This Week’s Climate Report…

COP15: Of course, the biggest climate news is currently coming from Copenhagen, & some of the best reporting from Copenhagen is coming from Democracy Now!, the only independent news show reporting daily from Copenhagen.

As might be expected, some of the biggest rifts so far in Copenhagen have been around issues of climate justice. Developing nations expressed outrage at leaked documents exposing backroom deals by rich countries that favor perpetrators of the climate crisis far into the future. Island nations, for whom the climate crisis is a matter of life-and-death, have been making it clear they will not sink quietly into the ocean.

The climate crisis is a complex and fascinating challenge to humanity. First of all, it is inescapably global–it requires a higher level of international cooperation than any challenge humanity has ever faced. That adds all kinds of complications that are not easy to negotiate. It’s easy to get cynical about the slow pace of progress, but we should not underestimate the difficulty of the challenge. The international community is required to come to grips with historical international injustices at the same time as it navigates a transition away from fossil fuels into clean energy sources. Not simple stuff.

Just as the international community faces these challenges, the progressive community of activists and advocacy organizations faces similar challenges. The climate crisis presents an issue where environmental protection and social justice are inextricably linked. Too often progressive advocacy operates in specialized silos — environmentalists over here, social justice advocates over there — with even those broad categories compartmentalized into a variety of single-issue focuses. This format has led to successes on many fronts, but will require lots of “cross-pollination” to meet the 21st century challenge of the climate crisis.

One of the more difficult pieces of the puzzle is the issue of “climate debt.” When looked at from the standpoint of the developing countries of the world (a perspective the American public rarely considers), climate debt makes perfect sense — not just as some “moral obligation” of charity, but as real mitigation costs for harm done. The “categorical rejection” of such costs by Todd Stern, the lead U.S. negotiator in Copenhagen, does not bode well, but should not be surprising. American public opinion has a long way to go before understanding and supporting this matter of international climate justice.

And of course, as soon as the Great Right-Wing Noise Machine gets ahold of this notion that hard-working, hard-pressed American taxpayers should be expected to give some of OUR money to poor people in other countries … look out.

I’ll offer more reflection on Copenhagen at a later date. But in the meantime…

Speaking of climate denialists and the Great Right-Wing Noise Machine: Unfortunately, I feel compelled to comment on the subject of “Climategate” (a.k.a. “SwiftHack”), a topic no one should need to discuss because it is so trivial, but which has been blown all out of proportion by the Great Right-Wing Noise Machine (because, well, that’s what they do). I don’t need to waste any words debunking the whole thing, because that’s been done quite well by real experts (e.g., Union of Concerned Scientists, Nature magazine, as well as an entire site created just to respond to the nonsense). A timeline & analysis here.

How weak does your evidence have to be before mainstream media decides “this is not a newsworthy story”? We’re discovering that if there’s enough heat, the amount of light matters little.

Maybe I’m naive, but I continue to be amazed at how mainstream media continue fall for the same trick over and over again: It’s like watching Charlie Brown make his run to kick the football one more time…

The formula is simple: Take some small and trivial transgression cherry-picked from amidst a very large and serious issue, blow it out of proportion, then have many voices parrot the same “outrage” till it becomes a “controversy.” It doesn’t matter how little merit the actual claims have — the key is to generate outrage and controversy. That’s all it takes to hijack a serious public discussion and drive it right into the ditch. Whether it’s Swiftboat, Bill Ayers, Van Jones, ACORN, whatever… The mystery is that this deception seems to work, over and over again.

The reality of this large and well-funded effort to deny crisis in the midst of crisis presents an ethical challenge to those of us working to address the crisis.

It’s often said that free speech does not include the right to falsely shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater; but if the theater is actually on fire, neither should free speech include the right to deny it: “Ignore all warnings of fire! Nothing to worry about here. Please remain seated & enjoy the show.” If you were in a theater on fire and witnessed someone putting people’s lives at risk like that, what would you do? That’s a question we all need to face right now.

