Whenever I see "liberals" who collaborate with the forces of darkness, I am not entirely surprised--power and ego are a powerful mixture--and I immediately have a flash of Jack London's treatment of the nature of a scab:
After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he made a scab.
A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles.
When a scab comes down the street, men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and the devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out.
No man (or woman) has a right to scab so long as there is a pool of water to drown his carcass in, or a rope long enough to hang his body with. Judas was a gentleman compared with a scab. For betraying his master, he had character enough to hang himself. A scab has not.
Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. Judas sold his Savior for thirty pieces of silver. Benedict Arnold sold his country for a promise of a commission in the British army. The scab sells his birthright, country, his wife, his children and his fellowmen for an unfulfilled promise from his employer.
Esau was a traitor to himself; Judas was a traitor to his God; Benedict Arnold was a traitor to his country; a scab is a traitor to his God, his country, his family and his class.
True, he was referring mainly to the fight for class justice. But, it has a broader meaning applicable to today's scab on climate change: Larry Tribe.
From The New York Times:
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has begun an aggressive campaign to block President Obama’s climate change agenda in statehouses and courtrooms across the country, arenas far beyond Mr. McConnell’s official reach and authority.
The campaign of Mr. McConnell, the Senate majority leader, is aimed at stopping a set of Environmental Protection Agency regulations requiring states to reduce carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants, the nation’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.
Once enacted, the rules could shutter hundreds of coal-fired plants in what Mr. Obama has promoted as a transformation of the nation’s energy economy away from fossil fuels and toward sources like wind and solar power. Mr. McConnell, whose home state is one of the nation’s largest coal producers, has vowed to fight the rules.
And who is assisting McConnell in his quest to kill the planet:
To make his case, Mr. McConnell is also relying on a network of powerful allies with national influence and roots in Kentucky or the coal industry. Within that network is Laurence H. Tribe, a highly regarded scholar of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and a former mentor of Mr. Obama’s. Mr. Tribe caught Mr. McConnell’s attention last winter when he was retained to write a legal brief for Peabody Energy, the nation’s largest coal producer, in a lawsuit against the climate rules.
n the brief, Mr. Tribe argued that Mr. Obama’s use of the existing Clean Air Act to put forth the climate change regulations was unconstitutional. He then echoed that position in an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal. He argued that in requiring states to cut carbon emissions, and thus to change their energy supply from fossil fuels to renewable sources, the agency is asserting executive power far beyond its lawful authority.[emphasis added]
Aha. I'm sure Tribe is willing to sell his soul for a pretty penny paid out by Peabody Coal--a company known for bad safety and deaths at its mines (
example) and
running vast strip-mining operations that rape the earth.
I'm sure Tribe justifies part of his soul-selling with a "just serving the client on a constitutional issue" argument. But, lawyers can actually have a set of ethics that underpin a choice of what clients to take, what clients not to take.
To paraphrase Sy Hersh's ruminations about Henry Kissinger ("When the rest of us can’t sleep we count sheep, and this guy has to count burned and maimed Cambodian and Vietnamese babies until the end of his life"), while we count sheep, Tribe will count the countless miners who die from black-lung disease, communities full of people who suffer from coal-related pulmonary diseases and, ultimately, the scars left on the planet.
7:15 AM PT: Touchy touchy...people, let's not get sidetracked by whether lawyers do good work or not. I edited slightly the above so people would stay on track here. I know plenty of lawyers--mainly, labor lawyers--who do important work--but I will say almost all of them also acknowledge they'd have no case to make in court or rights to pursue WITHOUT the movements and courageous people who stand up for those rights. So, let's just avoid the black-and-white "all lawyers are unethical" or "without lawyers there is no good done".