Corporate Social Responsiblity, Greenwashing, and the Austin Environmental Justice Team

On September 12th, concerns about DAPL drove local citizens to attend a meeting of the Austin Environmental Justice Team (ATXEJ).

According to the meeting organizers, turnout was about 150% higher than usual, suggesting that DAPL is having a galvanizing effect on activism in Austin (and presumably throughout the country).

The meeting was scheduled to run from 6:30 to 8:30, but it lasted far longer than anticipated because the moderators stuck to an agenda designed for sixteen to eighteen people even though there were more than twice that many in attendance. By the time the icebreaking/introduction activity was over, we were already 20 minutes behind schedule.

Most of the attendees were college-aged, and the event was a hybrid of the typical college workshop and an academic or corporate committee meeting.

There were brief periods of general discussion punctuated by structured group activities. And there were also summaries of reports from subcommittee members on various topics (from the funding of the local police department to the extra fees Austinites must pay to receive electricity generated by solar power).

I don't know anything about how ATXEJ receives its funding, but these folks are getting ripped off if their coffers aren't routinely filled by the sinister agents of corporate social responsibility (CSR)--because it's hard to imagine an intentional greenwashing campaign being more effective at dissipating civic energy than this meeting was.

I was one of a group of people who rose to leave at 8:30--partly because that was when the meeting was supposed to end, partly because not one word had yet been said about DAPL (the concern that had brought most of us to the event), and partly because it had become evident, by that point, that ATXEJ takes a neoliberal approach to environmental concerns.

I sensed the neoliberal tendencies in one of the earlier exercises, when roughly one in five people talked about how important it is for activists to listen to communities in order to get anything done--without a single one of these people indicating what they had learned by listening.

Then came the admission (from a leader named Josh) that the community of environmental activists in Austin is so fragmented that it's hard to organize collective action. Lots of people followed up on his remarks to lament that fragmentation, but no suggestions for building coalitions were examined or discussed. Such suggestions were merely "listened to."

My heart sank especially when we heard from Pete, an environmentalist in east Austin (where the population of African-Americans and Latinos is most concentrated). Pete found his way to ATXEJ because he noticed, as a Hispanic living in east Austin, that all the other neighborhoods around town had beautiful parks. Unfortunately, instead of enjoying nicely maintained parks, the people of east Austin have been living with an area called Red Bluff, where garbage and used oil have been illegally dumped for decades.

Pete's premise was perfectly reasonable: All taxpayers in Austin are entitled to decent parks.

But after working with ATXEJ, Pete's perspective seems to have been warped by neoliberalism. He has done a great job of motivating local citizens (and some politicians) to help clean up Red Bluff, but city officials are unwilling to provide the funding that will maintain it--so Pete is currently working with community leaders to figure out how the citizens in the immediate area can raise money on their own to maintain Red Bluff.

This is the lesson that neoliberalism teaches us: Your tax dollars are going to be spent on the elites, so if you want anything for yourself, you'll have to do it on your own.

It's great that Pete tackled the problem of Red Bluff, and it's great that his community is exploring ways to maintain the area. But what isn't great is the persistence of the fundamental injustice underlying the problem (the fact that wealthier, whiter communities throughout Austin will continue to spend tax dollars raised in east Austin on their own parks without supporting Pete's efforts in any way).

So when ATXEJ bills itself as a "safe space," that's probably because it's designed to preserve the privileges associated with the status quo. If you come to ATXEJ with a problem, they'll be happy to suggest ways that you can address the problem--without rocking the boat.

And if you come to them with a solution, such as how to unify the various environmental groups in the city, they'll listen--without doing anything.

This was my first time to attend an ATXEJ meeting, so it's entirely possible that I've formed an incorrect impression of how the organization operates. However, my first impression of ATXEJ is that this is what greenwashing looks like.

We Won't Get Anywhere Until We Realize How Many Sanders Supporters Are Neoliberals in Populist Clothing

The definition of neoliberalism has changed over time, but for Americans in 2016, it boils down to doing what's profitable in the name of doing what's right--whether it's right or not.

Hillary Clinton will support green energy as soon as the people behind it are willing to give her more money than the fracking industry. Until then, you can expect neoliberals to insist that there's a profound moral difference between Donald Trump's refusal to acknowledge climate change and Clinton's refusal to do anything about it.

Barack Obama will support reforming police departments throughout the country as soon as doing so becomes more profitable than oppressing communities of color on a nationwide scale. Until then, you can expect him and his neoliberal media apologists to pay lip service to the problem by providing highly controlled and emotionally loaded (but politically impotent) coverage of Black Lives Matter and Mothers of the Movement.

