The Rude Pundit - Climate March: If All the Trees Fell in the Forest...

[meegbear]

So 310,000 or so people marched in New York City yesterday, calling for action of some kind to address climate change. It was an officially sanctioned, widely-advertised, well-funded protest. To all who participated, awesome. If you've never been to a giant march before, it's bracing in a way that few things are. You are surrounded by people who believe the same as you, you learn that you are not alone, and you discover a few new things, like how to argue your views and that, however radical you thought you were, drum circles are fucking idiotic and put the fuckin' things away already. Tolerance only goes so far, and someone's gonna end up with a giant puppet up his ass.

Of course, the people who were there felt amazing about it. How could you not? And, of course, it was barely covered by the news networks. Maybe if a dozen fucknuts wearing colonial drag and open-carrying machine guns while riding on their Rascal scooters had been part of it, it would have been 24/7, motherfuckers, 24/7, with a goddamned countdown clock leading up to it. The most extensive coverage was from Al-Jazeera America, The Guardian, and Democracy Now, and two of those aren't even from this country originally.

The Rude Pundit will admit feeling more than a little cynical about the march. If it's the start of some sustained action, groovy. Certainly, today's "Flood Wall Street" protest and semi-occupation are a good deal more radical but those are still getting all the attention of a flea fart in a hurricane.

And that's because why bother, huh? Especially when the march is endorsed by, for example, the Climate Group, which counts as its members Duke Energy, known for coal ash and pollution, and, for everyone flooding Wall Street right now, Goldman Sachs. Yes, it does do some good for the environment, but it does so with the tacit approval of those it should be dismantling. It's like if Batman asked the Joker if it's ok if he takes down Mr. Freeze.

The other problem is that, for the most part, Americans fall into two camps: Don't give a fat monkey fuck about climate change or don't understand it, don't believe it, and won't lift a fucking finger to help. Change a chunk of minds there and we've got a chance. The Rude Pundit couldn't help but think that if everyone who spent money on signs and plane and bus tickets and more had pooled that for ads in congressional campaigns across the country, the effect might have been even greater.

You wanna do something about climate change other than take a nice walk on a pretty nice, if a bit humid, day? You better make sure that the House turns Democratic and then you better make sure that the Senate doesn't have more than 40 dumbfucks on global warming. If you don't vote climate denialists out, then fuck it, we're done here.

To go further, frankly, Chris Hedges is right when he said, as he did in August, "Play by the rules and we lose." Or as he said this past Saturday, "We will have to speak in the language of ... revolution. We will have to carry out acts of civil disobedience that seek to cripple the mechanisms of corporate power. The corporate elites, blinded by their lust for profit and foolish enough to believe they can protect themselves from climate change, will not veer from our path towards ecocide unless they are forced from power. And this means the beginning of a titanic clash between our corporate masters and ourselves."

But even that is dreaming. Right now, the corporate/government state is so entrenched in silencing real dissent, real revolutionary voices, that anyone who tried genuine radical action would immediately be punished. And everyone else will get so distracted when the iPhone 7, 8, 9, infinity comes out that they won't notice that they are wading through water or walking in deserts that used to be our cities to get to the Apple store first.

Frankly, the bigger news might be that the Rockefeller Brothers Fund plans to divest itself of anything fossil fuel-related, to the tune of $50 billion. That's real money, even by oil company standards, and it might be a sign that the way to attack the climate change problem is, as ever, to follow the (heaps of) money.

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2014/09/climate-march-if-all-trees-fell-in.html

[deutsey]

1. The Rude Pundit captures how I'm feeling

[hatrack]

2. Rude K, Rude R

[Dustlawyer]

3. I tend to agree. If networks were established however, with all of those people coming together

then it was a great thing. If the Rockelellers divested due to the awareness raised by the coming March, that alone was worth it.
The problem is that we are a step ahead of ourselves. Climate Change will not be seriously addressed by Congress until we have Representatives who do not owe their seat to the fossil fuel industry and big business. We must first change how we elect our Representatives. We need Publicly Funded Federal, State, and Local Elections (PFE's) to gain control over OUR Representatives again. We must take the money out of Congress! As long as Congress and campaign finance remain the same nothing will happen.