Final thought on climate justice: I dearly hope that someday — when it’s clear to all the extent of the problem, who created it, and who perpetuated it — we will hold those responsible accountable. In this case, it is not just Crimes Against Humanity, but Crimes Against Humanity and the Entire Planet. I hope to see — in my lifetime — trials of the global-warming denialists for the mass death and destruction they are creating. Perhaps as punishment we can ship them all off to their own island in the Maldives…

That’s all for now. I’ll be writing about the controversy over carbon cap-and-trade proposals sometime soon.

10 years after the Battle in Seattle

Seattle’s getting ready to celebrate the 10-yr. anniversary of WTO protests. One of the main events is the People’s Summit this weekend. Listings of other events can be found, as well as stories about the event’s meaning & legacy today, in the paper I help publish, Eat the State!

Battle of Seattle, or Battle in Seattle?: I’ve got a nit to pick with how we refer to the events of 1999. I’ve seen people use “Battle of Seattle” & “Battle in Seattle” interchangeably. I believe the two phrases are very different, & that the latter should be strongly preferred. Two reasons:

1) The WTO protests were in Seattle, but were made of — and all about — much more than just Seattle. People came from all over the world to participate in that epic week because the stakes were global. “Battle of Seattle” just doesn’t do it justice.

2) “Battle of Seattle,” as the name of a historical event, is already taken, by an event from 144 years before the WTO ministerial arrived in Seattle. That battle, on January 26, 1856, was between some factions of the local native population and the white settlers who had arrived a few years earlier. That was truly a Battle of Seattle, and rightfully deserves the name.

Finally, in commemoration of the anniversary of the Battle in Seattle, here’s a little political-economic fable I wrote just before that battle began. Still seems relevant.

The Invisible Hand: A Contemporary Fairy Tale

Once upon a time there was a land where the people placed great faith in an Invisible Hand. The Invisible Hand was a mythical creature of great magical powers, which had first been described by a wise man long ago named Adam Smith.

Smith explained that when people got together for the purpose of buying and selling and making things, all they had to do was act in their own self-interest and their actions would be guided “as if by an Invisible Hand” to create the greatest good for everyone.

In other words, this amazing creature could magically transform greed into public benefit. All that was needed was that everyone had to be competing against everyone else all the time, and that this competition had to take place with a minimum of rules and regulations. Cooperating or making rules were Bad Things, and would only prevent the Invisible Hand from working its magic.

People liked the fable of the Invisible Hand, because it told them they could Do Good by being greedy. Of course, the greediest people liked this story best, and so helped convince everyone that, with such amazing magical powers, the Invisible Hand should be allowed to control everything that involved buying, selling, or making things. And indeed, the Invisible Hand rewarded these people richly.

Over the years, the Invisible Hand did bring great wealth to the land, spreading enough of it around among enough people to keep them content. Even though most of the wealth went to a small minority, the rest of the people didn’t seem to mind all that much. After all, if the Invisible Hand had given enormous riches to some people, it must be a Good Thing.

Then one day the people who had reaped the greatest rewards from the Invisible Hand all got together. From every country on Earth they came, for the purpose of ensuring that everything that involved buying, selling, or making things, anywhere on the planet, would be controlled by the Invisible Hand, all the time. And that any rules that had been created that might restrict the Invisible Hand would be eliminated.

Even though this meeting was very secretive, the rest of the people heard about it.

“Hmmm,” people thought. “Maybe before we agree to let the Invisible Hand control everything in the world, we should think about this more carefully.”

And so people started to make a list of the times the Invisible Hand had brought Bad Things instead of Good Things.

This was a very long list, they soon discovered.

And so people said, “Maybe the Invisible Hand is good at doing some things, but it seems to do other things very badly. Maybe we shouldn’t let it control everything after all. Perhaps it’s time we started controlling things with our own hands.”

And so it was decided. And they lived happily ever after.

Hey, a guy can dream, right?

And to all those who participated in the world-changing events of 1999: Happy anniversary!

The honeymoon is over — time to get busy

I’ve been saying it since before the inauguration: If progressives expect Obama (and the Democratically controlled Congress) to create the kind of policies we want, we have to organize and apply the public pressure to make them do it. We know that the corporate powers, with their enormous influence and abundance of resources, are not going to let the public interest trump their private interests without a fight. We know that Fox “News” is going to use its sizable sway to disinform the public, and that the rest of the corporate media isn’t going to do much better. We know that the right-wing worldview that has ruled our country for the past three decades is not going to go quietly into the night. And we know that last time we had a Democratic president, we witnessed eight years of triangulation toward some perceived political center, nothing that would offend any corporate benefactors, and an utter abandonment of progressive ideals.

