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Monkeywrench Hope:
an interview with Jeffrey St. Clair
By Joshua Frank
Aug. 20— Jeffrey St. Clair is an environmentalist and author
of Been Brown So Long it Looked Like Green to Me: The Politics of
Nature. He is also the co-editor with Alexander Cockburn of several
new books including Dime’s Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser
of Two Evils, and Imperial Crusades: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia.
He currently resides in Oregon City, Oregon.
Joshua Frank: So many progressives I’ve talked to, who
admit John Kerry offers no alternative to the Bush Administration on
almost every issue, often justify their support for the Kerry ticket
by saying that there is at least a stark difference between Bush and
Kerry on the environmental front. They point out such things as Bush’s
disregard for science, his horrible forest plan, his roll-back of Bill
Clinton’s roadless rule — while they see Kerry as an environmental
crusader who has received ringing endorsements from all the major environmental
groups. Having covered environmental politics since the early 1990s,
how do you respond to this rationale? Do you agree that indeed there
are major differences between Bush and Kerry regarding the environment?
Jeffrey St. Clair: Let’s get some things straight up front.
The environmental movement bears very little relationship to the “major
environmental groups.” The big groups, aka Gang Green, function
politically as little more than a green front for the Democratic Party.
Of course, they inflate Kerry as an environmental crusader. They would
say, and indeed have said, the same thing about any Democratic nominee.
That’s their job. They do it very well, indeed. They should, because
the Beltway Greens aren’t really environmentalists any more in
the way we used to think of enviros 15 or 20 years ago. These aren’t
activists, but lawyers and lobbyists, mainly from Ivy League schools,
overwhelmingly white and liberal, who could (and perhaps will) just
as easily be lobbying on health care, abortion rights, trade policy.
They come packing with a PhD in deal making. There’s no driving
commitment to wilderness or burning rage about cancer alley or passionate
concern about the fate of the grizzly. It’s all very congenial,
nicely compensated, prefabricated, and totally uninspired.
The irony, of course, is that the better this new breed of eco-lobbyist
do their job (i.e., act as a kind of mercenary force against the Republicans),
the less seriously most rational people (except the perennially gullible)
take them. With good reason. There’s more threat inflation being
waged by the Big Greens than by the Bush administration in the run-up
to the Iraq war. Does Bush want to pursue corporate-driven, environmentally
hostile policies? Of course. Is Kerry an environmental crusader? Of
course not. And there’s the lie. In its zeal to become a Beltway
player, the Big Greens have ceased to be truth-tellers. For example,
the Greens say Bush has turned his back on the Kyoto Protocols. True
enough. But they neglect to say that Kerry turned his back first, voting
against Kyoto while he was a senator and Clinton was president. This
is to say that Bush was tight with Ken Lay and covered for Enron. Right
on. We all know Bush, the inveterate nick-name dropper, dubbed Lay “Kenny
Boy.” But they over look the fact that Lay and the Kerrys are also
very good friends and frequent dining companions. Moreover, Ken Lay
was recruited by Teresa Heinz Kerry for a seat on the board of her environmental
foundation, where he was assigned the task of heading the foundation’s
global warming task force. They charge that Bush, fully marinated in
crude oil, wants to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.
Horrible, but true. They say that Kerry opposes this. And that’s
true, too. But they elide the fact that Kerry told Teamster’s president
Jimmy Hoffa Jr. that while he won’t drill in ANWR, he does plan
to drill “everywhere else like never before.” Where would
everywhere else include? The coastal plain of Alaska, offshore waters
of Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, the Rocky Mountain Front, the red
rock country of Utah, the deserts of New Mexico, the Powder River Basin
of Wyoming. There’s more. Kerry met with the American Gas Association
a few weeks ago and pledged his support for a Trans-Alaska-Canada Natural
Gas Pipeline that will cut across some of the most incredible tundra
and taiga on Earth — a project that will dwarf the Trans-Alaska
Pipeline. No one among the Beltway Greens even squeaked. This amounts
to a grand and debilitating hypocrisy.
JF: What are the reasons the Sierra Club blatantly turns its
back on its radical John Muir roots? What are their motivations for
being a “green-front” for the Democratic Party as you say?
JSC: It involves big money, an obscene craving for political
access, ego enlargement and a kind of political paternalism that I (and
many others) find revolting. I don’t think the environment will
play that much of a factor in the election. Nobody listens to environmentalists
anymore, except their own captive members. The Sierra Club doesn’t
want activists; indeed, they run them out of the organization. Activists
have an unwelcome tendency to think and act for themselves.
