Rebecca Solnit: Invasion of the Democracy Crushers

In fiction, these have been the modernizing years for vampires. Following the path blazed by novelist Anne Rice, in text and on screen they have become more complex, more human, and increasingly (dare I use the word) heartthrobs. Think True Blood, the Twilight series, and The Vampire Diaries. In the all-too-real and bizarre world we actually inhabit, however, the vampires have been truly regressive: think Count Dracula or Count Orlok of Nosferatu (only far, far richer). Their sole bow to modernity is that, while they -- or the monetary contributions they offer in return for political cocktails made from our national lifeblood -- still tend to skulk in the dark, they are also willing to stand in the light, teeth bared, ready to sink them in the nearest set of necks. 

A story of election-year vampirism led last Thursdays NBC Nightly News with correspondent Michael Isikoff reporting on a kind of secret fortune that has been flowing into congressional campaigns in these midterm elections, with Karl Roves right-wing front-group American Crossroads, among others, expecting to raise as much as $250 million dollars to flood the airways in the last weeks of the election. The next morning the New York Times reported on a bevy of top corporations (Chevron, Goldman Sachs, Texaco, and Dow Chemical, to name just four) who have funneled multi-millions through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce into massive national ad and influence campaigns in these last years -- and on one right-wing contributor who stepped happily out of the dark to the tune of $7 million (also for American Crossroads). 

If you want to go deep into the night of the living dead, check out Marvin Kitmans account, Murdoch Triumphant, in the November issue of Harpers Magazine. Its the blow-by-blow tale of Ruperts fair-and-balanced path to American media power and the millions he spent or donated to get there. To stay there, he just keeps on giving -- most recently, million dollar donations to both the Republican Governors Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Reports on this subject are now a dime a dozen because what the weather (and global warming) recently did in inundating Pakistan, the money of the rich and largely right-wing is now doing to whats left of American politics. (And this isnt likely to be a passing phase. After all, the secret donors of the moment are already planning for their future -- but not, of course, yours.) 

It may be true that you cant buy love, but politically speaking, it looks like pretty much everything else is potentially up for sale in what we still like to call American democracy. With that in mind, one of TomDispatchs favorite writers, Rebecca Solnit, author of A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster and the soon-to-be-published Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, returns today to look at just whose horror movie were living in. (By the way, catch Solnit discussing mixed-up California in a Timothy MacBain TomCast audio interview by clicking here or, to download it to your iPod, here.) Tom 

Jurassic Ballot 
When Corporations Ruled the Earth 
By Rebecca Solnit 

This country is being run for the benefit of alien life forms. Theyve invaded; theyve infiltrated; theyve conquered; and a lot of the most powerful people on Earth do their bidding, including five out of our nine Supreme Court justices earlier this year and a whole lot of senators and other elected officials all the time. The monsters they serve demand that we ravage the planet and impoverish most human beings so that they might thrive. Theyre like the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, like the Terminators, like the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, except that those were on the screen and these are in our actual world. 

We call these monsters corporations, from the word corporate which means embodied. A corporation is a bunch of monetary interests bound together into a legal body that was once considered temporary and dependent on local licensing, but now may operate anywhere and everywhere on Earth, almost unchallenged, and live far longer than you. 

The results are near-invincible bodies, the most gigantic of which are oil companies, larger than blue whales, larger than dinosaurs, larger than Godzilla. Last year, Shell, BP, and Exxon were three of the top four mega-corporations by sales on the Fortune Global 500 list (and Chevron came in eighth). Some of the oil companies are well over a century old, having morphed and split and merged while continuing to pump filth into the air, the water, and the bodies of the many -- and profits into the pockets of the few. 

Thanks to a Supreme Court decision this January, they have the same rights as you when it comes to putting money into the political process, only theyre millions of times larger than you -- and theyre pumping millions of dollars into races nationwide. Its like inviting a T. rex into your checkers championship -- and it doesnt matter whether dinosaurs can play checkers, at least not once youre being pulverized by their pointy teeth. 

The amazing thing is that they dont always win, that sometimes thousands of puny mammals -- thats us -- do overwhelm one of them. 

Gigantic, powerful, undead beings, corporations have been given ever more human rights over the past 125 years; they act on their own behalf, not mine or yours or humanitys or, really, carbon-based life on Earths. Were made out of carbon, of course, but we depend on a planet where much of the carbon is locked up in the earth. The profit margins of the oil corporations depend on putting as much as possible of that carbon into the atmosphere. 