[mountain grammy]

5. Agree, and the corruption of money and influence goes far beyond campaigns..

the incessant lobbying and the revolving door for lawmakers and regulators. Government posts, whether elected or appointed, are often just a step towards future riches if one plays the game.
Our "for the people" government is a joke.

[Dustlawyer]

8. Eric Cantor is the poster boy for the Revolving Door

corruption. He has no background in what that financial company does yet he probably makes more than all but the CEO.
They don't even try to hide it anymore.

[mountain grammy]

9. Exactly what I was thinking..

[adirondacker]

14. Using Bush/Cheney as role models is what idiots can aspire to. nt

[BlancheSplanchnik]

4. as ever, the Rude is exactly right.

It is very hard to get around the fact that we billions upon billions upon billions of people depend on the massive corporate structures which sustain our day to day life.

To think that life with billions upon billions of people--not too far from 10 billion of us humans now--would function in any way we can even imagine, without the goods and delivery systems structure they provide is....fantasy land.

[Enthusiast]

6. Kicked and recommended a whole bunch!

[toby jo]

7. What a shit turd this dick is.

This march is phenomenal. It is civil disobedience. It is what is called for and needed. Changing things over doesn't happen in one big orgasmic moment of enlightenment. It takes a lot of hard work. It's accompanied by a lot of disappointment.

What a selfish, "I know so much better" bullshit rant.

Balls to the people who made it into Manhattan for the march. Have you ever tried to manage Manhattan on a good day? It's a bitch.
But a march, getting there with 300,000 people along for the ride? OMG, fucking ridiculous.

I couldn't because….. . Fill in the blank, asshats.

Of course more work is needed. We know corruption exists. It's not new, Johnny rude head. Get over your need for instant gratification and humbly jump down into the trenches of reality, how bout it?

[daleanime]

11. Did we read different essays?

[WHEN CRABS ROAR]

13. That march wasn't civil disobedience, it had the cooperation

of all types of official entities, having said that, lets hope that this is just a start on a long hard road to solving something that might be unsolvable.

You do realize that it will take all the nations of the world working closely together with resolve, in a new open cooperation to even put a dent in this dire situation that we find ourselves in.

We may be already past the tipping point.

[starroute]

10. Voting doesn't change anything -- scaring the shit out of them does

The New Deal wouldn't have happened without fear of bloody revolution. The Vietnam War didn't end because people rose up in a wave to vote against Richard Nixon.

In a year when the Koch brothers alone are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the midterms, a few hundred thousand donated to local Democratic candidates in a scattershot fashion would be meaningless. And that's even aside from the fact that the vast majority of House seats are so gerrymandered as to be either safely Republican or safely Democratic. It would take a wave election to turn the House Democratic at this point -- and wave elections don't happen because some climate change organizers throw their pennies into the kitty instead of getting out on the streets.

And beyond that is the fact that most of the Democratic Party is as sold out as the Republicans to corporate interests, because corporate money speaks a lot louder than those pennies from eager activists.

To bring about change, you have to leverage what you've got. And what the activists have isn't money -- it's people in the streets, boots on the ground, and passionate story-telling.

[daleanime]

12. If voting changes nothing.....

Last edited Tue Sep 23, 2014, 08:04 PM - Edit history (1)

why are they working so hard to keep people from doing it.

[starroute]

15. Because they want to take the country backwards

Unfettered voting is pretty good for maintaining the status quo. If you want to dismember Sociaal Security, Medicare, and unemployment and have a free hand to rape the rivers and mountains, you need to disenfranchise a lot more people.