JF: David Cobb, the Green Party Presidential candidate, is currently
polling at zero percent. His support apparently isn’t even a blip
on the electoral radar screen. What do you think the ramifications will
be for the Greens who, like the Sierra Club, were founded on radical
environmental ideals, but have apparently sidelined any radical tendencies,
and opted to run a “smart-state” campaign which basically
endorses John Kerry for president?
JSC: I think the Greens are kaput, a kind of group political
suicide on the order of Jonestown. A long time ago, in a galaxy far
far away, the founding purpose of the Green party was to be a party
of resistance. It was never about party building, or getting school
board candidates elected, or anything but being a monkeywrench against
a corrupt political system. Once the Greens decided to play nice, they
ceased to exist as a force of opposition. Why be a Green when you can
be a Dem? Why be a Dem when you can be a Republican? The only choice
now is not to vote. Staying home on Election Day under these circumstances
isn’t apathy or laziness or political mopery (as much as I admire
all of those things) but an act of supreme resistance, particularly
against those hysterical Dems who yelp that this is the most important
election of our lifetime. Bunk.
JF: Would you say that Ralph Nader is playing nice this election
season? Is there reason to stay home with him in the race? Or is he
just playing by the rules, much like the Greens, unwilling to monkeywrench
against the political system?
JSC: I think Ralph played coy for too long. Then he was baited
into running by the very smear artists who spent three years mugging
him. They really underestimated what Ralph is made of — which just
shows that they are as stupid as they are politically corrupt. He wasn’t
going to stand by and allow a bunch of political thugs and liars to
besmirch his character. Then he was betrayed by his own political progenies,
including the Green Party, which he almost single-handedly built into
a national force. Ralph is a lawyer and a good one. He lives by rules
and plays by them. He’s not a monkey-wrencher or revolutionary
or even a radical. He believes in ethical government, despite all the
odds. If Nader makes the Oregon ballot — a long shot given the
slimy tactics used against him by Democrats and some Greens — I
will happily vote for him. I take Foucault seriously. Politics is really
about power. The only power the Left (loosely speaking) enjoys these
days is the power of negation. We can’t elect Nader or Camejo or
Jackson. But we can defeat bad Democrats, like Gore and Kerry. Until
the Democrats bend in our direction or a new political party rises to
challenge them. And it doesn’t take much, other then courage, to
make this happen — an all out anti-war & anti-free trade campaign
waged in Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Oregon, New Hampshire, Maine and New
Mexico. Those are the states that matter. Those are the states that
will force the power elite to deal with the Left. Until that happens,
the Democratic Party will continue to move to the right, outpacing the
Repubs on several issues.
JF: On what issues have the Democrats outpaced the Republicans?
JSC: NAFTA, welfare deform, evisceration of the Endangered Species
Act, the drug war, logging the national forests (the ANNUAL cut under
Clinton was three to four times the TOTAL cut under Bush for his first
3 years) and, most recently, their ridiculous objections to the Bush
plan for withdrawal of US from Europe, which signals the end of NATO.
JF: Do you think that having Bush in office another four years
will energize these big enviros to do some good? How about the radical
environmental movement on the ground?
JSC: As a general rule, environmentalists, like other social
movements, are better playing defense than offense; better at organizing
against something than for something; better at attacking enemies than
holding purported allies accountable for their actions. At the legislative
level, much of Bush’s most insane policies have been stymied or
sunk. The problem, naturally, comes at the administrative level, where
there’s often little recourse beyond litigation followed by direct
action. And the Big Green groups don’t DO direct action. And for
the past 30 years, the federal courts have drifted steadily to the right.
The “right” is probably the wrong term since true conservatives
are supposedly suspicious of unbridled executive authority. This judiciary
is exceptionally tolerant of almost any decision made by the executive
branch. So the courts are becoming a much tougher venue to wage these
battles. Yes, the environmental movement is “invigorated”
under Bush, but for the wrong reasons.
The foot soldiers of the environmental movement have been conditioned
to hate Bush and all his minions. What’s missing, of course, is
any admission that it’s the political system which is aligned with
the corporations against the environment; what’s missing is any
acknowledgment that Bush — from forests to water policy, from oil
leasing to power plants, from salmon to toxic emissions — is merely
openly pursuing policies which Clinton (with the aid of many Democrats
in Congress) quietly established. And that’s the fatal flaw of
the Big Greens. They have refused to act as honest brokers, as non-partisan
defenders of the planet. Instead, they seduced their own members into
believing that a change in the White House will lead to a change of
direction in environmental policy. That’s the crucial lie. And
it’s a big one and a dangerous one. On paper, Kerry is marginally
better than Bush on the environment. But where a unified resistance
has confounded many of Bush’s plans, Kerry will face little resistance.