And yet, political dynamics in the past year-&-a-half have followed a predictable trajectory. Progressives who worked their asses off helping to get Obama into power have worked considerably less hard at ensuring that he would exercise that power in the ways we’d hoped. Meanwhile, corporate lobbyists have redoubled their efforts, Fox has roused its rabble, right-wingers are rallying for a comeback, and Democrats continue their timid triangulations.

Almost a year into this new political era, the results are in, and they aren’t pretty. After a long trail of disappointments on many fronts, we now confront the sour stench of a health care “reform” bill that only the medical-industrial complex could love. (Say it with me: “Fuck mandates!” Requiring that citizens buy into a broken private insurance system is unacceptable.) And we are told to expect more compromises in the Senate. Ugly.

And yet, it would be even uglier if progressives hadn’t organized to pressure their representatives to guarantee a public option (not yet guaranteed) and other reforms.

To me, the lesson is clear: We will never see the public interest win out over private interests until we have an organized public force stronger than the private forces that now shape our public policies. Obama in the White House and a Democratic Congress does not equal a win — it merely represents an opportunity. Seize it or lose it.

In a similar vein, I want to reference a couple of articles in the current issue of Eat the State!, a newspaper I help publish. The first is by Seattle-based political author Paul Loeb, Eight Reasons the Democrats Lost Virginia & New Jersey — and How to Recover, a wise analysis of Democratic Party missteps and what we all could do better.

The second article is by my long-time associate & friend, Geov Parrish, who persuaded me to help him start up Eat the State! over 13 years ago, and whom I continue to work with all these years later (& who turned 50 today). In his Letter to a Friend this week, Geov takes his friend to task for continuing to believe in Obama while blaming those around him — his staff, Congressional leaders, etc. — for all failures. Geov notes that Obama selected the advisers in his administration, and that Obama himself takes full responsibility for his record. Geov suggests we take Obama at his word.

Geov concludes with these thoughts, echoing much of what I’ve said above:

We should also take Obama at his word when he instructed advocates for various progressive issues to be the change we want to see, and to make him toe a more progressive line. We should do exactly that, or at least try. There’s no guarantee of success, of course, given not only the institutional and political barriers to progressive policies of any type in this country (despite their public popularity), but Obama’s own preferences, as consistently reflected by his record. But it’s more likely to be an effective strategy than waiting for Obama, or any elected official, to suddenly see the light, seize the moment, wave a magic wand, and make it all better. The only way meaningful change has ever happened in this country has been when a meaningful, often massive popular movement pushed for it, and then kept pushing, sometimes for years, sometimes (as with the slavery abolitionists and suffragettes and labor and civil rights activists) for generations.

We have nothing like that today, but we could. The dissatisfaction, the anger, the desperation are all out there. Hatemongers on the right are distracting a lot of those folks with their usual scapegoating. But on the left, grassroots groups are desperate for money; some are shutting their doors. The economy has hurt, and the lack of the sort of corporate benefactors a lot of astroturfing conservative groups enjoy is always a handicap. But the biggest problem is the large number of people who were worn down by eight long years of Bush and Cheney and who want, now that their friend Barack is in office, to just go back to watching The Office, living their lives, and trusting that all that nasty politics stuff will just sort itself out without them.

It won’t. Barack Obama isn’t going to do it. His major hires are all creatures of the bipartisan Beltway consensus: lovers of war and American empire, beholden to Wall Street and big corporations. So is he. So is every president and every congressional leader in modern American history.

Some things will never change; just you wait and see. Literally. Or, if we get active, band together, organize, and push, it still might not change.

Without such an effort, there’s no chance at all. None. Obama’s not going to take our advice unless we show up at his door with millions of people and the hounds of hell. And even then, we might not get what we need and want. But if we get off our asses and demand it, at least we generate the one thing Obama can no longer realistically offer: Hope.