Joe Biden and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz will support the war on drugs and the prison-industrial complex until someone pays them more to leave non-violent U.S. citizens alone than they're currently being paid to support locking folks up. Until then, they'll keep telling us that forcing Americans to rot in jail is the only way to protect us from ourselves.

Dianne Feinstein will continue to support spying on citizens until it becomes more profitable for Silicon Valley to protect the privacy of consumers than it is to compromise that privacy. Until then, she'll keep telling us that the slightest possibility of cyber-terrorism justifies the U.S. government's decision to terrorize its own population through constant surveillance.

Andrew Cuomo will continue to support attempts to quash the BDS movement until it becomes more profitable to recognize the humanity of Palestinians than to support their oppression. Until then, he'll keep equating empathy for human beings in Palestine with anti-semitism.

Loretta Lynch will continue to support prosecution of Edward Snowden for the crime of exposing the criminal behavior of our government until it becomes more profitable for her to protect the Fourth Amendment than it currently is for her to subvert it. Until then, expect her to keep insisting that national security considerations require us to treat the exposure of crime as a more grievous offense than the perpetration of it.

None of these arguments stand up to scrutiny, but the neoliberals can make them because the neoliberal media refuses to challenge such nonsense. However, thanks to the Sanders insurgency, more Americans are "woke" in 2016 than I ever thought possible.

More precisely, I believe we were always woke. We just had no idea how many of us there were until Sanders exposed us to each other.

Our problem is that with Sanders out of the race for the presidency, we're not sure what to do with our collective energy. Some of us are supporting Jill Stein and the Green Party. Others are more interested in Brand New Congress. Still others are throwing themselves into local politics. The one thing all of us have in common is a growing awareness that we're not using the current lull in the political cycle as effectively as we should be.

Even if we're aware, as Anoa Changa is in this video, that we have to go through the growing pains associated with figuring out how best to organize ourselves, that doesn't necessarily make us feel less frustrated about the fact that what was once a clear plan ("Let's get Sanders elected!") has become much murkier ("Let's continue the political revolution!").

So I want to call everyone's attention to an insight that Tim Black shared last night in a live broadcast on YouTube:

Tim is absolutely right to observe that if this disappointing time is good for nothing else, it is good for revealing who our true friends and allies are. We're learning that many of the people who seemed to be champions of the Sanders movement (such as Robert Reich, Shaun King, and Jim Hightower) are plainly less committed to the cause than they pretended to be.

Here's the problem with our fair-weather friends: Focusing on the danger that Trump poses to the present is simply a distraction from the danger that Clinton poses to the future. When Reich calls Chris Hedges nonsensical for pointing out the many policy particulars that are identical between Trump and Clinton, he is engaging in the same sort of neoliberal water-carrying as King and Hightower when they choose to become alarmist about connections between Trump and Russia.

Even if we don't all agree on what we should do next, I think most of us do agree about what we have to recognize, which is that neoliberalism is the chief threat to our future and that the people who insist on tilting at neoliberal windmills are not trying to help.

Instead of arguing with them, we need to figure out how to move forward without them.The question isn't whether the neoliberal powers that be are going to install Clinton. They are. The question is: What are we going to do about it? We won't find an answer by lamenting the betrayals of presumed allies; we'll find it by debating amongst ourselves, which is why it's even more important to pay attention to YouTubers such as Black and Changa now than it was before Sanders dropped out.

For Berners, Dr. Jill Stein Inspires More Enthusiam than Confidence

I first /facepalmed myself in response to one of Dr. Jill Stein's media gambits when she tweeted to Samantha Bee:

Let's show @FullFrontalSamB Greens are just as fun as Libertarians! Ask her to interview me: https://t.co/aeEMmKtTBp pic.twitter.com/8J7mwfAiLc

— Dr. Jill Stein (@DrJillStein) July 1, 2016

For crying out loud, Dr. Stein, if you and your advisors can't spot a raging neoliberal when you see one, you're going to squander the golden opportunity being handed to third parties by the toxic Trump-Clinton binary.

Unfunny comedians such as Bee (along with Seth Meyers, Bill Maher, Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert and Sarah Silverman) are all propped up by one thing and one thing only: their willingness to service the corporate agenda of the networks that sponsor their tiresome schtick.

They are professional neoliberal apologists. Their only role in life is to seem compassionate toward and connected to the people who are most beleaguered by the neoliberal agenda while pushing narratives designed to support that agenda. This is something that most American TV watchers grasp instinctively as teenagers, so it doesn't inspire confidence in us to see that such an intuitive life lesson has sailed over the heads of those leading the opposition to the two-party duopoly.

I'm not saying that Stein's inability to spot a neoliberal is a symptom of stupidity; it's probably just a function of the fact that she doesn't spend much time watching TV.

