Published in October 2011, ‘Beating Goliath’ gathers case studies from previous successful campaigns against corporations, looking at how they won and what we can learn from them. It provides links to many useful resources for activists, and highlights current campaigns engaged in the fight against climate change through targeting corporations.
Published August 2011, the Democracy Center’s report ‘Off the Market’ connects the dots between the global debate over forest protection and the complex realities on the ground.
Based on original research and interviews, ‘Off the Market’ breaks down the complex arguments over ‘REDD’, international negotiations on forest preservation, and global forest carbon markets – and it looks at the complex situation inside Bolivia, where forest use is a crucial economic, political and social issue.
The Network for Justice in Global Investment – founded by the Democracy Center and the Institute for Policy Studies – is a joint effort by citizens and organizations across the world to challenge the unjust rules governing international investment.
Visit the website to find out more, access resources, and get involved.
Read more about our work on challenging corporate power
Dear friends:
If you follow the news in the U.S., by now you have most likely heard of the Keystone XL pipeline. You may have read news of the spirited protests against it last summer and fall at the White House. Or you may have heard the Republican Presidential candidates denouncing President Obama for “caving in” to those protests. Either way, Keystone XL has now become both the leading environmental campaigning cause in the country and a major issue in the 2012 campaign.
How did this happen and where is all this likely to go? Today the Democracy Center offers a pair of special features on the battle against Keystone XL. The first is an inside look at the campaign, interviews with its most visible leaders and with some of the young people who have given the effort its fire. You can read that report here. And below, in this issue of the Democracy Center Newsletter, we offer an analysis of the campaign: The Tricky Activist Politics of the Keystone Pipeline.
Today also marks an important moment to take action yourself. We urge all our friends to join the Democracy Center and dozens of other organizations in flooding the U.S. Senate with a 24–hour barrage of 500,000 messages calling for rejection of legislation that would force immediate pipeline approval. You can add your voice to the fight here. As always, thank you for your interest and please pass this along to others who might wish to read it as well.
Jim Shultz
The Democracy Center
Credit: Emma Cassidy for tarsandsaction
Phase out of emissions from coal is itself an enormous challenge. However, if the tar sands are thrown into the mix it is essentially game over. – NASA Climate Scientist, Dr. James Hansen
“People are looking for ways to express their sense of urgency about this crisis. People want to take action to show that the Earth is in the balance.” – Author and activist, Naomi Klein
He [President Obama] seems to have confused the national interest with his own interest in pleasing the environmentalists in his political base.” – Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney
“The decision by the Obama Administration is another capitulation to the radical environmental fringe – and in turn puts our national security and economy at risk.” – Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum
Last September more than 1,200 environmental activists were arrested at the gates of the White House. The arrests were part of a weeks-long protest aimed at persuading President Obama to block authorization of the Keystone XL pipeline that would carry crude oil from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast. In November those numbers swelled by thousands, as activists returned to Washington to form a human chain around the White House, complete with a black inflatable replica of the pipeline. On January 18 the President handed them a victory, a temporary one at least, announcing that the administration was denying the permits required for Keystone’s construction.
How did citizens turn a proposed 1,700-mile steel tube into a national cause? How did it suddenly take center stage in the U.S. Presidential campaign? And what is ahead in the tricky politics of Keystone XL?
The ‘tar sands’ of western Canada are a complex underground stew where sand, clay and water mix with a form of thick black oil – enough to produce more than a million barrels a day of sought-after petroleum. When global oil companies and the Canadian government look at Alberta’s dark soil they see a fortune. U.S. boosters of the tar sands project see a new source of needed energy from a friendly government just across the border. But climate scientists see something else – a carbon time bomb.
Dr. James Hansen, the NASA climate scientist who sounded some of the first climate change warnings in the early 1980s began sounding a new alarm about the Canadian tar sands project early last year. He warned that if the massive and dirty petroleum supplies buried in the tar sands are fully released into the atmosphere it would in essence be “game over” for carbon reduction, and in turn the effort to slow the lethal path of global climate change. Climate activists, dedicated to lessening the world’s addiction to oil, saw in the tar sands the petroleum equivalent of an alcoholic finding a refrigerator full of six packs in the basement. [Read more about the tar sands.]
