How to Beat the Guys With the Cash : Labor attacks environmentalists, who return the favor. Won’t they learn?

Face it, the news isn’t good for our side. The loss on the North America Free Trade Agreement was a bad one, added to which one had to listen to torrents of horrible nonsense about “an agreement in the great tradition of Bretton Woods.”

In 1944, the Bretton Woods Conference gave us the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, two of the leading agencies of misery on the planet ever since.

Gloomy about more or less everything, I fell to browsing in Lenin’s “ ‘Left-Wing’ Communism, an Infantile Disorder,” a pamphlet by the Russian Bolshevik in which he discussed a period of defeat after the failure of the democratic revolution of 1905.

“Czarism was victorious. All the revolutionary and opposition parties were smashed. Depression, demoralization, splits, discord, defection and pornography took the place of politics. There was an ever greater drift toward philosophical idealism; mysticism became the garb of counterrevolutionary sentiments.

“At the same time, however, it was this great defeat that taught the revolutionary parties and the revolutionary class a real and very useful lesson, a lesson in historical dialectics, a lesson in understanding of the political struggle. It is at the moments of need that one learns who one’s friends are. Defeated armies learn their lesson.”

While I was mulling over whether Lenin had been optimistic about the capacity of losing armies to learn, Jim Britell called.

Britell is a defender of America’s remaining ancient forests. He’s based in Port Orford, Ore., at the Kalmiopsis chapter of the Audubon Society.

“So the labor unions took a beating on NAFTA,” Britell says. “Now remember, these unions singled out our environmental champions in the last election and wiped them out. Take (former Democratic Congressman) Jim Jontz. They went to Indiana and actively raised money and campaigned against him. They made him out to be an enemy of workers. Where he lost was in heavy union precincts.

“And why was Jontz supposed to be an enemy of workers? Because he was trying to save old-growth forests, and the unions basically promoted the idea that anyone who doesn’t want to liquidate ancient forests is an enemy of the people, and particularly a mortal enemy of the woodworker unions, most especially the carpenters.”

And indeed Jontz went down last November by a scant 1% of the vote and his seat was taken by a conservative Republican. The carpenters, working in cahoots with the timber barons, did him in.

Britell resumed his story. “Jontz went back to Washington to work on the anti-NAFTA campaign. But that wasn’t true of many environmentalists. When our core issues came up, the labor unions were harshly opposed. So now, when the unions’ core issues come up, the environmentalists sit it out or take the other side. Two years ago, the unions laughed at us, fought us. They were oblivious to log exports” (which are costing woodworkers good jobs).

And so it came to pass this year that when the unions were at bat with their precious NAFTA issue, virtually all of the major environmental groups were on the other side. Of these majors, only the Sierra Club joined Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to fight the agreement.

The moral of Britell’s parable is this: A popular majority wants to save the ancient forests, just as a popular majority wanted to ditch NAFTA. A popular majority (71% in one poll) wants single-payer health insurance along Canadian lines. But thus far the people have lost and the international corporations have won. The same thing may well happen with single-payer health insurance. The huge insurance companies will most likely prevail.

Whether it’s forests, jobs, health, water rights, blacks or gays, these issues are going down because there is no coalition-building.

“If corporate America can form coalitions,” Britell concluded, “if Bill Clinton can work with the Republican Newt Gingrich on behalf of international corporations, and we can’t do that kind of coalition-building, then we’re looking into the abyss.”

So, can labor and the environmentalists and all the other popular movements learn who their friends are? Strength in numbers and coalitions is the only way to beat the guys with the cash.