[Part 3 of the Beyond the Underpants Gnomes series, a response to Bill McKibben]
Imagine if McKibben had decided to use the same move — vigils and other protests — but did it on the Corporate Accountability Board. Here’s how it might have played out.
Nine months before Copenhagen, 350.org would’ve said, f**k Copenhagen — it’s going to be a joke. Politicians have given up on saving us, so it’s time for the rest of us around the globe to step up.
In the next nine months, everyone from activists to academics to accountants, from India to Indiana, are going to start talking amongst ourselves about what it would take to get the biggest, most profitable corporations around the globe to do their part in getting us under 350.
We aren’t going to waste any energy on the Copenhagen farce. But during the same week as Copenhagen, we’ll have our own “No-Joke Copenhagen” meetings (that’s a placeholder name — yes, I know it sucks). In vigils and teach-ins around the planet, we’ll get millions of folks up to speed. We’ll share stories within our own communities and with other communities, and we’ll talk – and stream and twitter — about the power we have to save the planet if we are willing to take it.
We’ll also teach each other about which corporations are being naughty and which ones are being nice — from what we can see as workers, as community members, as scientists, as financial analysts, and as students. And we’re going to ask millions of folks to sign up — for the industries where they want to help “thank ‘em & spank ‘em” and for the enviros/church/etc. groups out of which they want to work.
And instead of our spending the week shouting outside the main Copenhagen meeting, hoping to get heard? We’ll spend it watching hundreds of corporate flacks scrambling to convince everybody that their company is one of the nice ones — they’re really, really, really serious about global warming, and they’ve got the hard numbers to prove it.
At the end of the No-Joke Copenhagen week — the biggest hard-core global teach-in in the history of the world — we’re going to tell the multinational corporate leaders they’ve got nine months to get their act together. Because we’re going to spend the next nine months gearing up, working out the details of each industry campaign.
Would this be simple to do? No. There’s a lot we have to figure out.
For example, corporations aren’t going to sit still — they’re going to play every card they’ve got to undermine this movement. So any strategic plan would have to talk about what the “naughty” corporations might try doing and how we’d respond.
But this ain’t rocket science. Plenty of activists have experience dealing with these issues — even when working across the globe in many cultures and languages and in many different types of political environments (e.g., Western enviros rarely have to worry about getting shot by the cops).
The difference is that with this campaign, operating at this scale, we’ve got much better cards to play then we normally do. Usually corporations win because too few people notice when a company stomps folks into the ground. But here? Pity the poor corporation that was the first to get caught playing dirty — the one folks across the globe retaliated against with everything we’ve got to make sure other corporations get the memo.
We could even get proactive. For instance, when rating a corporation’s naughtiness/niceness, we could include how they spend their PR and lobbying money. If they switch to fluorescent light bulbs but keep spending millions fighting green laws, they’re going to get spanked (or at least a time-out).
So yes, there’d be a lot to work out. Yes, it would be hard. But Mission Impossible it’s not.
Maybe you’re still daunted by how much work it would take. So stop for a second and ask yourself a question. It’s a little more than a week after Copenhagen. How do you feel right now? Are you feeling hopeful? Fired up? Powerful? Really?
Then imagine what you would feel like right now if we’d spent the last nine months playing on the Corporate Accountability Board — and if we’d just spent a week with folks around the globe exploring the power we have as we gear up to use it.
So you tell me. Despite all the obstacles we might face, which way do you wish we’d played? How do you wish you felt at the start of this new year?
Up next: playing on the Local Board
