A Voice From the Forest in the Corporate Boardroom

By Tara Houska, Al Jazeera

02 January 20

Only when indigenous people are heard by those financing climate disaster can we stop the destruction, together.

his way of life is not primitive, it is not uncivilised," I gestured to the image on the screen just above my head. It showed my longtime teacher, Dennis Jones, knocking manoomin (wild rice), the grain sacred to Anishinaabe people, into a canoe.

I snapped that photo of us harvesting wild rice years back, before a new pipeline called Line 3 threatened to carry a million barrels of tar sands per day from Alberta through some of the richest wild rice beds in the world, in Anishinaabe territory. 

"It is life in balance, life that doesn't depend on the unspoken, unseen suffering of others for profit," I said.

A few of the corporate bankers sitting across the table from me shifted in their seats, one raised an eyebrow.

These were the representatives of financiers deeply invested in the expansion and continuing entrenchment of the fossil fuel industry.

We were 30 floors up in a New York skyscraper, the city stretched silently below. My eyes looked past the row of mostly interested faces, to the gleaming water past Manhattan.

"Disconnection is what Westernised society indoctrinates into our hearts, our minds, our bodies," I told them.

"We're here in this building of concrete and glass, under these lights. Harvesting wild rice is somewhere else, far away. Just as the tar sands pipeline your company is funding is far away. But concrete is made of stone and water, glass is made of sand, every fibre on your body and your body itself comes from the earth. And the earth is a living, breathing, connected organism."

The banker at the end of the table nodded almost imperceptibly, their eyes grew softer.

For the past hour or so, the civil society representatives sitting opposite the financiers rattled off the science of climate crisis. Charts, graphs, data tracking the self-destruction of humanity flashed across the screen.

This information was a familiar language to the bankers, easier to fend off and explain away through green energy investments, carbon offsetting, climate policy adoption, the myriad of excuses the financial sector offers to avoid the simple truth of its direct funding of the fossil fuel industry in the face of climate disaster. The wall between us and them was palpable. 

But these boardrooms are far less accustomed to indigenous wisdom, to an empathic, values-based assessment of our shared destiny. The impact of indigenous-led campaigns against those funding climate disasters is undeniable. 

As the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) at Standing Rock reached a global audience in 2016 and 2017, so too did the names of the banks funding it. 

Many supporters of the struggle asked how they could help from afar. Pulling their money out of the banks funding the disaster was - and still is - an easy point of intervention.

As the Standing Rock water protectors faced increasingly violent conditions in North Dakota, local shutdowns of bank branches by protesters disrupted the flow of business around the United States.

Shutdowns in North Dakota and neighbouring Minnesota spread nationwide, with Seattle's indigenous-led Mazaska Talks coalition targeting more than 100 banks in a single day at the end of 2017. Meanwhile, the indigenous-led Divest, Invest, Protect programme, supported by the Women's Earth & Climate Action Network, facilitated meetings between European banks and front-line indigenous women in the years following the bulldozing of the camps at Standing Rock.

According to a study by the CU Boulder's First Peoples Investment Engagement Program, targeted divestment against DAPL cost its parent company, Energy Transfer Partners, $4.3bn in city pension fund divestment, another $86m in individual bank account divestment, and refocused momentum into divestment as an ongoing long-term campaign. 

Corporate boardrooms are quickly trying to adjust to and counter the swell of indigenous resistance around the globe, particularly on the issue of land protection. As Big Oil has begun to realise that the growing movement against the extractive industry has real teeth, its financial backers have responded in kind.

These days, most of the major banks have climate policies, commitments in writing to invest and operate sustainably. Chase Bank, for example, has committed to sourcing 100 percent of its own power needs from renewable energy by 2020. It is simultaneously the world's number one funder of fossil fuels. Since 2016, Chase has spent $196bn financing fossil fuels and is the leading banker of fossil fuel expansion.

It appears that hailing the Paris Agreement and slapping photos of wind turbines and setting suns on a company website does not necessarily translate to substantive action.

Indigenous-led resistance against oil infrastructure, mining and extractive industry has a growing base of support; the reverberations of thousands-strong blockades and sage against DAPL, Keystone XL, TransMountain, and Energy East pipelines have reached these air-conditioned, softly carpeted rooms high above city skylines.

Native Americans are not just in textbooks these days, or confined to reservations or the streets of urban centres; we are here in these monied, ostentatious spaces. Indigenous rights policies have started appearing on bank websites - descriptions of the importance of consulting with First Nations, with rights holders. 

More of civil society is coming onboard also - indigenous peoples are not just romanticised tokens in a morality framework of inclusivity, but critical components of actually winning this fight for humanity. 

"I've brought along the data sets, lawsuits, and written material that can convey what I just said in a way that your corporate accountability and risk assessment teams might consider," I explained, sliding across lawsuits by White Earth Nation, Red Lake Band of Ojibwe, and others against Enbridge's Line 3 tar sands pipeline proposed through Anishinaabe wild rice beds.

"Tribal consent is clearly not there for this destructive project. Also included are UN reports of human rights abuses that were enacted on unarmed citizens demonstrating against the Dakota Access Pipeline. There's a security task force already associated with Line 3, readying itself to commit any number of abuses against the citizens of Minnesota."

My mind flashed to the riot line of law enforcement and private security that had faced us a few months before on a remote dirt road in the woods of northern Minnesota. 