Native American groups in Canada (First Nations) have been fighting tar sands excavation for years. The strip mining operations involved leave behind ruthless contamination of the water and land and lasting damage to fragile ecosystems. But their battle is a hard one. “You have twenty of the world’s biggest oil companies operating in the tar sands, just about every single major banking institution on the planet invested,” says Clayton Thomas-Muller of the Mathias Colomb Cree Nation.
In 2011, First Nations groups found a new set of allies among U.S. environmentalists and others who set upon a new strategy for slowing the project – turning off its main southbound tap.
Central to the Canadian government’s tar sands development strategy is the Keystone XL pipeline, a proposed 1,700-mile, 36-inch-in-diameter steel tube that would take the rough crude mined in Alberta southward through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma to Texas for refining and then sale to global markets. That’s 1,700 miles worth of communities that might have enough power to say no. Opponents understand that cutting off the project’s key Texas-bound tap won’t stop tar sands development, but it could slow it and buy some time.
Nebraskans have been leading the charge against the pipeline for years. BoldNebraska, a coalition of farmers, ranchers, labor unions, environmentalists and other communities, has hammered on state officials to refuse the pipeline the required state permits. Ben Gotschall, a cattle rancher and BoldNebraska leader explained to us, “For what looks to be maybe 100 or 200 jobs for Nebraskans for maybe 18 months, we’re going to endanger the Ogallala aquifer and tear up a portion of the Sand Hills, which has taken 10,000 years to become the way it is? When you weigh those two things together Nebraskans – in typical conservative, common sense logic – just say ‘well that’s not worth it.’”
In the summer of 2011 Bill McKibben, the founder of the climate action group 350.org, thought he found another leveraging point to block Keystone XL – the White House. In order for Keystone XL to be built the administration had to grant its blessing, a move it could refuse without any authorization from Republicans in Congress. Environmental groups decided that the time was ripe to make Keystone XL a green political test for the President on the eve of his re-election campaign.
In September they brought their anti–Keystone XL demand to the President’s front door. “We used our bodies as a form of currency,” McKibben told us. “We anted up, as it were, to get us into the game. By the time two weeks were over we’d taken a regional issue and made it a national and even global one.” On November 6th, a symbolic year–to–the–day before the day the President would be seeking their votes, concerned citizens returned to the White House and surrounded it with an enormous human chain.
Four days later President Obama announced he was delaying a decision on the Keystone XL permit until after the 2012 vote. Congressional Republicans, eager to force Mr. Obama to choose to between the environmentalists on one side and labor backers of Keystone XL on the other, piggybacked a 60-day decision deadline onto a December stopgap bill on the payroll tax. The President responded in January by denying the Keystone XL permit, blaming the Republicans for rushing the decision.
McKibben and others were jubilant. “The victory is of course a tribute to people who set aside their natural cynicism about the possibility of change and instead went to jail in record numbers, wrote public comments in record numbers, surrounded the White House shoulder to shoulder five deep.”
Keystone XL opponents were not the only ones jubilant over the President’s decision. Republican political consultants saw immediately in the pipeline decision the chance for an election year blast at the White House that tied together almost every issue they dreamed of – Iran, China, energy prices, jobs, and the President’s loyalties to “the radical environmental fringe.”
Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich launched the new Republican narrative in a Presidential debate less than a week later. Noting that the Iranians were threatening a cutoff of U.S. oil supplies in the Middle East, he declared:
This idea of vetoing the Keystone pipeline is wrong on every possible grounds. It would have led to 20,000 to 50,000 construction jobs while it was being built. We would have made money for 30 to 50 years processing Canadian oil. Then the ports of Galveston and Houston would have made money actually shipping the oil. Instead because Obama wanted to have a handful of San Francisco extremists happy, he vetoed it, which means that Prime Minister Harper, who’s a conservative and pro-American, is now talking about working out an agreement with the Chinese to build the pipeline due west across the Rockies to Vancouver, more expensive but doable.
Soon the other GOP candidates were piling on as well, signaling to a nervous president that the Keystone issue is going to hang around his neck to defend all the way through the fall.
Why is the battle against the Keystone pipeline so urgent? If there is one thing we have learned from the fight against coal (by far the single largest U.S. contributor to climate change) it is that once corporations have made big investments in infrastructure, they will fight tooth and nail for decades to squeeze the last return possible out of that investment, environmental concerns be damned. Another 50-year infrastructure investment in petroleum in the U.S. means another 50 years of political battle to wean our economy off oil.