But she needs to be better advised by people who have some understanding of how the corporate media works 24/7 to keep Americans happy with the debt-slavery that our culture has successfully rebranded as freedom.

As the Green Party Convention was getting underway in Houston, supporters were called upon to contribute $27 to a money bomb campaign for the Stein/Baraka ticket.

I happily did so--and then /facepalmed myself again when I learned that the money would go to buy ads on MSNBC.

Are you Greens seriously that clueless?

MSNBC is the network that you can most reasonably expect to sandwich your ads between segments from pretend-journalists who will present Stein's skepticism about pharmaceutical companies controlling the FDA as somehow akin to an anti-vaccination position.

If the Greens imagine that their target audience includes the neoliberal zombies who are still watching Rachel Maddow, then they have absolutely no idea what they're doing--which is especially galling when they're doing it with money donated by those of us who grasp that the most significant problem facing the U.S.A. is neither Trump nor Clinton, but the phenomenon that spawned both candidates: neoliberalism.

Trump is, as Chris Hedges points out, a predictable neofascist response to neoliberalism. And Clinton is simply the cancer of neoliberalism manifesting itself in human form.

So I'm going to beg Dr. Cornel West, who speaks so compellingly about jazz and the blues, to make Stein understand the landscape of the corporate media in 2016.

The GOP and the DNC both have the resources necessary to staff full orchestras with woodwinds, strings, brass, and percussion. The Greens simply don't have that kind of personnel available. They may appeal to the odd Lisa Simpson character who can play a mean saxophone, but they can't afford a dedicated rehearsal space or quality recording equipment, and the music they play on the major networks is going to sound amateurish compared to the offerings of the major parties.

If Stein tries to poach voters from the DNC by advertising on MSNBC, the only winners will be the DNC and MSNBC, who will put the Green Party's money into the pockets of talking heads who will perform siren songs about how those who vote Green will end up crashing the ship of state on the rocks, whereas those who support Clinton will steer clear of Trump-as-Charybdis. (They'll be sure to cut to commercial before mentioning that Clinton is Scylla--but the point is they know she's Scylla --and are delighted by the fact that she feasts on the part of the population that doesn't include them.)

Dr. West, please familiarize yourself with the social media uprising that took off around the Sanders campaign. Don't make the mistake of looking to the major networks for the Green Party's John Coltraine. The corporate media doesn't know how to improvise, but improvisation is happening throughout the Bernie-or-bust movement with the work of people such as Tim Black, Jimmy Dore, Debbie Lusignan, Benjamin Dixon, and Mike Figueredo. A hugely underappreciated part of the appeal of watching someone like Black instead of corporate media is that his show, even if it lacks high production value, happens live.

There isn't enough money in the world for the Green Party to fight neoliberalism via corporate media because the only people still watching corporate media are the ones who are committed to neoliberalism for financial (rather than moral) reasons. Those folks don't want to have their assumptions challenged by a rousing anthem from Stein; they watch TV to be distracted or soothed by syrupy ballads.

So instead of wasting your money on networks whose viewers hold the Greens in contempt, please consider spending that money on campaign infrastructure. Rent offices and vehicles. Set up bases and networks of support for your volunteers--and leave the media blitz to the arenas (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) where the jazz and blues musicians of anti-neoliberalism are already making headway.

This battle is going to have to be won in the real world because the phony world of television already belongs (lock, stock, and barrel) to the neolibs.

Hey Everybody, David Klion Needs You to Panic about Russia Right Now--Before It's Too Late!

We're doomed. The neoliberal sky is falling, and the only thing that can keep you from being crushed by neoliberal debris is a neoliberal umbrella.

Yesterday, David Klion released a red-baiting screed entitled "Russia may be meddling in U.S. Politics. Where is the leftwing outrage?" through The Guardian. The purpose of the article is to convince readers that the only way they can protect themselves from the neoliberal corruption in Russia is to embrace the neoliberal fear mongering of the Democratic National Committee and their hired hands in the cybersecurity industry (CrowdStrike).

There are several laugh-out-loud paragraphs in Klion's piece, but the richest is probably this one:

[Contemporary Russia] is better understood as a cautionary tale of unchecked neoliberalism. The US-supported 1990s privatization schemes described in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine are directly responsible for the rise of Putin and the repressive state he presides over.

See that? Klion has to be a good guy because he knows to blame neoliberalism for bad things, such as Putin's authoritarianism.

But the neoliberalism of the DNC (whose spokespeople and cybersecurity experts are the only folks pushing the narrative that Russia is to blame for the leak) doesn't seem to trouble Klion at all.

Weird.