So in a lot of basic ways, we are at odds with these creations. The novelist John le Carr remarked earlier this month, The things that are done in the name of the shareholder are, to me, as terrifying as the things that are done -- dare I say it -- in the name of God." Corporations have their jihads and crusades too, since they subscribe to a religion of maximum profit for themselves, and theyll kill to achieve it. In an odd way, shareholders and god have merged in the weird new religion of unfettered capitalism, the one in which regulation is blasphemy and profit is sacred. Thus, the economic jihads of our age. 

They Fund By Night! 

In the jihad that concerns me right now, most of the monsters come from Texas; the prey is in California; and its called our economy and our environment. Four years ago, with state Assembly Bill 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, we Californians decided wed like to cultivate our environment for the benefit of all of us, human and biological, now and in the long future. 

Theyd like to pillage it to keep their profit margins in tip-top shape this year and next. The latest tool to do this is called Proposition 23, and its on our ballot on November 2nd. It is wholly destructive, cloaked in lies, and benefits no one -- no one human, that is, though it benefits the oil corporations a lot. (You could argue that it benefits their shareholders, but Id suggest that their biological and moral nature matters more than their bank accounts do and that, as a consequence, theyre acting against their deepest interests and their humanity.) 

When he signed AB 32 into law, Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger, whos totally weird, termed out, but really good on climate stuff, said: Some have challenged whether AB 32 is good for businesses. I say unquestionably it is good for businesses. Not only large, well-established businesses, but small businesses that will harness their entrepreneurial spirit to help us achieve our climate goals. Using market-based incentives, we will reduce carbon emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020. That's a 25% reduction. And by 2050, we will reduce emissions to 80% below 1990 levels. We simply must do everything in our power to slow down global warming before it's too late." 

With Proposition 23, two out-of-state oil corporations, Valero and Tesoro, and right-wing oil billionaires based in New York and Kansas are trying to use the California initiative process, originally intended to allow citizen intervention in the governance of this state, to countermand AB 32 and set policy for us. According to data from the California Secretary of State's office, Kate Sheppard recently reported in Mother Jones magazine, more than 98% of contributions to the pro-Prop. 23 campaign are from oil companies. Eighty-nine percent of the contributions come from out of state Valero contributed $4 million, Tesoro gave $1.5 million, and a refinery owned by the notorious Kansas-based billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch, of Koch Industries, kicked in another $1 million. Just last week, Houston-based Marathon oil contributed $500,000. 

Actually, Tesoro and Valero are headquartered out of state, but their refineries in California gave us 2.4 million pounds of toxic chemicals in our air and water last year, and theyd like to continue offering the citizens of my state these gifts that keep giving illness, death, and long-term environmental devastation without interference. The coming vote is not about protecting fancy places for upscale hikers -- the stereotype used to portray environmentalism as a white-persons luxury movement -- its about air quality for inner-city people, especially those who live near refineries and harbors. This is the kind of environmental degradation thats about childhood asthma and increased deaths from respiratory illness. In other words, Prop. 23 is part of a corporate war on the poor. A vote for Prop. 23 is a vote to turn the lungs of poor children into a snack for dinosaurs, to put it in bluntly Hollywood-ish terms. 

Lies of the Living Dead 

To sabotage AB 32, theyre spending lots and lots of money and telling lots and lots of lies. Start with the propositions name -- The California Jobs Initiative -- designed to make you think that this measure will create jobs. Actually, according to most reputable analyses, it will do the opposite. A green economy has made jobs, is making jobs, and will make more jobs. This stealth initiative would suspend AB 32 until unemployment in California drops below 5.5% for four consecutive quarters, which it wont anytime soon, if ever. 

The implication is that doing something about climate change is a luxury we cannot afford in this bleak economy. Thats a lie. Down the road, if we dont retool to address a future in which theres less petroleum (at far higher prices), well truly crash and the suffering will be intense. AB 32 would prevent that crash; Prop. 23 steers us directly into it. 

The more we heat up the planet, the more it costs all of us, not just in money, but in colossal famines, displacements, deaths, and species extinctions, as well as in the loss of some of the things that make this planet a blue-green jewel, including its specialized habitats from the melting Arctic to bleaching coral reefs. 

Doing something about climate change makes economic sense right now. Its good business. 

Its hardly surprising that the corporate aliens lie when it comes to the relationship between doing something about climate change and the economy. After all, oil corporations funded a lot of the disinformation campaigns which, for years, promoted the idea that human-caused climate change was a figment of the overheated imaginations of mad environmentalists, and later that there was controversy (as well as corruption) among scientists when it came to global warming. The only honest information would have been that about 97% of the worlds relevant scientists overwhelming agree that climate change couldnt be more real and is a genuine danger to humanity and the planet -- and that the evidence is all around us in freakish weather, rising oceans, melting arctic ice and glaciers, shifting habitats, and more. 

