The Alliance For Democracy - News, eNewsletters, Alerts and Chapter News

Occupy the Courts: Bangor

2012-01-23T14:29:00.000-05:00

More than 50 people rallied at the Margaret Chase Smith Federal Building in Bangor to mark the second anniversary of the Citizens United decision. Protestors included nine "supreme court judges" in black robes, five of which also sported sashes bedecked with corporate logos.

Occupy groups in Bangor, Ellsworth and Blue Hill organized the event, including Alliance member Starr Gilmartin and AfD vice co-chair Bonnie Preston. Bonnie spoke on the need to eliminate all corporate access to constitutional rights, and the importance of defending the right to pass local rights-based ordinances to claim sovereignty of people over corporations, as has been done in some towns in Maine and New Hampshire to protect water from exploitation by bottlers, and to defend farm-to-table food sales and local farms in five Maine towns last spring.

The keynote speaker was Rob Shetterly, an artist from Brooksville who's painted a series of portraits, Americans Who Tell the Truth. Rob travels all over the country to speak in schools and libraries about his portraits, and picks a small group of paintings, which generally have a unifying theme, to take to each talk. Here's what he said at the rally:

You may know about the huge lion that waddled into the Fat Cats restaurant & sat down & yelled at the waiter, “I’ll take the zebra! Don’t cook it. Bring me the whole thing.” So, the waiter dragged over the zebra carcass & the lion went to work, gnawing, ripping, tearing, & gulping down the muscles and organs, the head, the eyes & ears, the hooves, & finally chewing up & swallowing all the bones. Then the lion, blood dripping still from his jaws, motioned to the waiter. When the waiter came over, the lion belched & said, “Well, if you are what you eat, I must be a zebra now!” And then he laughed so hard at his own joke, he fell off his chair.

This is exactly what has happened to democracy in this country, and the fat cats are still laughing. Capitalism swallowed democracy and claimed that a vanished democracy is capitalism. That capitalism, an exploitative economic system, not democracy, an egalitarian political system, is what guarantees our rights and fulfills our dreams. But it did not have to be that way, and it doesn’t now. As Ashley Sanders, one of the Occupy Movements organizers & theoreticians says, Capitalism is not inevitable. Poverty is not inevitable. In other words, they’re fallible. They can be fought, resisted. In that sense, Occupy is not an occupation, but a giant exercise in decolonization. It’s a battle to oust the false masters of our minds.

Back in the 1930s after an economic boom & bust eerily similar to the cycle we are in now, the great Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, “You can have democracy, or you can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few. You cannot have both.”

Why is that true? It’s true because great wealth translates into power, the power of control and influence, the power that buys the major media and shapes the message to its benefit making democracy impossible --- a people who aren’t informed of the truth by objective media are incapable of being good citizens. It’s the power that bribes both political parties and creates a system subservient to it; it’s a power in the banking industry and on Wall Street that gambles with people’s money to the benefit of the banks and the detriment of the people. It’s the power to control the history our children are taught, the power to commodify every aspect of our lives including our children’s dreams and imaginations so that all of our sacred contracts we make with the future in order to perpetuate the health of our minds, our bodies, and our communities are exchanged for contracts for profit taking. It’s the power to ensure that there is no real accountability for the crimes of that wealth, the crimes that decimate landscape, eliminate species, promote wars, exploit people and resources and poison the environment, and lastly, it’s the power to write the laws to protect that wealth’s power behind impregnable walls of special interest legal mumbo jumbo.

As Howard Zinn said, The rule of law does not do away with the unequal distribution of wealth and power, but reinforces that inequality with the authority of law. It allocates wealth and poverty in such calculated and indirect ways as to leave the victim bewildered.