Blog Fail, Qwest Fail, Big Media Fail

350 Seattle Center, WA shot from above at 3:50 pm

OK, I said this was about “slow blogging,” but I never intended to be this slow. It’s been over 7 weeks since my last post. Just getting started and then I stopped. Pathetic. I blame Qwest.

Qwest Fail: I’d blocked out most of a week in between project deadlines in mid-October to catch up on blog writing & other personal projects. The first couple days of that week I had health problems. Then I had three days of Qwest-Hell problems. I’ll spare most of the gory details. But here are the basics: I had called Qwest to disconnect one of two phone lines in our house, the one nobody used. Instead they disconnected everything, including my personal land-line & voice mail (my only phone as I have no cell phone) as well as the Internet connection shared by five people in my household. It took 3 days to get (almost) everything restored. Initially talking on a borrowed phone, I spent a total of 5 hours on the phone with various customer disservice representatives getting them to execute the simple order, “Put everything back the way it was before you broke it.” It was only because I went out & personally swapped some wires at the connector-box-thingy outside the house that we had service restored within 3 days; otherwise we would have had to wait another week for a Qwest technician to come out. Various other problems continued long afterwards, including being without long-distance service & getting billed for a service call that never happened & other connection charges. (Being billed for reconnecting services that were erroneously disconnected was really pouring salt in the wound.)

By the time it was all over, I came to the conclusion that Qwest’s business model must involve making their customer’s heads to explode with frustration. Never having run a large corporation, it wasn’t clear to me how this was a sound practice, but I guess being a virtual monopoly makes things possible that are beyond my feeble imagination.

Danger of Election Fail: Following that ordeal I was preoccupied with paid project deadlines for the next couple weeks. So now I’m finally writing on election day, whereupon we will find out if Tim Eyman succeeds in crippling Washington state government, if Washington voters decide to roll back civil right in our state, and if Martin Luther King County, one of the largest & most liberal counties in the entire country, chooses a closet Right-wing, bible thumping, former TV personality for county exec (dubbed “our Sarah Palin” by a Washington Republican). Ah, the silly season!

Big Media Fail: So what did I miss mentioning this past month? Some inspiring citizen action around both climate change and health care, for one. On Oct. 24, people in 181 countries organized more than 5200 events in what some have called the most widespread day of political and environmental action ever (one event at the Seattle Center is pictured above). The day was organized by 350.org to call attention to the number that scientists deem the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere (which we’ve already well surpassed as we approach 390 parts per million). After seeing the extensive coverage major media devoted to handfuls of protesters at town hall meetings in August, I was excited to think about the prospect of nonstop, wall-to-wall coverage a globally coordinated day of events on this scale would get. Instead I heard the sound of crickets chirping: the NYT, for example, devoted less than 350 words to the topic. (Perhaps Times editors were confused & thought scientists had determined 350 words to be the safe upper limit for stories on climate change.)

In other related news, single-payer health care advocates have been stepping up their own actions, staging protests & civil disobedience at dozens of health insurances offices in recent weeks. Actions organized by Healthcare-NOW! have led to over 100 arrests in 18 cities so far, again largely to the sound of crickets chirping in the major media. (Note to climate and health care activists: It seems to help get media attention when you bring large guns to your events.)

Anyway, major news coverage or not, I’m very glad to see progressive citizen action on this kind of scale. It’s clear it will take all this and more if we’re going to get meaningful reform of either health care or climate and energy policy in DC. Without large-scale popular push-back against the corporate interests that mostly control our government, we’ve seen that we can’t expect elected officials to uphold the public interest against private interests. Recent months have been an ongoing civics lesson in this reality.

So, whether it’s Qwest, major media companies, or the corporate puppeteers in DC, I guess my main take-away from the month of October has been that large corporations suck. Huh. Who knew?

Revisiting the Van Jones debacle — lots of blame to go around

I was going to write about something else this week, but the ouster of green-jobs adviser Van Jones from the Obama administration has me livid. It’s just so wrong in so many ways and on so many levels.

