Thursday, August 27, 2020
Proving 'A Different World Is Possible,' Exxon Dropped From Dow Jones After 92-Year Run
"Big Oil has fallen. Our job is to make sure they don't take us down with them."
by
Julia Conley, staff writer
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/08/25/proving-different-world-possible-exxon-dropped-dow-jones-after-92-year-run
Climate campaigners on Tuesday marked a major milestone in the fight to eliminate the use of fossil fuels and transition to a green energy economy as ExxonMobil was dropped from the S&P Dow Jones Industrial Average after nearly a century.
The oil giant, the oldest member of the Dow, was replaced on the index by software company Salesforce as more than 100,000 people were displaced by wildfires raging across California, a third year of global Fridays for Future climate action protests kicked off, and the Republican Party was rebuked for failing to even mention the planetary emergency on the first night of its national convention.
The finance world, 350.org executive director May Boeve said, has been forced to "[wake] up and [cut] ties with these climate criminals."
"Big Oil has fallen," Boeve said. "Our job is to make sure they don't take us down with them. Fossil fuel companies like Exxon knew and lied for decades about the main cause of the devastating impacts we're now experiencing across the globe: from fires, storms, and floods to droughts and rising seas... We are rising up to make polluters pay for their destruction."
Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, credited climate campaigners who have spent decades educating the public about the climate crisis and the dangerous effects of extracting fossil fuels from the Earth, and demanding a transition to renewable sources of energy like solar and wind power.
In April, oil prices fell below $0 per barrel for the first time on record, prompting calls by climate action advocates to nationalize the oil industry rather than continuing to prop it up.
Meanwhile, the solar and wind sectors have grown at a rapid rate in recent decades, with job growth in the renewable field outpacing oil.
"Exxon's deep fall today is another powerful reminder of how fossil fuels are too volatile to be the basis of a resilient economy," said Boeve. "It is past time for Exxon to recognize that it is not only one of the most responsible for the climate crisis, but also that its assets are quickly becoming stranded as we move towards more sustainable, resilient, and regenerative economic systems, based on renewable, accessible, and just energy sources."
A poll taken last year by Business Insider found that a majority of Americans favored transitioning away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy sources, and aligned with other recent findings by Gallup.
Seven oil companies have downgraded their assets by at least $87 billion in the last nine months, while more than 1,200 institutions representing more than $14 trillion in assets have committed to fossil fuel divestment.
"None of this is to say Exxon is officially done for or that it doesn't still hold massive power," wrote Brian Kahn at Earther. "A company worth $175 billion with its tentacles latched onto the Republican Party is still a formidable foe. But it does show a different world is possible. Fingers crossed the Dow Jones can get Chevron out of there next."
Why the DNC's Platform Will Guarantee a Loss If Democrats Don't Do More
Democrats are simply not going to win votes if they see a crisis of this scale and respond with laughably small, do-nothing policy ideas.
by
Morris Pearl
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/08/25/why-dncs-platform-will-guarantee-loss-if-democrats-dont-do-more
Nearly six months into the pandemic, the term “unprecedented” remains the only word to accurately describe the economic, health, and social challenges we currently face. In our country’s 200+ year history, we’ve never seen nearly half the country jobless, over 40 million people at risk of eviction, or at least 26 million going hungry, and we’ve never seen all of this happen at the same time that a lethal disease with no known treatment or cure is running rampant through our communities.
This year of unprecedented national pain and suffering is also a presidential election year. This means our leaders have the prime opportunity to offer Americans big, bold new ideas to guide our country in a better direction through the national party platform. However, thus far the Democrats have only proposed the same tired, age-old solutions for new problems hopelessly beyond the scale of yesterday’s policies. They’ve failed to meet the 2020 moment.
But with the election on the horizon, there’s still time to course-correct.
In the Democrats’ current 2020 platform, there’s a lot of talk about undoing the damage of the Trump administration, especially with regards to the economy, and returning things to their “historical norm.” The problem with that goal is that even before the Trump administration, the American economy wasn’t working for most. It was working fine for me, a former managing director at BlackRock. But for many Americans, going back to normal simply isn’t good enough.