It’s the kind of absurd mumbo jumbo that made the stealing of an election legal in 2000, that allows corporations to privatize profit and socialize cost, register in the Cayman Islands & pay no tax, and pervert the Constitution so that they have the rights of full personhood and their money has free speech. Giving a corporation personhood is like having your body invaded by an insidious disease, a disease which replicates and infiltrates every system of your body --- your heart, your brain, your lungs --- and then the disease says to you, You can see how powerful I am, how integrated I am into your well being, I think you better defer to me on all future decisions if you know what’s best. And instead of taking a huge dose of antibiotics, you say, Right, of course, you are a lot stronger and more powerful than I am, I’ll name you my executor right now.

Richard Grossman, who died in November, and worked for many years at the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, & who understood how dangerous legalized corporate power is, how it annuls democratic rights, said, You want sanity, democracy, community, an intact Earth? We can't get there obeying Constitutional theory and law crafted by slave masters, imperialists, corporate masters, and Nature destroyers. We can't get there kneeling before robed lawyers stockpiling class plunder precedent up their venerable sleeves. So isn't disobedience the challenge of our age? Principled, inventive, escalating disobedience to liberate our souls, to transfigure our work as humans on this Earth.

In 1963, in front of the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King, Jr., defined the American Dream. He didn’t measure that dream in quantities of consumption, or in enemies vanquished. He didn’t tout American entitlement nor defend Manifest Destiny. Dr. King defined the Dream in terms of the “riches of freedom and the security of justice.” You see, the wealthy and powerful would have us today lavish praise on Dr. King, but turn his words inside out, invert them so that our Dream should be the freedom of riches and the justice of security. If you aspire to the freedom of riches, then you also believe that exploitation is necessary. Not everyone can share equally in that freedom. Some are more worthy than others. And you want to instruct your court system to solidify that freedom of riches into law. And if you believe in the justice of security, you believe in fear, that anything that keeps you safe --- more war, more torture, more secrecy, more spying, more fear, more suspicion --- is good. The security of justice keeps you secure because it guarantees the same justice for everyone. The justice of security is the frightened privileged building walls around their huge slice of pie.

What is so important and powerful about the Occupy Movement is that it demands the Dream that Dr. King envisioned. It understands what Thoreau meant when he said, The law will never make men free, it is men who have got to make the law free. The Occupy Movement understands what Frederick Douglass meant when he said, Find out what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong that will be imposed on them. We have submitted for so long to corporate domination, to courts promulgating a system of justice appropriate for oligarchy not democracy, that it’s almost embarrassing to have to come into the streets to insist on the basic ideals we thought we all believed in. But it’s the only way. There is the power of wealth, and then there is the power of people. There is the power of the Supreme Court giving unlimited anonymous, free speech to billionaires, and then there is the power of us here today. There is the power of the drone and the ethic of collateral damage, and then there is the power of the recognition of the inestimable value of every life. When the people have the courage to inhabit their own power, they win, always.

Terry Tempest Williams said, The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time. You in the Occupy Movement are the eyes of the future. You are already looking back from a future we know is the right place to be, the place based in justice and living in harmony with nature. We all learned in biology class about the web of nature, how every species, no matter how big or small, how more or less evolved, is equally and mysteriously important in the health and survival of the entire web. Law is like that, too. It’s impossible to dictate that any powerful institution in a society has only one obligation and that is to make money for its investors. To believe in the rightness of a law like that is to live in the fantasy that acts to do not have consequences, that poison belched into the air only affects poor people, that torture is justified when you do it, and that a child’s primary function is as a profit center for selling food dangerous to her health and as a target for media crippling to her imagination. It’s to live in the fantasy that a corporation, like a giant pathological robot, deserves the same rights as fragile, mortal humans. That’s a fantasy we are here to end. One zebra can’t teach a fat cat that lesson, but hundreds can. One zebra is a martyr, a democracy of zebras can occupy a despoiled land and make it flourish. We are the eyes looking back from the future, we have seen the occupation, and it is good.

Our next step must be to amend the Constitution, to strip corporations of personhood and free speech rights, to make every election a fair, publicly funded election --- no personal or corporate funding, to ensure that every citizen at age 18 is registered automatically to vote, to make election day a holiday, and to return the public airwaves to the public so that all candidates receive equal and free airtime.

