Divide and Conquer: 350 Apologists

Public Good Project

June 10, 2016

by Jay Taber

2011: Tom Goldtooth, Executive Director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, and Canadian author, Naomi Klein. Photo by Josh Lopez.

As I wrote in my op-ed Degrees of Evil: Savoring the Nuances of Co-optation, spectacle celebrities like Naomi Klein count on infantile consumers to maintain their activist credentials. As a board member of 350–funded by Rockefeller Brothers Fund and TIDES Foundation (Warren Buffett, et al)–Klein and her cohort Bill McKibben are in bed with CERES and Goldman Sachs. Yet, despite this blatantly obvious hypocrisy by the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of Climate Evangelism, the myth of 350 as a ‘grassroots’ organization persists.

This myth might be an amusing entertainment, were it not for the fact that 350 is complicit with Wall Street in Hijacking the Environmental Movement, and guilty as Agent Saboteur of the World Peoples Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth.

So it is disappointing, but not surprising, when people like Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN)–funded by TIDES–perpetuate the myth of 350 as a small organization responsive to indigenous interests. While IEN has done some good things, they nevertheless know where their bread is buttered, and this leads them to speak half truths–which amount to whole lies. The Goldtooth interview Divide and Conquer, while enlightening about REDD, also serves as a warning about the insidious corruption of Wall Street-funded NGOs–IEN included.