Blue Hill, Maine, farmer faces suit by state of Maine and Maine Agricultural Commissioner; town and supporters to rally in his support Friday, November 18

On Wednesday, November 9, Dan Brown, owner of Gravelwood Farm in Blue Hill, Maine, was served notice that he is being sued by the State of Maine and Walter Whitcomb, Maine Agricultural Commissioner, for selling food and milk without state licenses.

Blue Hill is one of five Maine towns to have passed the Local Food and Community Self-Governance Ordinance, a local law that permits the types of sales Brown was engaged in.

By filing the lawsuit, the State of Maine and Whitcomb are disregarding the Local Food and Community Self-Governance Ordinance passed nearly unanimously by the citizens of Blue Hill at their town meeting on April 4.

Residents of Blue Hill will be attending the Selectmen’s meeting on Friday, November 18 to enforce the provisions of the ordinance by instructing the town of Blue Hill to send a letter to the Maine Department of Agriculture requesting the lawsuit be withdrawn, and that the state recognize the authority of the Local Food and Community Self-Governance Ordinance.

A rally and press conference will take place Friday at the Blue Hill Town Hall beginning at noon.

You can learn more and support Dan at http://www.facebook.com/WeAreFarmerBrown.

For the media, a conference call with Dan Brown is scheduled for Thursday, November 17, 10am-11am eastern time. Dial it at 866-305-2467, and use access code 260454#. Dan will make a statement and cover the counts listed in the summons. Bob St. Peter, family farmer from Sedgwick, Maine and director of Food for Maine's Future will discuss the campaign calling on the State to withdraw the lawsuit.

Here's Dan, explaining rule changes that led to the suit, and that also underscore the need for us to take local control of our food back from state and federal government regulations that are designed by and for industrial agriculture and agribusiness profiteering.

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Two days away: house parties!

Don't forget that on Wednesday, November 9, Move to Amend, Free Speech for People, Public Citizen and People for the American Way are joining together to sponsor house parties across the country. Click here to find out if there's one near you. The house parties will feature a welcome from Sen. Bernie Sanders and a chance to plan local actions for the anniversary of Citizens United. There are federal court houses in every state. Attend a house party and suggest the local action of your community be to join Move to Amend in Occupying the Courts on January 20!

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Elinor Ostrom outlines the best strategies for managing the commons

Beyond Western notions of the market and the state, community-based forces can manage the commons effectively, and those methods can be studied and adapted to new situations and locations--hopeful news for any group seeking to manage local resources for the good of all rather than exploit them for the enrichment of a few.

To learn more about how AfD's Tapestry of the Commons project can jumpstart a commons conversation where you live, see the project webpage here.

by Jay Waljasper. Posted November 4 on Common Dreams

A breakthrough for the commons came in 2009 when Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize for Economics. The first woman awarded this honor, the Indiana University political scientist not only made history but also helped debunk widespread notions that the commons inevitably leads to tragedy. In 50 years of research from Nepal to Kenya to Switzerland to Los Angeles, she has shown that commonly held resources will not be destroyed by overuse if there is a system in place to manage how they are shared.

How such systems work around the world was the topic of Ostrom’s keynote address at Minneapolis’ Festival of the Commons at Augsburg College Oct. 7, co-sponsored by On the Commons, Augsburg College’s Sabo Center for Citizenship and Learning and The Center for Democracy and Citizenship.

Ostrom explained there is no magic formula for commons management. “Government, private or community,” she said, “work in some settings and fail in others.”

The most effective approach to protect commons is what she calls “polycentric systems,” which operate “at multiple levels with autonomy at each level.” The chief virtue and practical value of this structure is it helps establish rules that “tend to encourage the growth of trust and reciprocity” among people who use and care for a particular commons. This was the focus of her Nobel Lecture in Stockholm, which she opened by stressing a need for “developing new theory to explain phenomena that do not fit in a dichotomous world of ‘the market’ and ‘the state.’”

Addressing a crowded auditorium at the Minneapolis Festival, Ostrom pointed to an authoritative study of 100 protected forests in 14 countries, which shows that the cooperation of local people is more important to preserving these commons than whether a national government, local officials or someone else actually oversees the forests. If the people who live there feel they benefit long-term from how the forests are managed, she notes, they make sure the rules are followed. “When local groups have the right to harvest non-timber resources, they are more likely to monitor and sanction those who break the rules.”

