[Part 2 of the Beyond the Underpants Gnomes series, a response to Bill McKibben]
If you want to win the social justice game, first you have to figure out where you’re going to play.
Enviro groups do a lot at the local and state level, and they also go after individual corporations. But the heart of their effort, where the Big Boys play, is DC politics.
As the healthcare and stimulus fights have painfully demonstrated, that board is tilted against us. Yes, some effort has to be made around DC fights like cap-and-trade. But on the DC board, right now the best outcome we can hope for is a crappy, watered down mess. If global warming is as much of a threat as enviros say it is, we need to play to win — and that means there’s no point in wasting a whole lot more time on DC for the next few years.
Where do we go? To two boards where the odds are much better. First up: the Corporate Accountability Board.
The Corporate Accountability Board
Just because we can’t get strong federal or global laws passed doesn’t mean we can’t change the rules of play.
When Wal-Mart decided to go green — and drag its subcontractors with it — it wasn’t because of Beltway bills. Wal-Mart did it because it was a smart way of deflecting the heat it was taking from union, enviro, and other community activists (and going green cost a hell of a lot less corporate power than going union).
Enviros have had some remarkable successes going after corporations, and that’s just from isolated campaigns. Suppose groups across the globe banded together and, drawing in millions of people who are fed up with getting stepped on by corporations, acted together around a common strategic plan?
For example, let’s say Enviro groups around the globe declared, since Copenhagen failed, we’re putting on notice Microsoft, Apple, Dell, Toshiba, and Lenovo in computers; Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Heineken Holding, and SABMiller in beverages; AT&T, Verizon, Nippon, Deutche Telekom, and Telefonica in Telecomm , etc. – the biggest players in each industry on the planet. We’re going to rank you on how you’re doing in getting us to producing less than 350 parts per million of CO2 in our atmosphere.
If you’re serious about stopping global warming – and you’ve got the plans and the hard stats to prove it – we’ll work with you to help you succeed.
If you don’t? Everywhere you are, we’re going to be in your face – with our bodies, our 401(k)s & union pensions, our campus’ investment funds, our union power, our consumer power, our Facebook accounts, our local government’s & campus’ contracts, and everything else we got. You thought government regs were going to be bad? Wait till you get a taste of people power.
Is pulling off this kind of massive corporate campaign a gianormous ask? Yes. But not for the reasons you might expect.
You might think putting all the pieces together would be the hardest part. But if we were acting together, we’d have an enormous pool of talent to draw on — enviros, union activists, and other community activists around the globe who have years of experience running corporate campaigns. As somebody who’s played a bit part in a few national and international corporate campaigns outside the enviro world, I don’t see any logistical or tactical reasons we couldn’t pull this off.
It might not feel doable to you, but that’s because you aren’t used to seeing us take advantage of the real power we have at our disposal. Most of the time we choose to play on boards where, like Copenhagen, we’ve got pieces too puny to make a winning hand.
And the great thing about playing big on the corporate accountability board is that our execution doesn’t have to be flawless to succeed. On such a scale, we can make plenty of mistakes and still rack up impressive victories. In fact, as you’ll see in the next post, just announcing the campaign and getting it rolling in a half-assed way could be a huge motivator for hundreds of corporations to start getting their act together. And in turn, getting a few small wins before we really have our act together could be a huge motivator for our folks to get it together.
The real stumbling block? The one that’s most likely to stomp us? Getting enviros to play nicely together. Boy, that wouldn’t be easy. On the national and international corporate campaigns I’ve worked on, when they’ve failed 9 times out of 10 it’s been because of internal politics.
But if enviros believe the climate crisis is really life-and-death, shouldn’t they be willing to step up? Put it another way: if consumers need to start bringing bags to the grocery store to save the planet, is it too much to ask enviros to start leaving their egos at home?
Up next: how McKibben’s Copenhagen vigils could’ve played out on the corporate accountability board.