That’s good for the first step. The next will be to reintegrate our lives with nature’s laws. That’s the tough one.

Thank you.

Occupy the Courts: Boston

2012-01-23T14:02:00.000-05:00

In Boston, Occupy the Courts inspired more than 200 people to come down to the waterfront and rally at the Joseph J. Moakley Courthouse. After a fife and drum fanfare, they heard from AfD member and Greater Boston Move to Amend affiliate coordinator John Hill, state Representative Cory Atkins, and Pam Wilmot of Common Cause. Rounding out the rally, a skit in which a certain famous monopolist auctioned off free speech, the White House, the 2012 elections and Congress to a bunch of eager corporations until the ignored 99% took charge and put him under citizens arrest.

North Bridge chapter members brought three carloads of demonstrators and volunteers from the greater Concord area, where they were joined by folks from the north and south shores as well as Cape Cod. The rally was co-sponsored by several local organizations including Alliance for Democracy, Clean Water Action of Massachusetts, Coffee Party USA, Common Cause Massachusetts, Community Labor United, Corporate Accountability International, Greater Boston Coffee Party, The LEAH Advocacy Group, Massachusetts Senior Action, MassVOTE, Progressive Democrats of America, and the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Andover. Occupy Boston stood in solidarity with us, and Operation Woof, the canine contingent of Occupy Boston, also turned out to remind us that if we need to know what human is, we should ask a dog.

Video of the event isn't online, but the local Univision affiliate provided some good coverage here. You can see some pictures of the event here.

After the rally both AfD and Move to Amend supporters participated in a two-day Occupy Boston "Rally and Summit to Unite Citizens for Democracy," featuring panel discussions, trainings and presentations, and a reprise of the auction skit.

We'll be following up with new contacts at a meeting on February 2, at 7 p.m. at the Cambridge YWCA--for more information, please email bostonmta@gmail.com.

Occupy the Courts: Portland OR

2012-01-23T13:42:00.000-05:00

Friday's Occupy the Courts actions hit more than 130 cities, with demonstrations taking place from the steps of the Supreme Court to town greens.

In Portland OR, some 250 people gathered at Pioneer Courthouse Square in the pouring rain and cold to support these two demands in order to restore a democratic nation controlled by We the People, instead of We the Corporations. Alliance for Democracy's Portland, OR, chapter, which was one of the first AfD chapters to start work on building a Move to Amend group in their city, was a major organizer of the event.

AfD co-chair and chapter president David Delk was quoted in this article in the NW Labor Press, and the following people spoke:

Erin Madden, an environmental lawyer in Portland active with Occupy Portland, had this to say:

Raging Grannies kick offs remarks by Adam Klugman, host of "Mad as Hell America" on KPOJ AM 62. For Adam, Citizens United is "a slap in the face of what it means to be human... the miracle of human existence has been reduced in stature to the level of corporations."

Barbara Dudley, the co-founder of the Oregon Working Families Party as well as former head of GreenPeace USA and National Lawyer Guild, also spoke, giving a brief historical background to the decision and corporate hegemony over democracy.

Richard Harisay works with the Democractic Work, lives in Oregon's state capital, Salem, and co-founded Move to Amend Marion/Polk. "We are the people!"

Dr. Atomic's Medicine Show provides the intro to Nate Guley of Common Cause Oregon:

The Oregonian online covered the demonstration here and here , and the Portland Mercury had this to say.

Timeline of Corporate Personhood

2012-01-23T12:51:00.001-05:00

Here are three different sizes of a "Timeline of Personhood Rights and Powers," as well as an article by Molly Morgan and Jan Edwards titled "Abolish Corporate Personhood" which helps explain the thinking behind the timeline and the movement to end corporate access to the rights of human persons as guaranteed by the Constitution.

The first two versions print out on wide-format machines; these are usually found in copy or print shops that specialize in making blueprint copies for architects, but other copy shops sometimes have them as well.