Before the COVID-19 crisis hit, America marked a 50-year high in income inequality as a result of decades of stagnant wages for working folks and the meteoric wealth accumulation by the top 1 percent. A full 40 percent of the country didn’t even have $400 on hand for an emergency expense in the years before COVID-19, and a staggering 78 percent of workers were living paycheck to paycheck. Millions of low-income workers were already getting priced out of homes everywhere in the country, and most had to work two or more jobs just to be able to make rent. At least half the country was suffering before the pandemic in an allegedly “good” economic era. A lot of those people aren’t paying their rent or mortgages, or doing all of the other things that make money trickle up to business people and investors. The Democrats should not be advocating for a return to those times. Democrats should be fighting to entirely redefine what a “good economy” is and reimagining every policy that gets us there.
Reversing some of the most egregious legislation of the Trump administration, like the 2017 tax cuts that amounted to a $1.7 trillion giveaway to the top 1 percent, is a start. And the Democratic platform endorses this. But simply repealing whatever Trump has done is not a positive vision for the future. If ever there was a time to get behind big, bold economic policy ideas like the Green New Deal or a wealth tax, now is the time.
Beyond just undoing the damage of the Trump administration, there’s little in the Democratic platform that one could call big or bold. In the 2020 platform, after months of primary debates on new concepts like wealth taxes and old-but-good ideas like investors paying the same tax rates as people who work for a living, there’s barely a whisper about taxing the rich, and what’s there is vague to the point of meaninglessness.
In 2016, the Democrats pledged to tax the rich like never before, proposing over a trillion dollars in new tax hikes targeted at the top 1 percent. Four years later, our need to tax the rich has never been greater, but the party’s platform is somehow less progressive on it than before. How is the bottom half of the country, the half that was barely eking out a living before the pandemic completely devastated them, supposed to look at that and believe that this is a party that will stand up and fight for them?
Democrats are simply not going to win votes if they see a crisis of this scale and respond with laughably small, do-nothing policy ideas. Millions of people are dying, getting kicked out of their homes, losing their health insurance, and struggling to eat. We are being faced with a historic moment to re-envision our economy, how it works, and more importantly, for who it works. It would be nice to see a 2020 party platform that reflects that.
Protest is not enough to topple a dictator: the army must also turn
Jean-Baptiste Gallopin
holds a PhD in sociology from Yale University, where he works in the field of comparative and historical sociology. He lives in Berlin.
https://aeon.co/ideas/protest-is-not-enough-to-topple-a-dictator-the-army-must-also-turn
What does it take to overthrow a dictator? Reflecting on this question in exile, Leon Trotsky wrote in History of the Russian Revolution (1930):
There is no doubt that the fate of every revolution at a certain point is decided by a break in the disposition of the army … Thus in the streets and squares, by the bridges, at the barrack gates, is waged a ceaseless struggle – now dramatic, now unnoticeable – but always a desperate struggle, for the heart of the soldier.
However solitary the power of an authoritarian leader might seem, dictators never rule alone. When enforcers shirk duty or rebel, the regime collapses. When they stay loyal, the regime stands. Mass protests alone are never enough.
During the Tunisian revolution, the mutiny that ultimately led to the president Zine el Abidine Ben Ali’s flight from power on 14 January 2011 started in an elite police unit exceptionally deployed to protect the Ministry of Interior against the biggest demonstration to date. When protesters marched on to the presidential palace, disobedience spread to the other security forces, and Ben Ali was forced to flee hours later. When police turned, the regime fell.
But why military and police forces decide to follow one course of action over another is poorly understood. Prevailing explanations of military defection during revolutionary uprisings emphasise personal or corporate interests. In this logic, grievances spur to action rebel officers, who hope for a better deal in a new political system. Loyalists, for their part, seek to preserve their material advantages.
Behind this hard-nosed Hobbesian realism, the argument rests on a simple, commonsense account: people do what is most advantageous to them. The claim is appealing when made from a distance and with the benefit of hindsight. But it struggles to explain why men who have dedicated their career to the service of a government and who have forged their professional identity on a bedrock of discipline would come to turn around and commit insubordination. The argument gives us no account of how members of the armed and security forces come to change their understanding of their interests when facing a mass unrest.