Of course the smear campaign by the right-wing noise machine, led by Glenn Beck, was ugly. Distortions and misrepresentations about relatively trivial incidents in Jones’ past were twisted into an aggressive and relentless campaign of race-baiting and red-baiting. Beck, simultaneously channelling both Joe McCarthy and George Wallace, called Jones a “communist” and “Black nationalist” who hates white people and is plotting to destroy America from inside the White House. Another scary black radical, like Rev. Wright, to prove how truly dangerous Obama’s agenda is. (Tim Wise clearly articulates the nasty racial dimension of the smear campaign here.)

Such far-right demagoguery is certainly ugly, but predictable. That such inflammatory rhetoric succeeds in frightening and agitating a significant sector of the populace is also ugly but predictable. You can still fool some of the people all of the time.

But some of the people is not most of the people. A vocal minority, to be sure (whose voices are amplified by the right-wing echo chamber), but essentially we’re talking about just a subset of the people who—let’s remember—lost the election. So how do they end up shaping so much of our current political discourse? And how, in this instance, did they win? How did they succeed in ousting a man Time magazine named as an “environmental hero” in 2008 & one of the “100 most influential people in the world” in 2009 through such a transparently dishonest campaign of fear-mongering?

That’s where the story got really ugly.

Obama bears much responsibility (as David Roberts at Grist notes in an insightful analysis), showing his willingness to sacrifice one the best and most progressive people in his administration for political expediency. Van Jones was not just well-qualified to lead a national program of green jobs development, he literally wrote the book on it. Instead of defending Jones as the best man for the job, and calling out his critics for waging a dishonest smear campaign based on relatively trivial incidents, the White House left Jones to twist in the wind for weeks, apologizing (twice) and finally resigning on Sept. 5.

After the resignation, the Washington Post reported that one administration official confided, “He was not as thoroughly vetted as other administration officials,” implying that Jones’ past would have somehow disqualified him for the job.

The White House response just lent credibility to Beck’s specious charges, implicitly conceding that they were legitimate causes for removal. Ironically, one the transgressions Beck had seized on was a time Jones had once called Republicans “assholes.” The context was in the observation that Republicans often get their way by being assholes, and that maybe Democrats needed more “assholes” who would stand up to them and fight back.

Obama let the assholes win again. As any schoolchild knows, when you let bullies get their way through bullying, you just embolden them to be bigger bullies in the future. The right-wing witch hunt has just begun (more on this later).

While encouraging giving aid & comfort to the rabid right, Obama also signaled to progressives (again) that they are expendable.

But it wasn’t just the White House that abandoned Jones. Liberal and environmental groups that had previously heralded Jones as a hero for his genius at uniting environmental and social justice causes and framing popular solutions were eerily quiet, as Jane Hamsher notes, describing the cozy, obedient relationship that DC liberal groups have developed with the Obama administration.

Jones did get more support at the grassroots from smaller progressive groups outside the Beltway, and a Facebook group called “I Stand with Van Jones” grew quickly, but it was all too little, too late.

Behind the scenes we see more ugliness: The attack on Van Jones didn’t start in the deranged mind of Glenn Beck; it was initiated & orchestrated by policy director of Americans for Prosperity, a front group for big industry, whose priority is to undermine energy reform. They see clean energy and green jobs as a major threat, so attacked the administration’s ablest advocate, as reported at Mother Jones & Alternet.

So, we have a well-funded industry advocacy organization trying to remove government officials inimical to industry interests feeding information to a professional demagogue given a platform for his demagoguery by one of the biggest media moguls in the world; meanwhile the White House, elected into a position of power by the majority of voters, acts powerless to stop this witch hunt by a vocal minority, while erstwhile organizational allies, with the power to mount a counter-campaign, stand by in silence. And of course, the mainstream corporate media does nothing to clarify any of the real issues involved. Is this a great country or what?

This is not the end of the story. The very next day after Jones resigned, Phil Kerpen, the AFP hack that first fed info to Beck, was crowing about the “victory” and plotting next steps in blocking the whole energy reform agenda. Beck has meanwhile successfully taken out another administration official, getting Yosi Sargeant removed from his post as communications director at the National Endowment for the Arts. And he has created a list of other administration officials to go after. Now that the sharks have tasted blood, the attacks will only become more aggressive.