"I recognise that my words might appear idealistic, that I do not understand the way of the world, that it cannot change so easily or readily. I wonder, though, when each of you sits here at this table with me, human to human, not banker to consulting party, if you believe humans have truly conquered the earth. If we can live without drinking water. If we are truly civilised when the cost is destruction of our shared home. We're in rough shape, as a species. I hope to look upon the faces of my grandchildren and tell them I did everything I possibly could to give them a better world." 

The last photo clicked into the frame above us. It was a picture I took fishing with my parents, on the lake my people have lived and died beside for thousands of years, in what is now the watery border between Ontario and Minnesota. The sunset shone on Gojiji-zaaaga'igan (Rainy Lake) and outlined islands of tall pines. Inside, my spirit prepared itself to hear my voice describing what a tar sands spill would do to wild rice, our sacred grain. I thought of how Rainy Lake smells, how the stony island shores warm in the sun. My toes shuffled on the carpet as my nose called up a breeze of shadowy forests across blindingly sunny waves of freshwater stretching for hundreds of miles.

I looked back at the upturned faces, at their sharp suits and tired eyes. Reminding a person of their own fragile humanity, of their debt to unborn generations is not an easy undertaking. But neither is maintaining rigid walls of disconnection from the basic truths of life. All of us are in this, together.

Centrist Democrats Need a 2020 Reality Check Before It's Too Late

By Cas Mudde, Guardian UK

02 January 20

In obsessively pursuing white, middle-class midwestern voters, Democratic leaders are setting their party up for disaster

et’s start the new year with a reality check. Remember that dad, uncle or neighbor, who told you over Christmas how much he dislikes Trump’s rude language and that he might vote for the Democrats, if only they nominate a “moderate” candidate and not a “socialist”?

Well, he is going to vote for Trump.

This election year will be (again) filled with columns and op-eds from #NeverTrump Republicans giving (unsolicited) advice to the Democratic party. They will argue that the Democratic party can win the presidential elections, but only if they nominate a “moderate” Democrat, who can win over the many Republicans they know that are appalled by Trump. But you can forget about these Max Boots, Jennifer Rubins, and (particularly) Bret Stephenses. These pet conservatives of the liberal media represent no relevant electoral base.

You can also ignore the reports from “non-partisan” thinktanks – like the Niskanen Center – which show that many Republicans are much more “centrist” than Trump and his Republican party. Polarization in the US is not about party policy but about party identification. In particular it is about negative party identification – and most of these “centrist” Republicans despise or distrust the Democratic party, irrespective of whether it is led by Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders.

Moreover, as long as the US economy is doing well – however shallow the foundations of that prosperity – these people are going to go with Trump, who has provided them with lower taxes and a booming stock market.

By focusing so much resource and strategy on pursuing the “Midwestern voter” (ie, centrist, middle-class whites), Democratic leaders are setting their party up for potentially disastrous failure. Trump is no longer the risky outsider he was in 2016. He is a known quantity; he may not be especially liked, but for many voters he has delivered where it matters: the pocketbook.

Democrats are not going to win over enough “moderate Republicans” to defeat Trump. Nor will suburban white mothers do the trick. The only way to win in 2020 is by mobilizing (potential) new voters and (recent) non-voters. Fortunately, there are more than enough of them. Almost half of Americans do not vote.

However, new voters and non-voters are disproportionately non-white and non-suburban. Many of them are not even registered, or – thanks to Republican purges of voting rolls – no longer registered. This is particularly relevant to African Americans, who – contrary to popular perception – actually have rather high voter turnout, higher than other minorities, but are disproportionately affected by voter suppression (including incarceration).

Despite the efforts of some organizations, most notably Stacey Abrams’ new group Fair Fight, Democrats devote most of their time to reaching already registered voters, rather than registering new voters. Imagine how much the millions of dollars of Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer could have achieved had they spent that money on registering new voters rather than vanity campaigns.

For the Republicans, the 2020 strategy is simple and straightforward: discourage or even disenfranchise minority voters, and mobilize white voters. Both campaigns are well underway and so far very successful. The Democrats seem to take minority voters for granted, yet again, despite low turnout in the 2016 elections. While there is a lot of talk about immigration and racism, the campaign is getting whiter and whiter.

Hispanics openly lament the neglect they experience from almost all Democratic candidates. Given their growing numbers – Hispanics are on track to become the largest group of non-white voters in 2020, and not just in traditionally Democratic states – ignoring them early in the campaign, just because early primary states are so white, is extremely short-sighted.

Perhaps Democrats assume that Hispanics will automatically support any Democrat over Trump, because of his inhumane immigration policies and racist remarks about Mexican immigrants. But, while many Hispanics are concerned about their place in (Trump’s) America, they are not single-issue voters.

In fact, if you remove immigration as an issue, many Hispanics fit socio-culturally and socio-economically as well with Republicans as with Democrats. In fact, in the 2018 midterm elections, the gap was closing rapidly in some key (potential swing) states. Unsurprisingly, given the conservatism of the Cuban-American community, the gap was smallest in Florida – there, just 54% of Hispanics voted for the Democratic candidates for Senate and Governor. In the governor’s races in Arizona and Texas, however, the percentages were the same.

The 2020 elections will not be about changing minds about who to vote for but about whether to vote. The damage done to voter registration in the South alone, following the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, could swing elections. The Democratic electorate the Republicans will “allow” to vote in November will not be enough to defeat Trump; Democrats must protect and expand their base before it’s too late.