The decision to rebel is a far cry from the execution of obvious and well-understood material interests. It is also easy to overlook how profound an ethical dilemma mass repression can pose to professional soldiers and policemen. Consider a country in the midst of a full-scale uprising. Tens or hundreds of thousands of demonstrators fill the streets of its capital city. The authoritarian ruler can no longer rely on his secret police and riot-response units. He must mobilise reserve forces, who typically carry live ammunition and have no training or experience in dealing with crowds. These men face a stark choice. Defending the regime comes at the price of massive bloodshed. Shirking duty or rebelling carry the threat of court martial and death.
Even for those with experience in repression, being made to kill tens or hundreds of innocents is often a deeply unpleasant prospect. The dilemma is first ethical and individual: it betrays a stark choice between serving one’s government and serving one’s country. But it quickly becomes collective. When an officer becomes aware that he’s not alone in his conundrum, he begins to wonder whether his colleagues will follow orders. From this doubt emerges the possibility of his own disobedience.
Military and police mutinies rarely break out in the face of small demonstrations, but reliably occur when revolutionary uprisings reach a critical mass, making unconscionable largescale killing the government’s only survival option. This year, scattered protesters in Sudan defied security forces for more than three months without prompting largescale defections; but when the opposition converged in a sit-in in front of the military’s headquarters on 6 April, soldiers wavered. On the second day, they protected demonstrators against loyalist militias. And on 12 April, the military and security apparatus turned against the president Omar al-Bashir.
Rebellions that begin during uprisings often spread like wildfire throughout the military and security apparatus. The Russian revolution of 1917 began when the Volynsky Life-Guards Regiment ‘refused to serve as executioners any longer’, as the Soviet historian E N Burdzhalov put it in 1967; the mutiny then propagated rapidly to neighbouring regiments in Petrograd. Burdzhalov writes that, by the evening, ‘no tsarist general could have taken charge of the situation to save the autocracy’.
It would be a mistake, however, to read these dynamics primarily as symptoms of widespread, longstanding grievances within the armed and security forces. They owe more, instead, to officers’ attempts to align themselves with one another. Once a mutiny begins, the threat of fratricidal violence between loyalists and rebels weighs heavily over officers’ calculations. Would-be loyalists will often go along with a mutiny to avoid infighting. In Tunisia, the head of the rebellion against Ben Ali rallied two additional units by pretending to act on orders; when his colleagues understood that he had lied, they remained on his side instead of turning their weapons against him. Minutes later, Ben Ali’s head of security, a loyalist, convinced the president to board a plane to Saudi Arabia, saying he feared ‘a bloodbath’.
In other cases, potential rebels will abstain from joining a mutiny that they think will fail. In China, troops fraternised with demonstrators on Tiananmen Square in 1989, while officers publicly condemned the government’s decision to declare martial law. Despite this vacillation, no officer took the initiative to mount an open rebellion. The government reasserted the initiative and decisively crushed the uprising.
In the language of game theory, such mutinies are coordination games: situations in which individuals seek to follow the same line of conduct at the expense of their own preferences because acting at cross purposes represents the worst possible outcome for everyone. Each must figure out what others will do, which is why expectations – mutual beliefs about what comes next – drive behaviour. Whether mutinies in revolutionary moments succeed or fail owes more to rebels’ ability to create the impression that they will ineluctably succeed than to the pre-existing grievances of their colleagues.
The point has deep epistemological implications for our understanding of revolutionary outcomes. Uprisings often begin in similar ways but take wildly different paths, from political revolutions to authoritarian restoration, civil war and social revolutions. Social scientific analyses of revolutions typically seek to see past the turmoil of events to uncover subterranean patterns of causation linking slow-moving factors – the makeup of social classes, state structure, economic conditions – to different outcomes. But if armed forces make or break revolutions, and if their stance owes to events occurring on the temporal scale of hours or even minutes, then the explanatory value of such ‘structural’ accounts of revolutions loses much of its edge. To explain why countries diverge, we need, instead, to develop better theories regarding the impact of typical revolutionary events, such as mass protests, defections and mutinies.