The Phantom of Democracy 

The oil dinosaurs want to win so badly in my home state because what happens here matters everywhere. The nation often follows where California goes. In the 1970s, we started setting energy efficiency standards that mean we Californians now use about half the energy of the average American (with no diminishment of quality of life or pocketbook pain). In the last decade, we created cutting edge measures to curb carbon emissions. 

In 2002, Los Angeles state assemblywoman Fran Pavley (now a state senator) put out AB 1493, which was to -- and will -- reduce vehicle greenhouse gas emissions. It was, unfortunately, held up for six years by the Bush administration and then transformed into a national standard by Barack Obama as one of his first acts in office. Pavley also authored the now embattled Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, AB 32. 

If you think oil corporations and life share an interest, you shouldve been in the Gulf of Mexico a few months ago. I was. I saw their oiled pelicans, their unemployed fishermen, and their oil-smeared marshes. I tasted and smelled the poisons I could not see, and I read their lies. 

The people of the Gulf will struggle to survive the recklessness of BP for decades to come, but the petrobeasts arent just destructive when things go wrong; theyre that way when things go according to plan as well. If the 5.5 million barrels of oil that spilled into the Gulf, thanks to BP, had instead made it to our gas tanks, the consequences would still have been dire. They are dire. The companies funding Prop. 23 are themselves a major source of climate change and, of course, a major obstacle to coming up with solutions to it. 

Like the people of the Gulf during the spill, the people of Richmond, California, in the San Francisco Bay area, live with those tastes, smells, and consequences all the time, because theyre in the shadow of Chevrons biggest west coast refinery. (Corporate headquarters are only 25 miles away.) Sirens go off during excessive leaks of toxins like ammonia, and as if out of a horror movie, an explosion at the plant in 1999 that sent an 18,000-pound plume of sulfur dioxide fumes into the air was said to be so nasty it took the fur off squirrels. 

Chevron is one of the biggest corporations on the planet. While the average income for a human being in Richmond is a little over $19,000, Chevrons profits last year were $24 billion, meaning the corporation is more than one million times as rich as the average citizen there. Nonetheless, the humans there won a huge victory recently, preventing the corporation from expanding and retooling its refinery so that it could process even dirtier crude oil (with dirtier local emissions, in a place that already suffers huge health consequences from the monster in its backyard). It may be the worlds first victory against refinery expansion. 

Chevron is both the states biggest single greenhouse-gas emitter and a huge financial force in Richmond elections, invariably funding campaigns against green candidates. The mostly poor, mostly nonwhite citizens of Richmond are, however, organized and motivated, so if you want to watch a monster movie in which the little guys have been winning lately, follow city politics there. 

One of the cool things about the West County Toxics Coalition, the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, the Green Party mayor, and the activists working with them is that they know better than anyone how to act locally and think globally, and even sometimes how to act globally and think locally. Maybe collectively theyre not so little. Theyre allied with antiwar groups, with Burmese human rights groups, with the people of Ecuador and Nigeria who have suffered petro-contamination at least as bad, if not worse than BPs Gulf spill this spring, with groups around the world fighting the petrobeast. Theres a movement out there, and sometimes it even wins amazing victories. 

Around the world this month, 350.org coordinated more than 7,000 demonstrations in favor of lowering atmospheric carbon to a sane 350 parts per million, while the climate justice movement had a global day of action on Columbus Day. Among the month's heroic efforts were direct action against mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia, blockades of refineries in France and Britain and of a coal-fired power plant in Germany, protests and gas-station blockades in Canada, and a rally in the Philippines, a demonstration in Finland, a march in Ecuador, a protest in South Africa, among others. In California, activists worked steadily against Prop. 23. 

Think for a minute about horror movies: in some of them, the little people rally and do heroic things and the monsters or aliens are vanquished. The forces that have come together against Prop. 23 are impressive, ranging from inner-city job coalitions and traditional environmental groups to university think tanks and business interests. Winning or losing, however, depends on what happens when California voters look at that deceptive label California Jobs Initiative on their ballots on November 2nd. 

If your heart isnt pounding, and you arent biting your fingernails and teetering at the edge of your seat, then you havent noticed the monsters yet. Look carefully. Theyre all around us -- and theyre coming for you. 

Rebecca Solnits brother David does organizing work against Chevron, and she often shows up for the marches. She is the author of 13 books, including the forthcoming Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (which maps toxins and right-wing corporations in the Bay Area, among other things) and A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. She writes for Tomdispatch.com as often as she can. Its her personal version of being David in the face of all those Goliaths.