Converting Keystone XL from being an invisible issue to being a global cause is a major achievement, as was convincing President Obama to reject permits for the pipeline. But in politics, on issues this big, leveraging can work in the short-term – but in the end public opinion bats last. Now that actions at the White House have made Keystone a major national issue, we are going to have to win not just the protest game but public opinion as well. That won’t be easy. Keystone backers have a far bigger megaphone and have already spent millions in donations to Congress to buttress their case.
It is in the nature of strong advocacy to expect a backlash. Ultimately winning depends on your ability to meet that backlash head on and defeat it. To ultimately win, opponents of Keystone XL need to make the case on the merits to the public, not just on the politics to the President. We need to make clear that the jobs estimates are wildly overblown; that the winners from all that environmentally reckless oil transport will not be families and communities but corporations; and that those who oppose the pipeline are all kinds of Americans not just one kind. Finally, we are going to have to make and win the most fundamental case of all on climate – that the environment we will bequeath to our children and their children matters so deeply that this time we need to leave the oil right in the ground where we found it, even if someone has to sacrifice a hefty profit in order to do so.
Join the effort to stop Keystone XL today by signing the petition to the U.S. Senate here..
Jim Shultz
Executive Director, the Democracy Center
The coalition that called on Obama to refuse the Keystone XL pipeline permit included Nebraskan landowners, First Nations communities, and environmental campaigners of all ages and backgrounds. We interviewed many of those involved – from the leaders to the grassroots – on why they were participating and how they were winning the battle. First published on our blog, Getting Action, these interviews have now been compiled into a downloadable document that forms a case summary of the actors, messages and strategies used to win this important battle in the fight against climate change.
Read more and download the Keystone XL strategy briefing.
One of the most fundamental things that governments do, in any country in the world, is take money from citizens through the tax system and then spend it through public budgets. In between that two-step of raise and spend lie some of the most important choices a nation can make: Do we invest in schools or armies? How do we address the needs of the poorest? What kind of infrastructure do we want for the future? And there are also massive opportunities for corruption as officials confuse public money for their own.
Citizen oversight and advocacy of public budgets has been an important part of the Democracy Center’s work since our establishment 20 years ago. We founded a progressive analysis organization on budget issues in California, the California Budget Project. We have also worked closely for more than a decade, across the world, with the International Budget Partnership, a global leader in open and participatory budgeting. You can read more about the Democracy Center’s work on budget issues here.
We are honored to publish this article below by a friend who has been an essential patron and champion of citizen budget work for decades, Michael Lipsky. As a program officer at the Ford Foundation in the 1990s Michael seeded not only our first work in California, but other projects across the U.S. and across continents. In this article, originally published by the Huffington Post, Michael looks at the key role that citizen budget activism plays today in the twin fights against poverty and public corruption. We know you will find it a valuable read.
Jim Shultz
The Democracy Center
by Michael Lipsky
A secondary result of the fiscal crises now spooling out in the United States and Europe will be greater scrutiny of the efficacy of public expenditures. Nowhere is this likely to have greater impact than in foreign aid and development assistance, as countries demand greater accountability for each dollar or euro spent. At the same time, citizens in many countries receiving assistance are also pressuring their governments for accountability.
Critical to both of these developments is the focus on public budgets. Whatever elected leaders say, when the last votes are cast and counted the critical question is how governments actually manage their funds to address problems of poverty, provide essential services such as education and health care, and make public investments to secure their future. The flip side of the question is how and in whose interest countries raise funds to fulfill their commitments. Do they use revenues raised from oil, gas, mining and other natural resource extractions for high national priorities? Or are these funds siphoned off for private enrichment? Do they make prudent use of development assistance from abroad?
Historically the purview of accountants and numbers-crunchers, public officials in the past showed little interest in making budgets more accessible. Nonetheless, citizen groups around the world have increasingly demanded access to budget information.
In a report issued on January 5, the U.K. House of Commons’ International Development Select Committee called for making aid to conflict ridden countries dependent on improved governance. The report highlighted the need to tie increased British aid to real commitments from recipients to greater transparency and accountability.
