Sacramento Branch, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom
Are we moving toward realizing the promise of Earth Day and Martin Luther King, Jr’s “Revolution of Values”?
The Dream Lives on! Tune into the webcast of the Poor People’s Campaign,
June 18, 2022, March on Washington DC: https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/
Over the 1960s, environmental and anti-war activists began thinking they’d had enough of corporate environmental disasters -Love Canal (1953), the consequence of indiscriminate spraying of DDT revealed by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring (1962), the assassinations of President Kennedy, Malcom X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, the violence of the Chicago convention and escalation of the Vietnam war with carpet-bombing, Agent Orange, the My Lai atrocity, and expansion into Cambodia.
Added to this in 1969 were two iconic disasters that galvanized the public and legislators into action: in Ohio, the alarming fire on the Cuyahoga River in downtown Cleveland, and, in California, the huge Santa Barbara Channel oil spill. At that time that was the largest oil “blowout” in U.S. waters, covering 30 miles of sandy beaches and significantly affecting marine life.
It was no surprise, then, that the proposal by Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson for
Earth Day on April 22, 1970, led 20 million people to turn out to peacefully demonstrate.
In quick succession, Congress under Pres. Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (1970) and passed the Clean Air (1970), Clean Water (1972) and Endangered Species (1973) Acts. These all had 1960s precursors when municipal and state governments, as well as Congress, alarmed by increasing illegal dumping of toxic waste and air, land, and water pollution had passed laws to limit corporate harm to public health and ecosystems.
On the first Earth Day, Sen. Nelson expressed his hope to “build bridges between man and nature’s systems, instead of more highways and dams and new weapon systems that escalate the arms race.”
Indeed, Nelson’s 1970 words seem to echo Martin Luther King, Jr’s revolutionary \Riverside Church April 4, 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” when King moved dramatically from civil rights to a critique of capitalism and war and called for a “revolution of values” – a shift from a “thing-oriented society to a “person-oriented” society.
In his speech, exactly a year before he was assassinated, King expanded his “dream” to a vision of “a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation,” saying: “when machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
Nelson remarked that the “change” he and King before him envisioned called for “new standards for progress, emphasizing human dignity and well-being rather than an endless parade of technology that produces more gadgets, more waste and more pollution.” Now with the Poor People’s Campaign, Rev. William Barber has added ecological devastation to King’s triplets.
King knew this change “would require new national policies that quite frankly will interfere with what many have considered their right to use and abuse the air, the water, and the land, just because that is what we have always done.”
Both Martin Luther King and Nelson understood that the change they envisioned and knew was necessary for people and the planet threatened those in power. They were right. Quickly, the business establishment launched a counter offensive that has lasted for almost 50-years.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Lewis Powell Memo
Eugene Syndor, Chair of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Education Committee, asked his friend, Lewis Powell – a corporate lawyer and member of 11 corporate boards – for a discussion memo. Powell was alarmed, not about the “sporadic or isolated attacks” from a few “extremists on the left” but about attacks from “perfectly respectable elements of society, including leading intellectuals, the media and politicians” that were “gaining momentum and converts.” He singled out Yale Professor Charles Reich’s book “The Greening of America” as an example of the “frontal assault on…our government, our system of justice, the free enterprise system” and “individual freedom.”
Powell’ expressed his views in the “Confidential Memorandum - Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” dated August 23, 1971. He wrote: “no thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack…There always have been some who opposed the American system, and preferred socialism or some form of statism (communism or fascism).”
In his memo on behalf of corporate America, Powell blamed the “apathy” of business to realize that the “ultimate issue was survival of the free enterprise system,” and described how the Chamber could regain influence on “the Campus”, in secondary education, and through control of politics, elections, public opinion, the media and the courts. He concluded, “There should not be the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas for support of the enterprise system. Nor should there be reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose it.”
The Chamber’s Board of Directors adopted Powell’s program on Nov. 8, 1973; immediately a “passive” business group turned into a powerful political force. In short order, the business elite founded the Business Roundtable (1972) and American Legislative Council (ALEC 1973); foundations and think-tanks such as the Heritage Foundation (1973), the Cato Institute (1977), Citizens for a Sound Economy (1984 - now Americans for Prosperity); and more.
Soon the Chamber and allies saw their court strategy succeed. In Buckley v. Valeo (1974), the Supreme Court – to which Nixon had nominated Powell in 1971 – overturned the Federal Election Campaign Act (1971,1974). The Court ruled that spending money in political campaigns was protected as free speech under the First Amendment. In 1978, Justice Powell wrote for the majority when the Court further expanded corporate free speech (Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, 1978). And with Citizens United (2010) and McCutcheon v. FEC (2014), the Supreme Court continued to lift restrictions on donations to political campaigns and candidates, to the benefit of the Chamber and their wealthy allies.
In 2022 – with a rigged 2020 national census and extensive gerrymandering, plus massive attacks on voting rights and voter suppression – it seems that the Supreme Court decisions giving corporations a protected right to free speech under the First Amendment isn’t enough of a corporate victory.
Across the U.S., as we head into a mid-term election season, we see our Constitutional right to a fair and honest vote under attack. How will we move toward realizing the promise of Earth Day and King’s Revolution of Values? Our shared future is threatened by the evils of racism, poverty, militarism, and ecological devastation. In 1970, the founders of Earth Day knew so well the need to focus education, mobilization and legislation on these threats to both people and the planet. Join the shift from a “thing-oriented society to a “person-oriented” society!
Act now to bring us back to realizing Sen. Nelson’s and Martin Luther King’s vision.
WILPF US • PO Box 13075 • Des Moines, Iowa • 50310 • Tel: 617-266-0999 • www.wilpfus.org
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