In fact, the Big Greens are likely to be complicit, as they were during
Clinton time. The press will play along. And that’s when the real
damage will be done. Then we will be left once again with that thin
green line of defenders, Earth First!, people in neighborhoods fighting
power plants and landfills (the dreaded NIMBYS) and the like, who put
the needs of the earth and the lives of their children above the niceties
of two party politics. Cherish those people: they are our only hope.
Source: CounterPunch
Seeking true security
By Frida Berrigan
Oil: Anatomy of an Industry
By Matthew Yeomans
New Press, 192 pages
Aug. 9— In January, my sister was arrested for hanging a banner
off Los Angeles’ Transamerica building depicting a gas nozzle gun held
to Lady Liberty’s head with the slogan “Ford: Holding America Hostage
To Oil.” My sister’s direct action might seem extreme, but as Matthew
Yeoman’s book Oil: Anatomy of an Industry makes clear, such stark
confrontations with how oil affects our lives are long overdue. America
is the world’s largest oil consumer and Oil amply demonstrates
that our dependence on this nonrenewable resource is a threat to economic,
geopolitical and environmental security.
Yeomans’ slim volume is a volatile mix of history, politics,
economics, science, and foreign and military policy. It is a story of
strength: How the world’s sole superpower generates, uses and controls
power. Yeomans begins with a good old-fashioned object lesson, trying
to live a day without oil. But he soon realizes that he cannot leave
his house — the city’s streets and his shoes are made from petroleum
products; and even if he could leave, he wouldn’t be able to see — both
his glasses and contact lenses are petroleum-based.
The lesson learned, Yeomans uses the rest of Oil
to trace the environmental, economic and security consequences of oil
addiction. He notes that the United States uses one-fourth of the world’s
oil, producing 8 million barrels a day and importing another 12 million.
Meanwhile, our domestic production capacity is waning; US oil fields
are 25 percent less productive than 20 years ago. Even so, the United
States has more cars than drivers, and new vehicles rolling off the
assembly line are less fuel-efficient than past models.
The “Energy Wars” chapter is timely and telling. Since
Winston Churchill’s oil-powered battleships turned the tide of WWI,
the fate of great powers has rested on their ability to control access
to oil. The paradigm is: oil access = a strong military = security =
oil access. Yeomans covers familiar ground in describing this dynamic
in the post-9/11 context: the pipeline politicking in Afghanistan and
the Caspian; Saddam Hussein as a former client of the United States;
Iraq as the Holy Grail of oil riches; Cheney’s ride in the revolving
door between the defense industry and the White House; the neocons’
role in crafting policy, and Africa as the new oil boom town. But he
covers it well. Morsels of insight and analysis, like his analysis of
the war against Iraq as an effort to undermine OPEC, make the book more
than just a simple overview.
Iraq, in the words of Paul Wolfowitz, “floats on a sea
of oil” — 112 billion barrels at least. But how much oil does it takes
to ensure US control of that motherlode? The US military used an estimated
45 million barrels in the 1991 invasion of Iraq. No figures for the
2003 war have yet to be formulated, but the Rocky Mountain Institute
estimates that in the first 3 months the air war alone consumed 1.5
million barrels of jet fuel.
This is a drop in Iraq’s bucket, but the fact that the
Defense Department is the United States’ single largest consumer of
energy should create opportunities to break Churchill’s paradigm. The
US military expends most of its fuel moving fuel. For example, 70 percent
of the tonnage transported in Army deployments is fuel for military
hardware like the Abrams tank, the workhorse of the occupation, which
gets about .2 miles to the gallon.
To challenge our oil dependence, we will have to do more
than choose Hybrid over Hummer. We have to dismantle this deadly paradox
— that the US military is the largest consumer of oil as it tries to
secure US access to oil — and begin to develop a new paradigm that asserts
national security’s independence from oil, and that global security
involves the development of renewable energy for the good of the environment
and the economy.
If our country remains the occupying force in Iraq and
continues its current course of the global War on Terrorism, we will
remain an oil-dependent nation caught in a cycle of “wars of blood for
oil” that waste both, and ultimately gain nothing.
Source: In These Times
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