Beyond Elections: People Power

By MARK BITTMAN
January 3, 2012, 9:00 pm
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/beyond-elections-people-power/


The presidential election may be grabbing headlines, but
the true rallying cry for 2012 is to struggle and organize
around those issues that a president might take seriously,
to stake out positions that would benefit what used to be
called the working class (and now goes by "the 99
percent") and to garner enough political will and power to
pressure the president and Congress to move resolutely on
the issues that matter.

Tall order, and one that's of more than passing interest
to those who think of themselves as part of the food
movement.

Or the environmental movement. Or the Occupy movement, or
the foreclosed homeowners movement, or the indebted
students movement, or the unemployment movement, or pretty
much any movement you can name that implicitly or
explicitly acknowledges that there is a class war in this
country, one that the wrong side is winning.

It doesn't matter what you call the movements, or the
people behind them. What matters is forcing the government
to act in the interests of the sometimes-silent majority
rather than its corporate paymasters. That struggle,
probably as old as representative democracy itself, most
notably dates from the consolidation of corporate power
that began after the industrial revolution.

It's a struggle that's causing more and more Americans not
just to see that something's wrong with the system but to
find the will needed to change it. Again, these people go
by a variety of names, though it's interesting that a
recent Pew poll found that just about half of all young
people now have a more positive view of "socialism"
(whatever that is) than "capitalism" (we know what that
is), as do nearly a third of all Americans.

Whatever. We should be able to agree on this: there is an
oligarchy in this country, one that uses financial
strength to gain political power, one that fights and
bullies for its "right" to make money regardless of the
consequences to the earth or anything on it. Exxon will do
all it can to prevent meaningful climate change
legislation; Cargill and Pepsi will fight any improvement
in agriculture or diet that threatens their profits; Bank
of America would rather see homeowners go under than
discuss changes in financial structures. And so on.

There are two ways to fight this oligarchy: by making
personal and local changes that counter its power, and by
joining mass movements that protest that power. The first
can be as simple as light-bulb changing (which Republicans
famously detest) and salad-eating [1], though obviously it
can be far more involved. The second begins with voting,
but it takes more than a president, however
well-intentioned, to bring about real change. Does anyone
believe that Lyndon Johnson wanted to combat racism, or
that Richard Nixon cared about American troops or
Vietnamese citizens? No: they were forced, respectively,
to support civil rights legislation and to begin ending
the Vietnam War. Forced by masses of Americans marching,
yelling, demonstrating, sitting in and more -- Americans
driven by their conscience, not by profits.

Only if there is collective action by large numbers of
citizens will politicians -- even principled ones -- have
the support they need to resist the power of corporate
lobbyists. It's not an easy process, and it's one that's
often met by violence.

I focus on the effect the oligarchy has on the food system
-- and in turn on our health and that of the environment,
farm laborers, animals and so on -- but in 2011 I was most
inspired when thousands of people sat in front of the
White House to protest the approval of the proposed
Keystone XL pipeline, which the climate scientist Jim
Hansen called the "fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the
planet." More than 1,000 people were arrested, but the
pipeline's approval, supported by the State Department and
taken for granted, was subsequently delayed, possibly
forever.

Why? Certainly not thanks to the pipeline's 234 supporters
in the House of Representatives, who collectively pocketed
$42 million (Speaker John A. Boehner's office alone took
in more than $1 million) from the fossil fuel industry[2].
No, it was delayed because President Obama was responding
to pressure from normal people, rather than pressure
exerted by the energy industry.

A system that allows what amounts to direct payments to
congressmen from corporations may be technically legal,
but as the journalist and activist Bill McKibben -- one of
the organizers of the Washington Keystone protest -- said
to me last week, "Not only does it offend the notion of
fairness, it leads to irrational outcomes."

The most "irrational outcome" is permission to poison air,
land, water and living things in the name of profits and
without penalty: a hefty subsidy for the products of both
the fossil fuel and big food industries. The relatively
paltry sums these corporations pay to members of Congress
are nothing compared to their profits. (Because $42
million isn't much when you consider that the total
profits of Exxon, for example, were more than $30 billion
in 2010.)

That's oligarchy in action, and the lesson of Keystone is
as old as protest itself: only by uniting people who are
willing to fight for a cause can we change things. (Do I
need to bring up Egypt, Tunisia, and the American and
French Revolutions?) And whether the food movement finds a
representative issue of its own (food safety? the casual
poisoning of the earth or our bodies?) or it joins with
other movements of people victimized by the oligarchy, it
will take dedicated protest -- lots of it, by lots of us --
to compete with corporate dollars.

[1] I can't find evidence that House Republicans are
anti-salad but I feel in my heart that it's true. We know
that they're anti-compostable serving plates.

[2] I'll do the math for you: about $180,000 per
"representative" (they're not representing you or me),
with the implied promise of more to come.

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