John Stauber on MoveOn et al:
MoveOn has fallen into the same top-down rut that all the big national public interest and environmental groups are in. MoveOn raises millions and millions of dollars each year, but the dollars go into marketing, advertising, and candidates, and not into empowering the 3.2 million people on their list. Similarly, the Big Green environmental organizations, the largest DC-based environmental lobby and marketing entities like Environmental Defense, NRDC and others, together raise and spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year from foundations and grassroots individuals. Billions of dollars over the past decade have been raised and spent by these ten or so largest and best branded environmental (non-profit) corporations. Yet despite the popularity of the environmental cause and the way environmental health issues cut across partisan politics, despite the fire and volunteerism at the grassroots where people are fighting and winning battles such as stopping new coal plants, this national movement of giant non-profit lobby organizations is politically impotent. Why? Because ever since the 1970s all the money that flows from the grassroots and from foundations, for the most part, is spent on everything but empowering and organizing and assisting the grassroots, who are starved of the money for organizers, offices, communications, strategy development and political training.
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Comments
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ce1907 Posted 8:59 pm
04 Aug 2008
what is done? by whom? where? with what results?
the presence of big groups, and ability to generate a firestorm on ass of pols who suggest brown legislation, has a powerful effect
but you have to measure it against what would happen without them. hard to measure
Also, challenging agency rules. important
this type of blanket assault is not well reasoned
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setb Posted 11:56 pm
04 Aug 2008
They assume that the these rubes have been duped, instead of the more obvious answer being that they agree with the aims, message, strategy & tactics of the organization they're giving their money to.
Go start your own group- show us how it's done.
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John Stauber Posted 12:05 am
05 Aug 2008
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Big_Green
This link above will take you to a an article on the edited wiki SourceWatch titled "Big Green". The article contains various critiques of the big non-profit environmental corporations, critiques over the years from writers and activists including Mark Dowie, Jeffrey St. Clair, Brian Tokar, Peter Montague, me and others.
My statement is no screed, it's just a fact. The biggest challenge facing the green movement is how to create powerful change starting at the grassroots. The huge national and transnational environmental organizations that have been built since 1970, when I was a highschooler organizing the first Earth Day, have spent billions of dollars over the past almost 40 years, and yet the green movement is politically weak and disorganized. Indeed, they are feared little by polluting corporations who have learned well how to communicate, coopt and even fund them. Politicians and lobbyists understand their weaknesses and especially their failure to educate and mobilize at the grassroots.
We need to redirect money and resources away from the top and to the grassroots, building infrastructure and democratic power at the local, congressional and state level. The lobby organizations based in DC should be accountable to that structure, not view the grassroots as simply a fundraising an online petition pool.
No existing top down group, whether government, big business or non-profit advocacy corporation, is going to allow itself to be democratized. Power doesn't dissolve itself. It will take activists and funders with a fundamentally democratic vision, faith in populist organizing, and an ability to collaborate, to create new vehicles for social change that can meet the massive challenges of climate, energy, poverty and corporate domination of civil culture and political policy. Marrying together the best tactics of the new 'netroots' with the wisdom and skills of grassroots organizing -- that's the way to go if we are going to move greens from whining to winning.
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