It’s a sad state of affairs when someone like Van Jones gets branded a dangerous extremist and loses his job while a truly dangerous extremist like Glenn Beck get to keep his. So if the rabid right can get Jones removed, the question is, can progressives get Beck removed from his job? Color of Change, an organization Jones co-founded years ago, has mounted a campaign to get corporate sponsors to pull their ads from Beck’s show, and have had considerable success. You can join the campaign here.

As for Jones himself, he’ll be fine. An organizer at heart, he’s likely to be happier and quite possibly more effective outside of Washington bureaucracy. The real damage is to national energy policy and America’s political culture.

In search of passionate intensity

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
—”The Second Coming,” W.B. Yeats

My previous post advocated for more passionate intensity from the sensible majority in this country and our representatives in government. Without that, the worst will win. So I was very glad to see signs that organized labor is ready to hold lawmakers’ feet to the fire to prevent further concessions on health care reform. It’s good to see someone standing up for something. We need lots more of that.

As cartoon editor for a “shamelessly biased political journal”, I found a few cartoonists also taking Dems to task for their wimpishness. Abell Smith finds Democrats’ martial arts skills lacking. Ted Rall updates Obama’s slogan: “Yes we can—but we probably won’t.” And Tom Tomorrow asks: “What if Democrats behaved more like Republicans?”

Health Care Reform and Energy Reform — Half a Loaf or Just Crumbs?

This summer’s Congressional battles on both health care and climate change/energy have been very illuminating of the state of American politics today.

One takeaway: When you accept the premise that “half a loaf is better than none,” you’re likely to end up with nothing but crumbs.

Both debates demonstrate several realities on Capitol Hill: Big-business lobbyists still call the tune; any reasonable idea gets quickly and loudly shouted down by the great right-wing noise machine; and the Democrats who control both houses of Congress and the presidency remain beholden to the former and terrified of the latter. They are therefore willing to compromise every principle in pursuit of a false pragmatism that just wants to get something done, no matter how inadequate. Talk about snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory.

I’ll start with health care reform since it has gotten all the attention lately. Many had hoped that Congress would get something done before summer recess. But things got bogged down by Blue Dog Dems, the ever-intransigent Republican minority, a right-wing scare campaign about “socialized medicine” (and now, government “death panels”), and of course the enormously well-funded insurance & pharmaceutical lobbies, which pay both Blue Dogs and Repugs to do their bidding.

Keith Olberman did a great job of name-checking many of our Congresscritters on this score recently. But for the most part, corporate media are part of the problem, holding no one accountable and shedding little light on how the system is broken and what would fix it.

Despite the fact that any sober analysis shows that the best way to reduce costs and expand coverage is to remove private insurance from the equation through a single-payer system, and despite the widespread support single-payer enjoys in both the medical community and general public, single-payer was declared “off-the-table” before the debate began, due to the forces described above. Consequently, any program considered is going to be much more complicated and costly than necessary.

Many liberals just shrug their shoulders at this state of affairs. It’s just How Things Work in politics. Of course business lobbies have a lot of clout. Of course corporate media will fail to clarify the real issues involved. Politics is the “art of the possible” and so Democrats in Congress can only do what’s possible within narrow parameters. We can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We must be realistic, pragmatic, and just Get Something Done. Half a loaf is better than none.

So liberals diligently ask their representatives in Congress to preserve a public option and improve regulatory oversight over the insurance industry. Give the insurance industry some of what it wants, but not too much. It’s all about compromise.

Meanwhile, the far-Right tea-party protesters, who have no concern whatsoever for being realistic, are storming public meetings and influencing the debate far out of proportion to their actual numbers. These crazed foot-soldiers, along with right-wing media pundits and industry lobbyists, are setting the terms of the debate, so much so that Business Week on Aug. 7 declared, “The Health Insurers Have Already Won.”

Which means, of course, that the rest of us lose.

