americans and anger on the left and the right about Citizens United, there is a huge opportunity to organize against the continued consolidation of corporate power.

Climate organizations and activists of all kinds need to unite to lead a movement to restore rights for individuals and the environment and reject the dominance of corporate power and money in our public institutions.

After Citizens United, with Republicans in control of the house and redistricting and many democrats already influenced by corporate interests, we’re not going to win by playing elections or by playing by the same old rules.