A matter of scale

So the Women's March was kind of a big deal, I will write more about it later as right now I am not sure what details I have read are trustworthy, big protests are like that, no one is too reliable when reporting crowd sizes or about disruptions, on either side. But we do know that marches happened on all seven continents, and there were a shitload of people at them, probably putting today in the lead for largest coordinated mass protest ever. It also appears that there was surprisingly little in the way of property damage as well as disproportionate police response.

The latter point doesn't surprise me though, as I said yesterday, the cops made their point about relative power with the smaller, less well organized protests then, and today was all about being as hands off as possible, largely I suspect because you don't want to be responsible for a crowd of a couple hundred thousand people deciding it needs to defend itself right now, and in the middle of a city. Doesn't matter how many riot police you have, nothing is going to stop that.

Karl wrote the other day about how politicians are often pretty terrible at their jobs, and never more so than when they are pushing legislation that is overtly oppressive. He touched on the concept that some of this is self defeating, or at least harmful to their other interests, because even if public opinion doesn't seem to matter to a congressman from a heavily gerrymandered district, it does matter to companies that might be doing business in the state those rules are enacted, as we have seen with North Carolina.

It's a good point, and effective under certain circumstances but not without its downsides, first of course is that the law has to be enacted for that sort of backlash to take effect, and people get hurt until/if it is repealed, another one is economic consequences hurt everyone in the state, not just those who support bigotry, not saying the backlash shouldn't happen mind you, only that it hurts at the same time as it helps. Still, money is one of the better tools we have to fight back against oppressive laws, at least in some circles.

It is not a tool that works in other instances, let's talk about the Dakota Access Pipe Line, I don't know that there has been a project that has been more reviled than this one, at least in the last decade or two, but it took the Army Corps of Engineers to only sort of stop it, and not effectively at that. But despite all the backlash, the protesting, and yes, the news coverage. Can anyone name the company behind the project without looking it up? Gonna guess that a couple of you probably can, but most have to look it up, and that is fine, so did I, the main partner is Energy Transfer Partners, a Fortune 500 company based out of Texas, it's stock price has done nothing but go up along with the rest of the market in the last few years, it hasn't been hurt at all, so has no incentive to change its ways.

The same can be said for every company in the energy industry, particularly fossil fuels. It also applies to companies that primarily work with the government, these companies are, not secret exactly, but they make no effort to attract the attention of the general public, they don't have to, they don't answer to us.

They have no controls on them, and their influence over policy is much greater than that of the religious fanatics over social policies, with effort and suffering, social policies can be fought by the people, but economic and environmental policies are somewhat harder as there is no leverage to be had over the companies that benefit from those policies. They have leverage though, did you know Energy Transfer Partners had a PAC during the election? Of course they did, it was only a modest half million dollars or so, much of which didn't get spent, but a couple hundred grand did, almost exclusively to Republican candidates in Texas, most of whom won their elections.

One of the many stupid attacks on Clinton during the campaign was the idea that she participated in the tradition of "pay to play" via the Clinton Foundation, where access and considerations were given to various interests in return for donations to the foundation. This was stupid and mostly false, oh I have no doubt she promised all kinds of things to all sorts of people, but I do doubt she used her foundation to do it because that would be too easy to find out.
It's also ridiculous because of course our political system operates via "pay to play" The Toddler was the most blatant about it and we elected him!

That is what concerns me most about the coming years, many of the proposed social changes will be fought successfully, others will fall to legal challenges or be rolled back in succeeding years, not without harm to all and sundry, but that damage is repairable, well, not on the individual scale but the societal at least. The only limits these companies have though is those the government imposes, and they have helped to elect a government that has promised to remove those limits. We can survive defunding Planned Parenthood, or rolling back equal protection laws, or even the ACA, but I don't know if we can survive 4-8 more years of unchecked economic plundering from the major corporations, and I really don't know if we can survive another 4-8 years of regression on green initiatives to combat climate change. We are looking at the very real possibility that previously temperate portions of our planet could become uninhabitable by humans in our lifetime, and the people we put in power, and who provide our services, actively don't care.

Now I am not saying the other stuff isn't worth fighting, it is and is really the only target we can reach, fortunately those same politicians who support the ecological destruction of the world, also largely support the physical destruction of women, LGBTQ, and minorities, so there is still leverage to be had over them, not as much as I would like of course, but it's there and if this weekend told us nothing else, it is that there are still a lot of people willing to fight, we do have influence, we just need to use it.