Paranoia? -- or a Heightened View of Reality?
( I include the article below because it taps into something that I have and continue to suspect - that various environmental and Green organizations have been infiltrated by persons on the payroll of anti-liberal, anti-progressive and anti-environmental organizations.
If there is enough money, and the corporations seem to have most of it corralled, it is very simple to find persons who will get trained and play "double agent" in any of these movements. It is a simple blueprint for successfully dividing and wrecking any "green" or other grassroots movements, thereby making them completely ineffective. I would suspect this situation to occur where bad feelings develop between persons who heretofore have worked well togther.
I imagine that this has happened in West Virginia - that there may be persons in our midst who call themselves committed enviros, but who are secretly in the camps of Big Coal, Big Garbage and Big Timbering. Persons who are backpackers, mountain bikers and whitewater freaks who appear to profess a great love for the natural world do not necessarily equate with being committed environmentalists.)
Who's Paying the Piper
By Don Fitz (From Synthesis/Regeneration 16 - a Magazine of Green Social Thought, Spring 1998)
The expansion of ring wing influence within the daily life of America is truly frightening. Corporations increasingly rewrite laws in their favor and influence information dispersed through the mass media. One of the greatest challenges to confront us in the 21st century will be: Are we, as a society, able to stand up to hidden attempts to control and manipulate us?
The right wing is not content with dominating government and media. They are seeking to influence the environmental movement. The willingness of some who call themselves environmentalists to succumb to corporate control of Earth Day celebrations has been a scandal for years.
1998 will go down in history as the year of the racist attempt to take over the Sierra Club and blame population growth on its victims. Though he anti-immigrant ballot lost, it is more than disturbing that it could receive 40% of the vote of the largest environmental organization. [I believe that the National Wildlife Federation would dispute you on the size issue, but then, there are those who don't consider the NWF a truly environmental organization. Ed.].
Many Greens are concerned that the 1996 Presidential campaign was used to expand an existing division and split the US Greens by a group that raised money and operated outside the existing national Green organizational framework. This group advocates setting up state Green Parties on the model of the Democratic and Republican Parties where registrants nominate candidates and, in some states, elect party leadership in primaries open to anyone, regardless of their politics. Such a Demopublican structure opens the door to domination by money and media elites and closes the door to grassroots accountability. This corporate party model is a far cry from the Green value of grassroots democracy.
Greens are also concerned about the loss of grassroots democracy in Maine. Reports continue to surface that, in that state, a person has been presented as the "Green Party" candidate for governor without being nominated by members.
A natural question is: What is the source of funding of those who seem to be pushing the environmental movement to the right? Ever since Earth Day of 1990, progressives have challenged corporate funding of environmental events. At a time when campaign finance reform and open disclosure of funding are major political issues, it is shocking that Greens are still unable to obtain a financial report for the 1996 Gathering and Nomination Convention. If Greens want to be taken seriously when they challenge hidden financial deals of larger parties, then it seems that, as a minimum, they should b able to account for the finances of their own campaigns and national meetings.