On December 19th, Tim DeChristopher, an economics student at the University of Utah, disrupted the Bureau of Land Management auction for oil and gas leases on environmentally sensitive land. He bid up prices, forcing other bidders to pay more than they think they should have, and he actually won the bids for over 22,000 acres, including parcels near Arches National Park, in Labyrinth Canyon, and Mineral Point. As noted by Clifflyon (Thank You Tim DeChristopher), The Salt Lake Tribune noted:
He didn't pour sugar into a bulldozer's gas tank. He didn't spike a tree or set a billboard on fire. But wielding only a bidder's paddle, a University of Utah student just as surely monkey-wrenched a federal oil- and gas-lease sale Friday, ensuring that thousands of acres near two southern Utah national parks won't be opened to drilling anytime soon.
Mr. DeChristopher was later arrested and faces felony charges. He says he is prepared for any possible punishment he will receive as a result of his civil disobedience. In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, DeChristopher said:
It wasn’t especially premeditated. I got in there and saw the opportunity to make the difference and then realized that, seeing that opportunity, I couldn’t ethically justify not taking it. I knew that as bad as this could possibly turn out, if I ended up going to prison, then I could live with that. But if I saw an opportunity to protect the land of southern Utah and I saw an opportunity to keep some oil in the ground and give us a better chance for a livable future and I passed up that opportunity, then I wouldn’t be able to live with that. And so, I just had to make that choice on my own.
The idea of disrupting auctions for political reasons seems to have at least some history. Though the disruptions usually take the form of protests during an auction, fake bids as a form of protest were used at least a few times. In October, 2007, the Sydney Morning Herald ran a story about music fans using fake bids as a way to disrupt ticket scalpers. Fans and organizers of the Live 8 event criticized contest winners of tickets who were auctioning their seats on eBay. Many people placed millions of pounds of fake bids on the tickets in an attempt to get the sellers to remove the items from auction. EBay eventually announced that, under pressure from the public, the British Government, and Bob Geldof, all auctions of the Live 8 tickets were withdrawn.
In 1998, protesters were arrested after using fake bids to disrupt an auction when New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani auctioned off the Charas/El Bohio Cultural and Community Center and five community gardens on city-owned vacant lots. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a group of fake bidders bought items offered by profiteers trying to make money off the tragedy. Users with revealing names like wtc_robin_hood and urasickoo bought hundreds of thousands of dollars of World Trade Center merchandise with no intention of paying. The uproar over eBay allowing those items to be sold, and the resulting "bid bombing" as the fake bids came to be known, eventually forced eBay to temporarily prohibit the auction of WTC memorabilia.
Shilling, or driving up the price of an auctioned item with fake bids, has always been a problem with auctions. E-bay goes to great lengths to stop the practice. Many fake bids seem to be pranks, as was the case with the watering can put up for auction by the British Divers Marine Life Rescue organization, who, in an attempt to recoup some of the costs, tried to auction the watering can used to hydrate a whale stuck in the Thames river. Recent criminal cases of shilling include the 2002 case of $410 million in fake bids for US Treasury notes, and the 2005 case in India where fake bids were used to jack up land prices.
But the history of fake bids to disrupt auctions as political protest is amazingly scant. As a non-violent action, fake bids can have an enormous effect if timed properly, as it was in the DeChristopher case. Perhaps now that the effectiveness has been demonstrated, we will see more of this type of monkey-wrench tactic. Animal rights activists could easily disrupt livestock auctions. Housing rights and open space advocates could disrupt local, state, and federal auctions of public property. Protectors of small family farms could disrupt auctions of foreclosed farms and farm equipment. Human rights organizations could disrupt auctions for offensive memorabilia.
As a form of civil disobedience, Tim DeChristopher seems to have shown us an under-used tool for disrupting the financial systems underlying much of the corporate and capitalist degradation of the environment and life. His willingness to face the punishment for his protest is admirable. Perhaps even more importantly, DeChristopher has publicized an effective weapon to combat greedy opportunists like Dick Cheney's cronies in the oil and gas business.
You can thank Tim DeChristopher by commenting on this blog post. You can donate to his legal defense fund here.