Klion's first paragraph acknowledges that we still don't know who hacked the DNC: "Russians may have hacked and leaked Democratic National Committee emails via WikiLeaks" (emphasis added). But Klion doesn't like to think in terms of maybe or maybe not. He wants to assume that what the DNC and CrowdStrike have said must be true and that anyone who fails to share his sense of alarm must be a closet Leninist:

[I]t was frustrating to watch many of my friends and allies on the left shrugging off concerns about Russia in my Twitter feed last week. Nearly a century after the Bolsheviks first seized power, the American left’s relationship with Russia is still defined by an abstract nostalgia for a failed socialist experiment that has little relevance today.

Klion carefully sidesteps the possibility that those of us who refuse to get caught up in his hysteria aren't so much waxing nostalgic for the days of "Uncle Joe" Stalin as we are deeply skeptical of claims made by the warmongering DNC and scare-and-sell cybersecurity tacticians:

Reminder: Cybersecurity firms like FireEye & Crowdstrike have a $$ incentive to keep nation-state hacking fears high pic.twitter.com/HIkSAGmEXg

— Trevor Timm (@trevortimm) July 25, 2016

To The Guardian's credit, it balanced Klion's red-baiting hysteria with a calmer, more reasonable piece by Trevor Timm entitled "The rush to blame Russia for the DNC email hack is premature."

So read the Timm piece if you want the boredom of feeling informed, but turn to Klion if you prefer the exhilaration of running around like a chicken with your head cut off.

Will the UK Treat Jeremy Corbyn the Way Brazil Treated Dilma Rousseff?

2016 has not been kind to left-leaning government leaders who dare to oppose neoliberal policies and systemic corruption.

Dilma Rousseff, the democratically elected leader of Brazil, was ousted in May on bogus charges of corruption by the very people whose corruption she was in the process of exposing.

Bernie Sanders, who challenged a foreign policy based on regime change and proposed a domestic policy based on infrastructural reinvestment, appears to have lost the nomination of his nation's so-called liberal party to Hillary Clinton, who sees spending cuts at home as the easiest way to finance wars abroad.

Earlier today, Jeremy Corbyn, the overwhelmingly popular leader of the UK's Labour Party, lost a no-confidence vote conducted among his own Members of Parliament, retaining support from only 20% of them.

But even though political officials may have lost confidence in Corbyn, the people of the UK apparently still consider him their best bulwark against neoliberal encroachments. According to an instant (and unscientific) poll conducted by The Guardian in the wake of the no-confidence vote, more than 90% of the people who voted to put Corbyn in charge of the Labour Party intend to vote for him again if presented with the opportunity to do so.

For his part, Corbyn has indicated that he will fight to represent the people who put him into his current position of power instead of kowtowing to the MPs who consider him unfit to lead:

I was democratically elected leader of our party for a new kind of politics by 60% of Labour members and supporters, and I will not betray them by resigning. Today’s vote by MPs has no constitutional legitimacy.

If Corbyn had to run against likely challenger Angela Eagle today, I don't doubt that Corbyn would win.

But such a vote won't happen until UK officials (in conjunction with their media spokespeople) have had a chance to educate the hoi polloi concerning the dangers posed by Corbyn's leadership. I suspect the process will follow (in broad strokes at least) the outline of what happened in Brazil.

The corporate media of Brazil worked actively to plant seeds of doubt concerning Rousseff's leadership (often by using the airwaves to make staged protests look far more widespread than they were). That campaign to undermine Rousseff was effective enough to shake the confidence of the electorate in the one person in the national government who was working most conspicuously to weed out corporate-sponsored corruption--with the result that the bought-and-paid-for politicians against whom Rousseff fought most fiercely were the ones who ended up in power.

Here in the US, I know plenty of people who see through what MSNBC is doing when it trots out Barney Frank to agree with Chris Matthews about what a tremendous threat Bernie Sanders poses to America's future. But I know plenty more who don't. Even people who fundamentally distrust news broadcasts end up repeating "facts" they "learned" from networks that they consider unreliable.

The media machinery that misrepresented Rousseff in Brazil and Sanders in the U.S. will doubtless give Corbyn the same treatment. I'm already hearing an overlap in the dismissive rhetoric applied to all three figures. Pundits and fellow politicians acknowledge that they are "decent" people, but go on to assert that they lack the fundamental "leadership" qualities necessary to steer their ships of state through the troubled waters ahead. After that grave pronouncement is made, the speaker pauses for a beat to let it sink in before adding something along these lines: "Look, I'm just as committed to breaking out of this neoliberal cycle as anyone else, but the global situation is simply too volatile right now for us to take the drastic steps proposed by Rousseff/Sanders/Corbyn. The only reasonable course of action is for us to temporarily entrust the government to the guidance of a compromise candidate such as Temer/Clinton/Eagle."