This is just the latest in a wave of government-led initiatives and people-led activism that is shifting the discussion about the openness and accountability of decisions that determine a country’s social and economic trajectory. The Arab Spring, the Occupy protests, and calls like that in the House of Commons to use foreign aid to increase the openness of other governments all point to a seismic shift in the democracy and governance paradigm.
The commitments and aspirations of many of these groups were on display in November when representatives of 58 countries came together in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to affirm the importance of opening budgets to public scrutiny. Their Declaration on Budget Transparency, Accountability and Participation holds that “participation in the decisions related to public budgets is a fundamental right… of all citizens.” The Dar Declaration calls on all governments to recognize the rights of citizens to know their governments’ spending and revenue-raising policies, and to have regular opportunities to comment on the priorities reflected in them.
But the Dar Declaration is not so much the start of a movement as a milestone. In the last 15 or 20 years, in country after country civil society groups have been organizing to hold their governments to account.
In India, the MKSS uses local knowledge and government budget commitments to take advantage of the country’s 2005 Right to Information law. The organization’s “social audit” enables villagers to verify official claims and hold government to account. Official budget reports may indicate that a school or a road was built, but local residents may have information, literally “before their eyes,” that such projects were never undertaken.
Similarly, the Uganda Debt Network has trained local monitors to insure that inputs in construction and other projects, as promised in budget documents, are actually delivered.
In over 40 U.S. states, groups like the California Budget Project and the Center for Public Policy Priorities in Texas regularly scrutinize budget and tax policies for their impact on low- and moderate-income people.
Twenty years ago hardly any organizations focused on budget transparency as a key to improving democratic accountability and improving outcomes for poor. Now, over 200 groups in at least 119 countries engage in such work, according to the International Budget Partnership, a global research and advocacy organization that collaborates with budget groups around the world.
The interest of civic organizations in public budgeting at national and subnational levels has been matched in recent years by “top down” efforts of international organizations and foundations. Every two years, the IBP’s Open Budget Index (OBI) evaluates countries’ budget processes by engaging independent local researchers to assess whether their country makes timely and useful budget information available to the public and provides opportunities for participation. Over the three rounds of the OBI, a dozen or so countries have made real strides toward greater openness — perhaps because their leaders now know that their budget practices are being scrutinized by leaders in other countries.
What about funds that don’t always show up in budgets — like those from natural resources? Revenue Watch, an international organization started in 2002 as a project of the Open Society Institute, seeks good governance by working with industry and civil society groups in countries rich in oil, gas and mineral reserves to ensure that funds from these resources are monitored and used productively.
For civic organizations and governments seeking to reform other governments, it seems that fiscal transparency’s time has come. The open budget movement and the energy behind it promise to shift, if ever so slightly at first, the grounds on which the nations interact with their citizens and their civic organizations, and with each other.
Michael Lipsky, a former professor of political science at M.I.T., is a distinguished senior fellow at Demos, the American think tank based in New York.
We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this piece in our comments section below. Our comments policy.
by Ben Brouwer
On Wednesday the Obama Administration rejected TransCanada’s permit application for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, handing another victory to a strategic and successful climate campaign. Now it’s on to Round 3 in a fight that won’t end with the President’s latest dismissal of the pipeline. In a rare defeat for Big Oil, industry promoters and Congressional Republicans were fuming.
Credit: Emma Cassidy for tarsandsaction
The Democracy Center’s recently released strategy brief shares insight from some of the key organizers and activists who succeeded in forcing the Obama Administration to delay its decision on the Keystone XL pipeline permit until after the 2012 election, and then ultimately gave him the political cover to deny the permit yesterday.
This high-stakes political battle focuses on the question of whether a pipeline will be built to carry oil sands crude from Canada to refineries on the US Gulf Coast. Keystone XL would dangerously expedite the energy-intensive exploitation of the oil sands with grave consequences for the climate, according to NASA’s top climate scientist, James Hansen. Moreover, the project would be a tremendous threat to water supplies, farmland and ecosystems vulnerable to ruptures in the pipeline.
Here’s a quick update on the evolution of this issue in the last few months.
Environmental groups have vowed that they will continue to fight back against industry pressure for pipeline approval, seeking to discredit TransCanada’s job creation figures with an independent study from Cornell University that cites a significantly lower number of long term jobs. Opponents of the pipeline are also taking aim at Congressional supporters by pointing out the millions of dollars from dirty energy businesses and front groups that have landed in their campaign coffers.
