OntheWilderSide

Now is the time to Turn Up the Heat on getting Obama to permanently end the Keystone XL pipeline. We need to force Obama to reject the pipeline NOW! Let’s not snatch defeat from the jaws of victory! We are winning, but we haven’t won on the issue.

Obama doesn’t want to make this decision before Election Day because he doesn’t want the negative fall-out from approving it while he needs money and votes from environmentalists .  That is why we have to force him to make a decision now, while he is still worried about the political consequences.  Don’t call off the protests and the pressure.  Increase it! Force Obama to say “No” while we have him on the run.

Don’t believe the people whispering in your ear that delayed decisions are a way of killing the pipeline.  That’s old school.  Delayed decisions are a way of sapping our energy until Obama can make the decision when it is a politically safe time.  And if we wait, Obama can play both sides of the issue for political support until the election. Obama can get money and votes from environmentalists who wrongly think he sided with them on Keystone , when he is just leaving his options open to approve it after Election Day.  Let’s not act out a second round of “I voted for Obama because I was sure — despite what he actually said — that he would do the right thing on [the wars, Gitmo, Tim DeChristopher, same-sex marriage, civil liberties, torture, single-payer, Wikileaks, Bradley Manning, name the issue] after he got elected.

AND Obama will rake in money from the oil companies for another year because they want to make sure they have access to the final decision on Keystone after election day. 

This whole scenario reminds of when Rep. John Conyers told everyone to sit down and shut up about the Bush impeachment hearings, that Conyers knew just the right time to start the hearings, and that agitating would just derail the process. Guess what?  Despite the House having passed an impeachment resolution, the hearings were never held.  The energy behind the hearings dissipated.  Bush walked away with his presidency intact.

Or in NY, where citizens were told to be grateful for a fracking moratorium.  And, here at onthewilderside, we warned the naive fracking activists — just like we are warning you right now — that this was just a stalling technique by the politicians to get through the elections.  We advised that activists should keep the pressure on for a fracking ban while the politicians were still vulnerable to losing an election and the activism was still hot.  And guess what?  After the election,  the majority of upstate NY was opened for fracking.

If you want to find out if Obama has moral fortitude, just ask Van Jones, Laurence Tribe, or Elizabeth Warren about their appointments.   Again and again, Obama backed down from the fight to do the right thing.  Again and again, he uses the lame excuse that the opposition from the other side is just too great from him to even raise the appointments.  This is the same tactics Obama used to keep single-payer completely out of the discussion about national healthcare, despite strong public support for it to be included.

The only way we can be assured that the Keystone Pipeline is stopped is to make Obama decline it now.  We need to increase the pressure on Obama permanently stop the Keystone Pipeline while he is vulnerable to re-election

And what happens if Obama is not re-elected? Obama’s re-election is hardly guaranteed.  What if someone else is in the White House after the 2012 election is is left the ability to still decide on the Keystone Pipeline.  What do you think will happen then?

Filed under: Action Alert!, activism, Ecology, Election 2012, energy, Global Warming, grassroots democracy, News, progressive politics, sustainability, US Politics Tagged: | 350.org, Bill McKibben, Bradley Manning, John Conyers, keystone, Keystone Pipeline, Obama, tim-dechristopher, Van Jones