A Different Kind of Democracy

A big theme in my upcoming book, The Uprising [1] (due out this coming Tuesday), is our culture's inability to see anything other than elections - and specifically federal elections - as a major instrument of social change or democracy. This myopic view expresses itself in all different ways - the media coverage of presidential campaigns, the blogosphere's narrow focus on Democratic Party prospects in election cycles, to name just two. But as I write in my newspaper column this week [2], there are many other arenas of democratic expression - some far more important for social change than any election.

In the next week,there is a huge example of what I'm talking about: ExxonMobil's annual shareholder meeting [3]. In reporting my book, I sneaked into this meeting last year with a group of shareholder activists who are using shareholder democracy as a means of pressuring and jaw-boning the largest and most powerful energy company on the planet. Their efforts, and the efforts of other shareholder activists pressuring other companies, could be as important - and maybe more important - than any given congressional or presidential election.

Like last year, shareholder activists are promoting shareholder resolutions to force management to invest more of the company's record-breaking profits into alternative and renewable energy. When you understand that Friends of the Earth [4] estimates that ExxonMobil's operations and products are responsible for 5 percent of all human-generated carbon emissions since the late 1800s, you understand that if these activists even minimally change ExxonMobil, they will make a planet-wide impact.

Shareholder activism is a very intricate and esoteric corner of the populist uprising I describe in my book. This column summarizes how it works and why it is so important. But make no mistake about it - shareholder activism is but one example of powerful direct action that we tend to forget about in our obsession with elections, campaign gossip, and glam politics. As a progressive movement, we forget these instruments of influence at our peril. The more we ignore these tools, the more power we allow to lay idle - and the less effective our movement will be.

You can read the whole column at the San Francisco Chronicle [2], Denver Post [5], Ft. Collins Coloradoan [6], In These Times [7], TruthDig [8], Credo Action [9], or Creators [10]. If you like this column, I hope you consider picking up a copy of The Uprising [1].