Amy Goodman: Power Shift vs. The Powers That Be

[marmar]

from truthdig:




Power Shift vs. The Powers That Be

Posted on Apr 19, 2011
By Amy Goodman


More than 10,000 people converged in Washington, D.C., this past week to discuss, organize, mobilize and protest around the issue of climate change. While tax day tea party gatherings of a few hundred scattered around the country made the news, this massive gathering, Power Shift 2011, was largely ignored by the media. They met the week before Earth Day, around the first anniversary of the BP oil rig explosion and the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, while the Fukushima nuclear plant still spews radioactivity into the environment. Against such a calamitous backdrop, this renewed movement’s power and passion ensure that it won’t be ignored for long.

Rallying those attending to the work ahead, environmentalist, author and founder of 350.org Bill McKibben said: “This city is as polluted as Beijing. But instead of coal smoke, it’s polluted by money. Money warps our political life, it obscures our vision. ... We know now what we need to do, and the first thing we need to do is build a movement. We will never have as much money as the oil companies, so we need a different currency to work in, we need bodies, we need creativity, we need spirit.”

The organizers of Power Shift describe it as an intensive boot camp, training a new generation of organizers to go back to their communities and build the movement that McKibben called for. Three areas are targeted by the organizers: Catalyzing the Clean Energy Economy, Campus Climate Challenge 2.0 and Beyond Dirty Energy. The campaigns cross major sectors of U.S. society. The move for a clean-energy economy has been embraced by the AFL-CIO, seeing the potential for employment in construction of wind turbines, installation of solar panels and, one of the potentially greenest and oft-ignored sectors, retrofitting of existing buildings with energy efficiencies such as better insulation and weatherproofing.

On April 18, tax day, thousands held a “Make Big Polluters Pay” rally, targeting the fossil-fuel and nonrenewable-energy industries. The demonstrators gathered in Lafayette Park, a traditional protest square wedged between the White House and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. As Bill McKibben said, the Chamber “spends more money lobbying than the next five lobbies combined. It spent more money on politics last year than the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee combined, and 94 percent of that went to climate deniers.” ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/power_shift_vs_the_powers_that_be_20110419/