While climates continue heating up, politics remain same as usual

Editor’s note: This is a continuation of series of columns showing the challenges facing political leaders at local and higher levels, especially those with a commitment to the environment who look ahead to challenges like climate change and encourage their constituents to do the same. You can read previous parts here, here or here. There’s no doubt Spokane’s recently ousted Mayor Mary Verner understands the climate change-peak oil-food insecurity and deafening reality of a chaotic world through economic collapse tied to lack of resilient communities. She’s told me previously that radical change is necessary to get cities moving in right directions. But politicians have so many intellectual glass ceilings, governors on accelerators and too many people and organizations they are beholden to. Another former mayor, Salt Lake City’s Rocky Anderson, made the case for the spinelessness of politicians running for office, especially higher offices, on Democracy Now Dec. 13, 2011. He was speaking about Mitt Romney’s shifting platform and Newt Gingrich’s hypocrisy on climate change and energy. “These politicians are not leaders. They’re led around by polls and political considerations. I was mayor of the capital of probably the most conservative state in the country,” Anderson said. “We reduced greenhouse gas emissions from operations by 31 percent in three years. I spoke around the country about best practices, the dangers of climate change, how we all need to come together.” “I spoke at three of the United Nations Conference of the Parties meetings, what solutions are and how we can contribute to them. I’ve been working at this for years, and I’ve stayed entirely consistent. You see these people bouncing back and forth. They’re unrecognizable from one moment to another. It’s because of the basest political considerations. How are they to be trusted? In the end, how is the public interest going to be served, when they’re looking at nothing but polls, rather than what needs to be done?” For Verner, Spokane’s political and intellectual climates proved difficult to traverse. Leadership means making bargains with the devil. Like Sam Adams in Portland, a mayor can talk about sustainability, but the reality is that business as usual only gets blasted away with tactics of what the Occupy Movement is drawing on the national media front. Adams, an openly gay mayor, has repudiated Occupy Portland, and his green creed is meaningless in a city where cops shoot unarmed people of color. Verner, too, got lassoed by Otto Zehm largely because she got wrangled by the 1 percenters in the higher echelons of “policedom” and by the rank-and-file protectors of the 99 percent. Breaking blue means going green. What sort of community can live with solar panels, wind energy and French-fry smelling city fleets when there’s no housing for poor or decent jobs, schools are in disrepair, food insecurity abounds, and violent cops perpetrate crimes against citizens? In many ways, Verner was afraid of confrontation, adopting a consensus-based management style when leadership, creativity, a defined voice, and chutzpah could break this stranglehold on the big boys club. She should have had open dialogue with Envision Spokane organizers and embraced a stronger ethos tied to the environment. Even the progressive Fuse Washington couldn’t endorse Proposition One, because as an organization, it’s tied to old-style Democratic politics. Fuse didn’t vote for or against the Community Bill of Rights, saying “there is not a progressive consensus on this issue.” Fuse also waited until four days before the mayoral election before endorsing Verner. I’ve heard from a few progressives here that they didn’t vote for Verner (nor Condon) because of her wavering on environmental issues like megaloads, coal trains, and others. While Utah’s Anderson has interesting things to discuss about presidential candidates and his Justice Party candidacy, he shows his lack of spine. Asked recently why he did not opt for a Green Party candidacy, he said: “I think the Green Party has a lot of great people and a good platform. But there are organizational problems. I think they’re perceived as being sort of a sliver of just the left in this country. We’re attracting a multi-partisan group of people. We’ve been contacted by Republicans, Libertarians, Democrats, people across the political spectrum that have just had enough. They know there’s got to be another way.” It’s this sort of hot potato logic that shows lack of guts, denigrating a third party that has won battles. (Disclosure: I worked on the Green Party presidential-vice presidential campaign for Nader/LaDuke and have supported its causes and candidates for 20-plus years.) We need to look at why Anderson doesn’t support direct action protests tied to climate change for why politics is so damaged. He was quoted in an Outside article about Tim Christopher, who is serving two years for a non-violent, zero-expense-depleting crime of falsely bidding on Bureau of Land Management land to keep pristine areas of the West out of gas leasers’ hands. In December 2008, DeChristopher, a 27-year-old University of Utah undergrad, traveled to the BLM office in Salt Lake City, joining a protest against gas leasing of 77 parcels totaling 150,000 acres. Much of the territory was near Arches and Canyonlands national parks. These leases grant companies the right to extract oil or gas almost indefinitely. Read the entire profile on Tim here to understand how messed up the justice system, Interior Department, and media are. Anderson says this about the actions of DeChristopher or future climate change protester’s non-violent direct action: “If the public sees climate-protection advocates as young, impetuous people who engage in fraud without really knowing what they’re doing, then claiming that they shouldn’t be held accountable under the law, I fear he’s set us back. Tim’s actions were dishonest and incoherent.” Breaking newsflash: Time magazine just declared its “Person of the Year” honor for 2011 to “the protester” — individuals who have clamored for change in all parts of the world. “In each place, discontent that had been simmering for years got turned up to a boil,” Kurt Andersen writes. “They are protesting corruption and the lack of real freedom and true democracy.” More here.