Flash from my past: In the mid-1980s, in my first job after graduate school, I was an energy company mercenary assigned to a team working to get a state land development permit for a large petroleum pipeline terminal facility. The facility was to be in a rural county with no fire department on a site in a poor African American community selected to “pay the price of progress” based on proximity to an Interstate, a major federal highway, and a railroad.
We obtained the opinion of a respected state university economist that if the facility were approved, the price of gas would go down by a nickel in the affected region. In today’s money that would be a dime and a penny. Citing that nickel, state officials approved the permit over the determined opposition of the nearby residents.
The company, later swallowed up by Enron, promptly scrapped plans for the overall pipeline project when the price of oil collapsed. The facility was never built. Corporate profit, not human safety, was the deciding factor.
I soon realized I needed a new line of work and began walking down a winding path to workers’ gardens (gardenvarietydemocraticsocialist.com/...) and other humble pursuits. I’ve never forgotten the power of that nickel to overwhelm the public interest.
The left is justifiably proud that Bernie Sanders is leading the effort in the U.S. Senate to protect millions of Yemenis from Saudi-induced starvation and disease while also enforcing the constitutional restriction on exercising war powers. As John Nichols put it in The Nation:
No matter what the final outcome, the Senate vote on Wednesday represented a dramatic turn in the debate over Yemen. Earlier this year, a majority of senators rejected a move by Sanders to force a vote on his resolution. On Wednesday, the overwhelming majority stood on the right side of history.
“For the first time, the U.S. Senate voted to advance a resolution withdrawing U.S. Armed Forces from an unauthorized and unconstitutional war. The situation in Yemen now is the worst humanitarian disaster in the world. Eighty-five thousand children have already starved to death and millions more are on the brink of starvation. All of which was caused by Saudi intervention in the civil war in Yemen,” Sanders said after the vote. “The bottom line is the United States should not be supporting a catastrophic war led by a despotic regime with a dangerous and irresponsible military policy. Let us bring this catastrophic war in Yemen to an end, help bring peace to this tortured country and with the rest of the world help provide the humanitarian aid that is so desperately needed.”
Peace Action’s Paul Kawika Martin echoed the sentiments of the senator, saying, “Three years ago, the notion of Congress voting to cut off military support for Saudi Arabia would have been politically laughable. This successful vote in the Senate is a testament to the collective power of a coalition of peace groups, human rights groups, and grassroots activists across the country making calls, organizing rallies, and meeting with members of Congress to make the case for ending the U.S. role in the war in Yemen. Of course, more work remains to be done. The Senate still needs to pass the Sanders resolution itself and the House needs to follow suit as soon as possible to force the president to decide between vetoing the legislation, which polls suggest would be widely unpopular, or ending U.S. support for the war.”
(www.thenation.com/...)
But for Sanders’ persistence, and the brutal Turkish dictator’s revealing of the heinous murder of U.S.-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, no forward movement in the Senate would be occurring.
Let’s hope it passes the Senate. But what happens then?
Then it will probably have to wait until next year, with a Democratic-controlled House, for full passage to occur, only to then no doubt face Trump’s veto. An email Bernie’s supporters got on Friday said:
Not surprisingly, given our president's deep affection for authoritarian regimes, the White House has threatened to veto this bill if it gets to Trump’s desk. So what I want to do today with this petition (act.berniesanders.com/...) is make sure Trump knows that it isn’t just the United States Senate that believes we should end our involvement in this humanitarian catastrophe, but the American people as well.
Assuming somehow an override occurs, Trump might then ignore it and face litigation or begin litigation himself, which he could eventually lose, perhaps a year or more later. Maybe one day thereafter Trump would comply. And maybe one day thereafter this compliance, from an unsupportive Trump, would have the desired effect and Saudi genocidal conduct would end. Or maybe Trump would do an Oliver North and support the Saudi conduct on the down low.
Quite inefficient would say the millions who could die in the meantime—if they could talk to us over the din of daily bombings in Yemen and the daily idiocy back over here in the US. We might say back to them, if they still have ears to hear, until and unless presidents routinely comply on their own with the constitution, this kind of Byzantine maneuvering is the best that we can do.
But is that really true?
