Despite the name, which might seem to imply a passive role overseeing government as it fails again and again to deal with L.A.'s bad air, this Watchdog has an aggressive and expansive vision, and maybe a real bite. But not band-aid solutions of the kind environmental groups have tried for the past 20 years with little success. But, for the most part, it is large corporations that manufacture the consumer products we purchase and that determine our choices through advertising, market share, pricing and other forms of power in the marketplace. Those who profess freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are people who want crops without plowing up the ground, who want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
Power concedes nothing without a demand.
And it is evident that they mean it. Environmental groups don't have to show they can 'communicate' with big business by sitting on corporate boards of directors or taking grants from corporate polluters. In fact such tactics compromise their credibility and leverage. Therefore the Watchdog is going into workplaces, churches and communities to develop new leaders and a new grassroots movement. Suffice it to say that the Watchdog's strategists are working on tough issues such as the flight of capital overseas, the dumping of toxics in the Third World, the need for environmentally benign economic development using L.A.'s own abandoned rust-belt factories, affordable public transportation, changes in the tax structure, and international campaigns to ban particularly dangerous chemicals.