The strategic focus on the “power of money in Congress” is timely: it builds on the popular discontent with corporate power that has been renewed by the Occupy movement and amplified by unfettered “Super PAC” election spending. The international climate action organization, 350.org, is calling for a rally at Congress on January 24 in which activists will dress in referee uniforms and “blow the whistle on Big Oil corruption.”
Crucially, this strategy confronts the deepest root cause of climate change: the unyielding power of the dirty energy lobby in US policy making. If it succeeds in the battle against the Keystone XL pipeline, there is hope that this strategy will be able to break down barriers to the systematic economic and energy reforms that are required for the health, prosperity and security of this and future generations.
In our recently released campaign brief you can find out more about the strategies and tactics Keystone XL opponents have used to win this battle. Also stay tuned for a new series of profiles showcasing the successful strategies of climate change campaigners around the world.
We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this piece in our comments section below. Our comments policy.
Welcome back to our Blog, Getting Action. We wish all our friends and readers a very happy New Year and hope that 2012 will be a great year for each of you and for the work for social and environmental justice that each of you do. This week the Democracy Center team begins to reassemble itself from scattered visits to distant parts to see family and friends, and to actually have a life. So as we get newly organized for 2012, here is a review of what we will be up to, and what you can read about here, in the weeks and months ahead.
Next week I will be in Vietnam, to lead an advocacy development project on children’s rights with the staff of UNICEF there. This is part of a global partnership between the Democracy Center and UNICEF to strengthen the work of children’s rights advocates across the globe. In the past year we have done workshops with children’s rights advocates from more than three-dozen countries, work that has taken me to the Middle East, Eastern and Western Europe, the U.S, and elsewhere. Later this year we’ll be doing more advocacy workshops across Africa.
We are also planning a series of workshops and events later this year across the U.S., especially with our friends on the front lines of the fight against corporate power and tackling the rough terrain of getting real action on climate change. We will keep you posted here on the Blog as our plans develop. Meanwhile, here is a library of some of the materials we use for these projects, including a slide show on advocacy strategy.
The crisis of global climate change will be at the center of our work in the coming year. Bolivia is one of the Earth’s unfortunate ‘ground zeros’ for climate change impact and Leny, Aldo and Shawn have been traveling across the country to document one of climate change’s most dire effects – its impacts on water and what that means for vulnerable communities. In the coming months we will be publishing a report, a video and multimedia presentations on how climate change is rearranging the planet’s fragile water system and what that means in the lives of real people. If you haven’t already seen it, be sure to check out our video on Bolivia’s melting glaciers.
In our effort to provoke a deeper discussion about strategic advocacy on climate issues, we will be releasing a case study on the lessons learned from the victory a year ago by environmental groups in California, who beat back a right-wing measure (Proposition 23) to repeal the state’s progressive climate law. We will also be working with our friends in UNICEF and other organizations on a project to put the spotlight on how climate change is one of the most fundamental children’s issues of our time. Maddy is planning a project interviewing young people in Europe and Bolivia and we will share their voices with you here. And our newest team member, Ben Brouwer, is working on a set of profiles of climate action groups we think you should get to know.
Those of you who have followed the Democracy Center’s work for a while were probably a part of the global campaign we helped lead that forced the Bechtel Corporation to drop its $50 million World Bank lawsuit against Bolivia following the Cochabamba Water Revolt. This year we will be joining with social justice organizations across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa to launch a Day of Action aimed at the global trade rules that allow corporations like Bechtel, Phillip Morris, and others to wage legal war against people and nations that adopt policies to protect their economic and the public health. Stay tuned here for more on those plans as they develop and if you haven’t seen it, have a look at the new video produced by the Democracy Center and the Institute for Policy Studies on how these trade rules can make global corporations even more powerful than governments.
That’s what we’ll be up to in this New Year, as well as much more. So please keep reading, keep commenting, and good luck and best wishes to everyone in 2012!
We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this piece in our comments section below. Our comments policy.
by Jim Shultz
Corporations have too much power.
We should be able to decide in our own communities whether we want to risk a polluted river in exchange for the promise of some gold. We should expect our governments to take on the tobacco industry to help keep kids from smoking. Those are exactly the kind of choices that democracy should decide, not effectively handed to corporations that have no interest in our interest.
