The Coming Climate Revolt
By Chris Hedges
Posted on Sep 21, 2014
More than 100,000 people march through midtown Manhattan as part of the People’s Climate March on
Sunday in New York. John Minchillo/AP Images for AVAAZ
Chris Hedges made these remarks Saturday at a panel discussion in New York City titled “The
Climate Crisis: Which Way Out?”The other panelists were Bill McKibben, Naomi
Klein, Kshama Sawant and Sen. Bernie Sanders. The event, moderated by Brian
Lehrer, occurred on the eve of the People’s Climate March in New York City. For
a video of some of what the panelists said, click here.
We have undergone a transformation during the last few decades—what John Ralston Saul calls a
corporate coup d’état in slow motion. We are no longer a capitalist democracy
endowed with a functioning liberal class that once made piecemeal and
incremental reform possible. Liberals in the old Democratic Party such as the
senators Gaylord Nelson, Birch Bayh and George McGovern—who worked with Ralph
Nader to make the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Mine Safety and Health
Act, the Freedom of Information Act and the OSHA law, who made common cause with
labor unions to protect workers, who stood up to the arms industry and a bloated
military—no longer exist within the Democratic Party, as Nader has been
lamenting for several years. They were pushed out as corporate donors began to
transform the political landscape with the election of Ronald Reagan. And this
is why the Democrats have not, as Bill Curry points out, enacted any major
social or economic reforms since the historic environmental laws of the early ’70s.
We are governed, rather, by a species of corporate totalitarianism, or what the political
philosopher Sheldon Wolin describes as “inverted totalitarianism.” By this Wolin
means a system where corporate power, while it purports to pay fealty to
electoral politics, the Constitution, the three branches of government and a
free press, along with the iconography and language of American patriotism, has
in fact seized all the important levers of power to render the citizen impotent.
The old liberal class, the safety valve that addressed grievances and injustices in times of
economic or political distress, has been neutered. There are self-identified
liberals, including Barack Obama, who continue to speak in the old language of
liberalism but serve corporate power. This has been true since the Clinton
administration. Bill Clinton found that by doing corporate bidding he could get
corporate money—thus NAFTA, the destruction of our welfare system, the explosion
of mass incarceration under the [1994] omnibus bill, the deregulation of the
FCC, turning the airwaves over to a half dozen corporations, and the revoking of
FDR’s 1933 Glass-Steagall reform that had protected our banking system from
speculators. Clinton, in exchange for corporate money, transformed the
Democratic Party into the Republican Party. This was diabolically brilliant. It
forced the Republican Party to shift so far to the right it became insane.
By the time Clinton was done the rhetoric of self-professed liberals was a public relations game.
This is why there is continuity from the Bush administration to the Obama
administration. Obama’s election did nothing to halt the expanding assault on
civil liberties—in fact Obama’s assault has been worse—the Bush bailouts of big
banks, the endless imperial wars, the failure to regulate Wall Street, the
hiring of corporate lobbyists to write legislation and serve in top government
positions, the explosion of drilling and fracking, the security and surveillance
state as well as the persecution of government whistle-blowers.
This audience is well aware of the Democratic Party’s squalid record on the environment, laid out
in detail in a new Greenpeace report written by Charlie Cray and Peter Montague,
titled “The Kingpins of Carbon and Their War on Democracy.” The report
chronicles what it calls “a multi-decade war on democracy by the kingpins of
carbon—the coal, the oil, and gas industries allied with a handful of
self-interested libertarian billionaires.”
The Obama administration, in return for financial support from these kingpins of carbon,
has cynically undermined international climate treaties, a fact we discovered
only because of the revelations provided by Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks. It
uses its intelligence agencies, these revelations revealed, to spy on those
carrying out climate negotiations to thwart caps on carbon emissions and push
through useless, nonbinding agreements. The Obama administration has overseen a
massive expansion of fracking. It is pushing through a series of trade
agreements such as the TPP and the TAFTA that will increase fracking along with
expanding our exports of coal, oil and gas. It authorized the excavation of tar
sands in Utah and Alabama. It approved the southern half of the Keystone
pipeline. It has permitted seismic testing for offshore drilling in the Gulf of
Mexico, the East Coast and in parts of Alaska, a process that kills off hundreds
of sea mammals. It authorized drilling within four miles of the Florida
coastline, violating one of Obama’s 2008 campaign promises. This expansion of
offshore drilling reversed 20 years of federal policy.
If we appeal to self-identified liberals in the establishment who have no capacity or desire to
carry out the radical reforms, we will pour energy into a black hole. And this
is what the corporate state seeks. It seeks to perpetuate the facade of
democracy. It seeks to make us believe what is no longer real, that if we work
within the system we can reform it. And it has put in place a terrifying
superstructure to silence all who step outside the narrow parameters it defines as acceptable.
The Democratic Party speaks to us“rationally.” The party says it seeks to protect civil liberties,
regulate Wall Street, is concerned about the plight of the working class and
wants to institute reforms to address climate change. But in all these areas,
and many more, it has, like its Republican counterpart, repeatedly sold out the
citizenry for corporate power and corporate profits—in much the same manner
that Big Green environmental groups such as the Climate Group and the
Environmental Defense Fund have sold out the environmental movement.
To assume that Obama, or the Democratic Party, because they acknowledge the reality of climate
change, while the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party does not, is better
equipped to deal with the crisis is incorrect. Republicans appeal to one
constituency. The Democrats appeal to another. But both parties will do nothing
to halt the ravaging of the planet.
If Wolin is right, and I believe he is, then when we begin to build mass movements that carry out
repeated acts of civil disobedience, as I think everyone on this panel believes
we must do, the corporate state, including the Democratic Party, will react the
way all calcified states react. It will use the security and surveillance
apparatus, militarized police forces—and, under Section 1021 of the National
Defense Authorization Act, the military itself—to shut down all dissent with
force. The legal and organizational mechanisms are now in place to, with the
flip of a switch, put the nation effectively under martial law. When acts of
mass civil disobedience begin on Monday morning with Flood Wall Street and later
with Occupy the U.N., the face of the corporate state will, as it did during the
Occupy movement, reveal itself.
If the response of the corporate state is repression rather than reform then our strategy and our
tactics must be different. We will have to cease our appealing to the system. We
will have to view the state, including the Democratic Party, as antagonistic to
genuine reform. We will have to speak in the language of ... revolution. We will
have to carry out acts of civil disobedience that seek to cripple the mechanisms
of corporate power. The corporate elites, blinded by their lust for profit and
foolish enough to believe they can protect themselves from climate change, will
not veer from our path towards ecocide unless they are forced from power. And
this means the beginning of a titanic clash between our corporate masters and ourselves.
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The coming climate revolt by Chris Hedges.docx |
Kingpins of Carbon - Greenpeace
kingpins-of-carbon.pdf |