Overall, she recommends local control as the best path for protecting a commons because it allows rules to be “based on unique aspects of a local resource and culture”. But the polycentric approach—a diverse web that might include some community or private governance along with different layers of government—“can have the benefits of local control, but still cope with the problems that come on a larger scale.”

What We Can Learn from New England Fishing Fleets
Ostrom also champions “self-organized” systems, where the people closely involved with a commons help “develop rules for themselves which can be quite different from what is in the textbooks.” Her favorite example of this is the intricate system of rules and enforcement created by fishing fleets in Gloucester, Massachusetts, to ensure there are enough lobsters for everyone.

*The first time the rules are broken, a bow is tied around the offending lobster trap. “Imagine these big lobstermen tying a bow on a pot,” she said with a laugh.

*On the second offense, the lobstermen visit the home of the offender to discuss the problem.

*On the third offense, the lobstermen break up the trap.

*On the fourth offense, it’s possible the lobstermen may destroy the offenders’ boat—but Ostrom is not certain it has ever come to that.

This way of governing the commons has proven effective because penalties are imposed gradually and enforced by the community itself. Although she cautioned that “Community control is not a panacea” anymore than private or government control in a panel discussions with local commons advocates after her talk at the Commons Festival.

What Local Cops and Jane Jacobs Have in Common
Before the speech, Ostrom met with students from various colleges around the Twin Cities, discussing her commons research in subjects beyond natural resources. She cited Jane Jacobs—the passionate advocate of neighborhoods who believed that local people usually know more about what’s best for their communities than expert planners—as an influence on her work.

Ostrom outlined her years of research on local police departments in 80 metropolitan areas across the country, studying them at a time when they were under pressure to consolidate operations in the name of efficiency. Yet most of them, she discovered, were able to achieve increased efficiency in resources like crime labs without merging into a huge metropolitan-wide forces.

Unfortunately, she added, schools were not able to resist consolidation. While there were 125,000 separate school districts across American in the 1930s, now there are 13,500.

“The ideas was that bigger schools would be cheaper,” she said, but that has not turned out to be true. Ostrom believes that both education and our democracy have suffered in the process. She pointed out that each of those 125,000 districts had at least five elected school board members, meaning that a much higher proportion of people then were directly involved with public affairs in their communities. That left me wondering if the widespread contempt for politics we see today would be so prevalent if more of us personally knew someone who actually served in public office.

Following Ostrom’s keynote speech, the audience flowed out into Murphy Square—the oldest public park in Minneapolis—to celebrate the many ways the commons enriches our lives with art, cuisine, community organizations and social interaction. The Brass Messenger band set a rollicking mood for the evening while a mob of theater students enacted a scene from the play Marat/Sade. The festival continued the next day with a walking tour of commons landmarks in the inner city neighborhood around Augsburg College led by Sabo Center chair Garry Hesser, followed by a commons bike tour led by Augsburg urban sociologist Lars Christiansen and me, which wound up at the site of the Occupy Minnesota protest downtown.

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Sunday's DC action against KeystoneXL

Saying no to the Keystone XL oil pipeline, protesters, including AfD vice co-chair and Defending Water for Life campaign coordinator Ruth Caplan, surrounded the White House on Sunday. More photos from Ruth are here.

Meanwhile, Brad Johnson of ThinkProgress debunks the idea that the KeystoneXL project will create jobs in this article. Pipeline proponents throw out all kinds of figures here, from "13,000 union jobs" in the Wall Street Journal (one imagines the "union" part came out through gritted teeth) to “more than 250,000 permanent jobs," according to the US Chamber of Commerce.

But according to Johnson,

these tremendous-seeming jobs claims are based entirely on a report by the Perryman Group, commissioned by the pipeline’s owner TransCanada, whose results have been described as “dead wrong” and “meaningless” by Council on Foreign Relations fellow Michael Levi and environmental economist Andrew Leach, neither of whom oppose the construction of the pipeline.

Instead, "the only independent analysis conducted of the American job-creation potential of the Keystone XL pipeline finds that between 500 and 1400 temporary construction jobs will be created, with a negative long-term economic impact as gas prices rise in the Midwest and environmental costs are borne," Johnson writes.