We know this of course. So all over the world citizens organize and advocate for laws to protect us from corporate abuse. Sometimes we do win and get the law on our side. Corporations know this. In reply they have steadily and slowly built a counter-strategy while most people weren’t looking. That counter-strategy is called ‘global investment rules’ and it has been very successful for them.
Here is how it works. National governments across the world have been busily spinning a complex web of global trade agreements with one another, sometimes in groups (NAFTA) and sometimes just country-to-country. In many of these accords, beneath all the rhetoric of “job creation, opening up markets, etc.” lies a little known bill of legal rights for global corporations. Those rights include giving corporations the right to sue a government in a global trade court if it isn’t happy with some effort that government has undertaken to protect the public.
There they can extract from that nation’s taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, ten and twenty times their actual investment. In the Bechtel case against Bolivia after the Water Revolt the corporation demanded a $50 million payment based on an investment of $1 million. This threat, in turn, can scare governments into making policy decisions based less on what serves the public and more on what keeps global legal threats at bay. This is not about protecting legitimate investor rights. It is a new corporate game that offers truly awesome returns on investment at the expense of everyone else.
The video here, produced by The Democracy Center and Institute for Policy Studies through the Network on Justice in Global Investment, is a good ten-minute primer on global investment rules, told by our friends working on this issue around the world. We hope you will watch it, pass it on to others, and send along any inspirations of genius you have about how to get many, many people to see it.
Thank you always for your interest!
Jim Shultz
The Democracy Center
We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this piece in our comments section below. Our comments policy.
Kylie Benton-Connell worked for the Democracy Center from February 2010 until July 2011. In this article written for Alternet, Will Programs to Off-Set Carbon Emissions Fuel Further Conflict in Bolivia’s Forests?, she looks at the social complexities on the ground that lie behind global plans to create forest carbon markets. What does the recent conflict in Bolivia over the TIPNIS highway tell us about how schemes such as market-based REDD might play out in countries of the Global South?
Kylie is the author of our August 2011 report ‘Off the Market: Bolivian forests and struggles over climate change’ (Spanish version also available).
by Jim Shultz
Empowerment Sculpture, Lincoln, UK. Credit: yohanlincoln
I am writing from New York, at the tail end of a journey across four countries and two continents leading and supporting gatherings where citizens have come together to look at how to make a real difference. In Italy it was global staff from the UN Development Program planning their actions on climate change and sustainable development. In Brussels it was labor, trade and environmental activists from all corners of the world organizing to tackle corporate power. In London and here in New York I led workshops for UNICEF leaders campaigning for equal rights for the world’s most vulnerable children.
After teaching citizen advocacy like this for more than twenty-five years I have come to believe in two basic things about citizen action, one innocent and idealistic and the other Machiavellian. The first is that people really can change the world if they join together. The other is that the only way we can do this is to understand the realities of political power and root our actions in that understanding. It is not enough to simply have good intentions; we have to be smart.
Sometimes I begin workshops like these by holding up a note of the local currency and lighting a match under it. People everywhere have a strong reaction to the threat of burning perfectly good money (though I don’t actually burn it). Once I have their attention I explain that citizen action is a resource no less precious than cash, and in most ways more precious still. In a world with so many urgent problems to address none of us can afford to let our impulse to democratic action go up uselessly in smoke.
So now at the end of this long journey, as I get ready to head home to Bolivia, here are three important reflections about what it takes to change the world, inspired by the powerful actions and deeds of those I have worked with these past three weeks.
There are two ways to play the game of chess. One is to study the board carefully, analyze the various options before you based on a realistic reading of your position, and then make your best move. Another is to decide that you just really like moving your bishop – something about those big diagonal sweeps across the board – and so you move your bishop without much study and end up in checkmate two moves later.
Being strategic is fundamental to effective activism. It’s the difference between taking action with our eyes wide open rather than with a blindfold on. But all over the world I find people taking actions based on what feels most familiar. Analytic organizations put out reports. Protesters make signs and march. Lobbyists lobby. A wise friend of mine once called this the “if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail” problem.
All these approaches to advocacy and activism are potentially powerful. What is essential it to take careful time before you act to think together about which combination of actions actually has the best chance of delivering the goods. In the workshops that I lead I never pretend to know what strategies people should use. What do I know about how to get the government to take action on children’s rights in Kosovo, or to protect worker rights in the Philippines?