The whole Congressional debate around the climate crisis and energy reform follows a similar pattern, the main distinction being that the consequences of failure will be much more cataclysmic. As I wrote in a recent article, fossil fools still rule. The fossil fuel lobby is as massive as the health insurance industry — ExxonMobil alone spent more on lobbying than the entire clean energy industry, about $15 million in the last six months alone. Thanks to the clout of the fossil fuel lobby, far more money is allocated to the coal industry in the “American Clean Energy and Security Act” than to all clean, renewable energy development combined.

The energy bill so far has followed a sadly predictable trajectory: Beginning with an Obama proposal that already fell short of what climate scientists have said is necessary, a weaker version was then introduced into the House. Concessions to industry were made to get the bill out of committee; many more were made to get the bill passed on the House floor, resulting in a sprawling abomination of a bill the NASA climate scientist James Hansen has called “an astoundingly inefficient way to get a tiny reduction of emissions.” The bill, he declares, is “less than worthless, because it will delay by at least a decade starting on a path that is fundamentally sound from the standpoints of both economics and climate preservation.” And that’s even before the bill has arrived in the Senate, where it is expected to get further larded up with concessions to the fossil fuel industry.

So goes the compromise game. Start with half a loaf; give away half of that; repeat. Soon you’re left with nothing but crumbs. With Democrats controlling the White House and enjoying strong majorities in both the House and the Senate, is this really the best we can expect?

Maybe. It all depends.

The array of forces against meaningful reform is formidable and relentless. How will progressives—and all people with basic common sense—respond?

We know that over the last three decades corporate lobbyists have strengthened their grip on government, and the Right has been systematically building a vast network of advocacy organizations and media institutions. And we’ve seen that a significant constituency exists of frightened, uninformed people easily manipulated by the latter to advocate for the interests of the former, even when it directly contradicts their own self-interests.

Those nutty people. Right now they’re kicking our asses and we should be ashamed.

Why hasn’t it been single-payer advocates storming town halls with our insolent questions? Why are we so complacent in allowing a minority of the population to continue to set the tone of the debate?

So what’s a realistic pragmatist to do?

First, let’s get real. The opportunity for national health care reform is too big and too important to dither away to politics-as-usual. Medical costs are crippling our economy and health care policies are a matter of life or death for multitudes of Americans.

The urgency of energy reform to address the climate crisis cannot be overstated — the fate of people, animals, and plants around the entire planet Earth is at risk.

That, to me, is what realism looks like.

A pragmatic response? Begin with advocating what we really want and think is right, instead of some already watered-down approach. Why has MoveOn been exhorting its 4 million members to support a public option instead of supporting single-payer?

It’s as if liberals and progressives have been out of power so long they’ve forgotten how to set the agenda, and continue to allow the right-wing minority to do that. Stop reacting and take control. The first four campaigns currently on MoveOn’s website are fighting back against right-wing health care lies, pressuring Blue Dogs, investigating “Rovian” political tactics, and debunking the “birthers.” How’s that for forward thinking? Sarah Palin utters two words and gets more media attention to non-existent “death panels” than has been devoted to examining a single-payer option. Pathetic.

Next, recognize that the only way to counter the formidable forces against meaningful reform is to mobilize a large, broad, strong, smart, and vocal constituency to exert popular pressure in favor. Much of that constituency already exists, it just needs to be motivated and mobilized.

If we want meaningful reform, we need to throw a bigger tea party.

As usual, they’ve got the money and resources, we’ve got the numbers. And increasingly, progressives are building stronger resources in terms of advocacy organizations and media. And we’ve got, well, reality and rational argument on our side, which should still count for something, even in today’s “through-the-looking-glass” world of political discourse. And, for the first time in at least 15 years, we’ve got a federal government at least potentially receptive to progressive, reality-based proposals.

What seems lacking is a “fire in the belly” and focus on seizing the opportunity. Let’s remember what’s at stake. As motivation, we need the promise of more than just crumbs. We need deep reforms of both our health care system and our energy systems.

To aspire to anything less would simply be unrealistic.

Single-payer health care advocacy:

http://www.singlepayeraction.org/

http://www.unitedforhealthcare.org/

Climate/clean energy advocacy:

http://www.1sky.org/

http://focusthenation.org

http://www.350.org/

Look out world!

I’ve started blogging. Well, perhaps it’s an overstatement to say I’ve already started. But I’ll be starting soon!