It may only take 3.5% of the population to topple a dictator – with civil resistance
The United States has a rich history with effective uses of nonviolent resistance. It’s time to become familiar with it
Erica Chenoweth
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/01/worried-american-democracy-study-activist-techniques
Many people across the United States are despondent about the new president – and the threat to democracy his rise could represent. But they shouldn’t be. At no time in recorded history have people been more equipped to effectively resist injustice using civil resistance.
Today, those seeking knowledge about the theory and practice of civil resistance can find a wealth of information at their fingertips. In virtually any language, one can find training manuals, strategy-building tools, facilitation guides and documentation about successes and mistakes of past nonviolent campaigns.
Material is available in many formats, including graphic novels, e-classes, films and documentaries, scholarly books, novels, websites, research monographs, research inventories, and children’s books. And of course, the world is full of experienced activists with wisdom to share.
The United States has its own rich history – past and present – of effective uses of nonviolent resistance. The technique established alternative institutions like economic cooperatives, alternative courts and an underground constitutional convention in the American colonies resulting in the declaration of independence. In 20th century, strategic nonviolent resistance has won voting rights for women and for African Americans living in the Jim Crow south.
Nonviolent resistance has empowered the labor movement, closed down or cancelled dozens of nuclear plants, protected farm workers from abuse in California, motivated the recognition of Aids patients as worthy of access to life-saving treatment, protected free speech, put climate reform on the agenda, given reprieve to Dreamers, raised awareness about economic inequality, changed the conversation about systemic racism and black lives and stalled construction of an oil pipeline on indigenous lands in Standing Rock.
In fact, it is hard to identify a progressive cause in the United States that has advanced without a civil resistance movement behind it.
This does not mean nonviolent resistance always works. Of course it does not, and short-term setbacks are common too. But long-term change never comes with submission, resignation, or despair about the inevitability and intractability of the status quo.
And among the different types of dissent available (armed insurrection or combining armed and unarmed action), nonviolent resistance has historically been the most effective. Compared with armed struggle, whose romanticized allure obscures its staggering costs, nonviolent resistance has actually been the quickest, least costly, and safest way to struggle. Moreover, civil resistance is recognized as a fundamental human right under international law.
Nonviolent resistance does not happen overnight or automatically. It requires an informed and prepared public, keen to the strategy and dynamics of its political power. Although nonviolent campaigns often begin with a committed and experienced core, successful ones enlarge the diversity of participants, maintain nonviolent discipline and expand the types of nonviolent actions they use.
They constantly increase their base of supporters, build coalitions, leverage social networks, and generate connections with those in the opponent’s network who may be ambivalent about cooperating with oppressive policies.
Crucially, nonviolent resistance works not by melting the heart of the opponent but by constraining their options. A leader and his inner circle cannot pass and implement policies alone. They require cooperation and obedience from many people to carry out plans and policies.
In the US on Tuesday, dozens of lawmakers have said they will boycott confirmation votes for Trump nominees. Numerous police departments countrywide have announced that they will not comply with unethical federal policies (particularly regarding deportations). And the federal government employs more than 3 million civil servants – people on whose continued support the US government relies to implement its policies. Many such civil servants have already begun important conversations about how to dissent from within the administration. They, too, provide an important check on power.
The Women’s March on Washington and its affiliated marches – which may have been the largest single-day demonstration in US history – show a population eager and willing to show up to defend their rights.
Of course, nonviolent resistance often evokes brutality by the government, especially as campaigns escalate their demands and use more disruptive techniques. But historical data shows that when campaigns are able to prepare, train, and remain resilient, they often succeed regardless of whether the government uses violence against them.
Historical studies suggest that it takes 3.5% of a population engaged in sustained nonviolent resistance to topple brutal dictatorships. If that can be true in Chile under Gen Pinochet and Serbia under Milosevic, a few million Americans could prevent their elected government from adopting inhumane, unfair, destructive or oppressive policies – should such drastic measures ever be needed.
Forget protest. Trump's actions warrant a general national strike
Francine Prose
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The anti-Trump resistance will fail if we don't ditch establishment Democrats
Bhaskar Sunkara
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