But I do find in every country I work in that there are some universal questions that people need to ask themselves in order to think as strategically as possible. What do we want? Who has the authority to deliver it? What is the most effective way to talk about our demands? Who do we need with us? What are our options for action, from the moderate to the radical, and which ones are most likely to get the job done?
We’ve put a whole library of materials about how to work with these strategy questions on the Democracy Center Web site, from training handouts to a presentation.
This morning I paid a visit to ‘ground zero’ of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, Zuccotti Park. Much has been written about this movement (including by us) in the two months since it began in the physical heart of U.S. corporate power, and then spread to hundreds of other cities across the U.S. and abroad. And always, especially this week as New York’s Mayor has moved to shut down the OWS encampment, the questions remain: What are its aims? What are its concrete objectives? What will it achieve?
Citizen action is a coin with two sides not one. Sometimes what we need to do is not merely to make specific demands but to completely change the political winds. In the U.S. the winds of corporate power have been blowing hard in only one direction for a very long time, in favor of the most wealthy and powerful. Huge financial houses that took the nation’s savings and converted them into complex betting schemes were deemed ‘too big to fail’ and were bailed out with our tax dollars. Oil and energy conglomerates have been given near free reign over our natural resources and environment at huge cost to our children’s future. Three decades of economic policy have more than doubled the share of the annual income pie going to the nation’s most wealthy, and more than one in ten Americans is now out of work. In the face of all this, until just a few months ago, the U.S. seemed to believe that the main economic issue in the country was reducing the federal deficit.
Has Occupy Wall Street achieved even one concrete change in public policy or one clear change in the rules that let corporations control so much about our lives? No. But in the end, direct changes are probably not its purpose at all. In many ways OWS has already achieved its purpose, which is to shift the political winds. In the summer the economic crisis in the nation was about the national debt ceiling. Now it is about corporate power and economic inequalities. That is a huge, important change. But the question now is how to harvest that shift in the winds to deliver concrete change, and it is likely to be others – who are not camping out in lower Manhattan – who drive that.
On the 15th floor of UNICEF headquarters this week, staff at the UN’s organization for children’s rights were strategizing about how to use those winds to win concrete actions from governments to address the needs of the world’s poorest children. In Brussels two weeks ago the activists I gathered with were looking at how use the new winds to open up a new challenge to corporate-driven global trade rules (see our new video on those rules here).
Those who use protest and radical action to change the winds, and those who work in the world of concrete policy, are partners in ways they don’t fully recognize. Without those who toil in the details, the changing of the winds becomes a mere political show with no actual impact. Without the wind-changers in the streets, the advocates who work on policy change find the doors closed and get nowhere. At the Democracy Center we believe in and we work with both sides of the coin.
Working for political change is hard and it comes with no guarantees. Those who have disrupted their lives these past months to take to the streets, who have faced a mix of ridicule and arrest, have no assurances that their sacrifices will result in anything other than memories of participation in a historical footnote. The people who campaign year after year in defense of children’s rights may see only backwards steps by the governments they pressure. How do we sustain ourselves in such a fog of uncertainty about the value of our struggles?
Citizen action, like the democracy that is its foundation, is an act of faith. We mobilize because being immobile in the face of injustice is not an option. As we do so we have to take our inspiration from one another, and recognize the inspiration we ourselves have to offer. I and many others have been inspired by Occupy Wall Street. I have also been inspired anew by the people I have met along the way these three weeks – the young environmental campaigner from India organizing her people; the UNICEF advocates in London who are working to help the world understand that climate change is about our children; and many, many others. I know that many young people take inspiration from me and my work, astonished that a guy old enough to be their Dad is still doing the work of activism.
That inspiration that we give to one another is the bridge that carries us to the victories that sometime come out of the blue. Bechtel drops its $50 million case against Bolivia. UNICEF in Canada gets world leaders to commit $6 billion to support maternal and child health in the poorest nations. A handful of public officials in Eastern Europe become champions of renewable energy.
Citizen action is not a science. It is an art in which the most effective path forward begins with a clear-eyed read of circumstance, a mix of wildly different approaches that blend together in unexpected ways, and a belief that you really can make a difference, but only if you give it your best shot.
Jim Shultz is the founder and Executive Director of the Democracy Center.
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