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Another layer of support for cold-weather Occupiers

FireDogLake.com has been raising cash to buy union and USA-made cold weather gear for Occupations across the country, including warm weather clothing, sleeping bags and generators. Sourcing the purchases, writes Jane Hamsher, was not an easy task, and

it was extraordinarily depressing. The garment manufacturing industry in the United States has been decimated by NAFTA. Link after link to once thriving union shops were dead, even in the past few years. They went out of business. They were gobbled up and gutted, or the jobs went overseas. Or both.

Which leads right back to Occupy Wall Street. As American manufacturing goes, so goes the American middle class — which was built on manufacturing jobs. ”Decline” is too delicate of a word to describe what happened. American manufacturing and the middle class economic stability that went with it were sabotaged by cooperation between leaders of both political parties.

Check out the article on Common Dreams, here.

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Boulder CO voters say no to corporate personhood, "money as speech"

Voters in Boulder overwhelmingly approved a non-binding resolution calling for an amendment to the Constitution ending corporate access to personhood rights and defending the right of municipalities to regulate campaign donations.

The ballot question, Question 2H, won by a near 3 to 1 margin, according to the final count, with 18,392 ayes to 6,556 votes against.

The measure asks:

"Shall the People of the City of Boulder adopt the following resolution: RESOLVED, the People of the City of Boulder, Colorado call for reclaiming democracy from the corrupting effects of undue corporate influence by amending the United States Constitution to establish that:

1. Only human beings, not corporations, are entitled to constitutional rights, and

2. Money is not speech, and therefore regulating political contributions and spending is not equivalent to limiting political speech."

Congratulations to local voters and to the coalition Yes on 2H, which brought together organizations and individuals in support of the measure. Local media coverage here.

Update! We just got the following press release from Boulder Move to Amend, Boulder Yes on 2H and Move to Amend:

BOULDER, CO - Last night Boulder became the second city in the nation to pass a ballot measure calling for an amendment to the US Constitution that would state that corporations are not people and the legal status of money as free speech. At midnight, with 93% of the ballots counted, the measure was handily winning with 74% of voters in support.

Boulder's campaign is the latest grassroots effort by Move to Amend, a national coalition working to abolish corporate personhood. "From Occupy Wall Street to Boulder, Colorado and every town in between, Americans are fed up with corporate dominance of our political system," said Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, a national spokesperson for Move to Amend. "Local resolution campaigns are an opportunity for citizens to speak up and let it be known that we won't accept the corporate takeover of our government lying down. We urge communities across the country to join the Move to Amend campaign and raise your voices."

Earlier this year voters in Madison and Dane County, Wisconsin overwhelmingly approved similar measures calling for an end to corporate personhood and the legal status of money as speech by 84% and 78% respectively. Next week voters in Missoula, Montana will have an opportunity to vote on a similar initiative in their community. Move to Amend volunteers in dozens of communities across the country are working to place similar measures on local ballots next year.

"Today's 'corporate personhood' referendum in Boulder, Colorado is the latest message from the American people to state and federal legislators on the need for a Constitutional Amendment," said Congresswoman Donna Edwards (D-MD). "The Supreme Court's misguided Citizens' United ruling burst open the floodgates of corporate spending in our elections, but it also unleashed a wave of public outcry over the need to put individuals, not corporations, in control of our elections. The results from today are just one example that we must take action to protect our treasured democracy."

Edwards introduced a bill last month for a Constitutional amendment that would overturn the controversial Supreme Court's ruling in the Citizens United case.

"Working on this campaign was electrifying," said Scott Silber, a local Move to Amend organizer in Boulder. "We had such an outpouring of enthusiasm from our community. Folks were so thrilled to finally have an opportunity to have their voices heard and resoundingly call for an end to corporate corruption of our democracy. From here we're taking the campaign to Denver, and then on to Washington, DC."

Move to Amend's strategy is to pass community resolutions across the nation through city councils and through direct vote by ballot initiative. "Our plan is build a movement that will drive this issue into Congress from the grassroots. The American people are behind us on this and our federal representatives will see that we mean business. Our very democracy is at stake," stated Sopoci-Belknap.

Here's a complete list of all resolutions passed to date.

Contact:
Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, National Field Director, (707) 362-0626, Move to Amend
Scott Silber, Boulder Move to Amend, (510) 485-6586
Elena Nunez, Boulder Yes on 2 H Campaign, (720) 339-3272

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