The only way we here in the Kingdom of Trumpi Blamia can truly act with moral clarity against Saudi genocide and other atrocities committed or encouraged by the Saudi ruling class is to empower ourselves as the working class to do the right thing politically as a class. We cannot rely on idiosyncratic movements or the sacrifices of scattered heroes, martyrs, and saints. Our own ruling class vehemently opposes our having class consciousness much less class empowerment. Our own ruling class wants us to salivate like Pavlov’s dogs every two years if we hear of the loosening of OPEC oil valves on cue.
Right now, our divided and fearful working class is easily coerced into opposing moral clarity based on whether the price of a gallon of gas might go up a quarter. In addition to supporting a necessary idiosyncratic effort to address an extreme case of Saudi aggression against civilians, that’s a quarter we need to be focusing on if we want to save Yemeni lives—and our planet. (I will not attempt to dissect the yellow vest protests in France, en.m.wikipedia.org/…, but anti-tax movements are commonly coopted by the right.)
We will never be able to break Saudi power over our lives until we gain our own lives back from the power of that quarter, which the Saudi ruling class wittingly lords over us. Who knows, if we free ourselves from the power of that quarter maybe we can even help Saudi Arabia democratize. First we will have to have more democracy at home, with social assurance of the basics and a creative new form of outright public control of the energy sector.
To begin to address our collective quarter problem, we must first acknowledge two things.
First, energy prices go up and down in a complex global marketplace. It begins to feel like the rising and setting of the sun, with lots of wicked solar flares. We can be so wrapped up in the cycles of this marketplace that we do not discern our right as citizens of the earth to confront it in the common good.
Oil prices have recently plummeted, largely because of the growing threat of worldwide recession and because of OPEC, for now, keeping the spigots open wide:
Crude plummeted 22% in November, marking the worst month since October 2008. Despite that meltdown, Trump has repeatedly pressured OPEC and Saudi Arabia not to dial back production to balance the market. OPEC and Russia are nonetheless expected to seriously consider slashing output at Thursday's highly-anticipated meeting in Vienna, Austria.
(www.cnn.com/...)
Unless we work in the energy sector, we are expected to be cheering our president and his party for our good gas price fortune. Ironically, now, during a time of low prices many in the working class may be less focused on a commodity price that does not appear to be becoming more expensive to them. But we may still be easily manipulated to fear that this small measure of good fortune could change at any moment.
Second, as important as oil is, this is not just about oil. It is about all the earth’s resources not being democratically managed for the common good, which sometimes should mean leaving certain of them in the ground even though techniques like mountaintop mining and fracking exist that, not factoring in externalities, can be used to keep prices low.
Even if we did somehow get the Saudi ruling class to behave vis a vis journalists and Yemenis and perhaps even, we hypothesize, to stop violating women’s rights and funding a hateful fundamentalist educational system, we’d still have our own ruling class to worry about. It does not want West Virginia and Kentucky coal miners to be able to feed their families without coal mining. It does not want Alaska, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, and Big Sky Country workers to be able to feed their families without being “energy voters.” It wants small farmers sweating over input costs and equipment payments, the better to lose their farms to aggregation. We all need to live in fear, the better to fight with each other rather than uniting for the common good. It is perfectly fine with planetary suicide.
If we really want to do our part to save our planet and to have the courage to say no to murderous regimes around the world, as we should, we must unite as a working class in the U.S. to (a) demand societal provision of healthcare and education, AND the basics, as our human rights, and (b) to exert dominion over and quickly disempower energy companies operating within U.S. territory. We can no longer afford their profit-centered model, which is ruining our planet. We the people are ultimately responsible for running our economy for the common good and for every motor vehicle and smokestack belching out pollution in our territory for the common bad. Let’s take democratic control of our destiny before it’s too late. The wisdom of the ruling class, which has taken over our political system, is the artificial intelligence of capitalism. It is not up to the task.
One final note: Merely nationalizing energy companies is not a panacea. Saudi Aramco is a state-run company. Beyond its financing of a repressive regime, the track record of state-run energy companies has been mixed. (My next ACM piece will be on this subject.) The atmosphere does not care whether the pollution came from fossil fuel from a corporate or a state-run oil well or coal mine.
True democratization of the energy sector would require constant vigilance by an empowered working class whose needs are being met to prevent the reestablisment of a ruling class in the energy sector and to ensure that the sector serves the needs of the working class rather than the other way around. We cannot expect that the public way forward would be easy. But who said necessary would be easy?