Click on this link to download a version designed to be printed at a commercial large-format copy shop on 24-inch paper. The final timeline should be approximately 11 feet long (24 x 130 inches).

Click on this link to download a version that will print on 36-inch paper and be approximately 17 feet long (36 x 200 inches).

Click on this link to download a version that can be printed on a home printer on eight letter-size sheets of paper set on "landscape." Tape the individual pages together to make a small timeline 8 1/2 x 88 inches long, or about 7 1/2 feet.

This timeline was compiled by Jan Edwards with much help from Doug Hammerstrom, Bill Meyers, Molly Morgan, Mary Zepernick, Virginia Rasmussen, Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, Thomas Linzey, Jane Anne Morris, and the late Richard Grossman. Thanks to Carl Mayer for his article "Personalizing the Impersonal". Early supporters of this work include Alliance for Democracy, POCLAD, and WILPF.

OREP's monthly webinar focuses on feed-in tariffs in Germany

2012-01-17T15:24:00.000-05:00

If you're interested in building the social and political supports for locally-produced renewable energy, check out the audio recording of Oregonians for Renewable Energy Policy's January Conference Call, now available on OREP's website at the Webinars page.

Guest speakers Rep. Jules Bailey, a state senator representing southeast Portland, (D-OR, district 42) and Jeff Bissonnette, organizing director for the Citizens's Utility Board of Oregon, shared their experiences from their recent Climate & Energy Study Tour to Germany.

OREP secured places for Bailey and Bissonnette to participate in the study tour this past December. The tour was sponsored by the American Council on Germany, and it enabled participants to learn directly from German government officials, business leaders and researchers about Germany's successful climate/energy policies. Jules and Jeff generously agreed to share their impressions, a portion of what they learned firsthand during their intensive study tour and answer audience questions.

If you have questions after listening to the audio, please feel free to contact either of our speakers directly:
Jules Bailey
rep.julesbailey@state.or.us
503-986-1442

Jeff Bissonnette
jeff@oregoncub.org
503-516-1636

The OREP team thanks everyone who participated in this well-attended conference call.

Oregonians for Renewable Energy Policy (OREP) is a sponsored project of the Alliance for Democracy. OREP promotes Feed-In Tariff policies that produce good economic, environmental and social outcomes at reasonable costs. To request a speaker, host an Energy Future House Party or volunteer, call Judy at 503-232-1911. To support the work of Oregonians for Renewable Energy Policy, you can make a donation through Alliance for Democracy here.

"Corporate Personhood Cannot Withstand Organized Persons"

2012-01-17T15:08:00.000-05:00

In "Corporate Personhood Cannot Withstand Organized Persons," David Swanson provides a rundown of congressional resolutions and proposed amendments designed to address the Citizens United decision and the power of big money in politics, and picks out the loopholes in some that would allow "business as usual" for deep-pocketed funders. Importantly, he also cites some additional "to-dos"--and the organizations that are working on them--that would make our government truly representative of the popular will. These include a variety of election reforms from same-day voter registration to hand-counted ballots, public funding, and establishing a legal right to vote. Worth reading!

"A Declaration of Indignation" and a local action for democracy in Pennsylvania

2012-01-16T12:13:00.000-05:00

AfD council member emeritus Lou Hammann writes that activists in Gettysburg, PA will be placing the following ad in their local newspaper on January 18 and 21, and will be demonstrating in the Gettysburg town square on the 21st in solidarity with Occupy the Courts.

A DECLARATION OF INDIGNATION

We hold these truths to be

self-evident:

A corporation is not a person

AND

Money is not speech

Therefore:

We here and now DISAVOW the validity

of whatsoever authority undertakes to deny

these self-evident truths!

Activists help to strengthen and pass Portland OR city council resolution against corporate personhood

2012-01-16T12:00:00.000-05:00

AfD'ers in Portland have helped the city pass a resolution against corporate personhood--here's their report:

On Friday, the Portland OR city council approved a resolution proposed by Mayor Sam Adams establishing as part of the city's Federal Legislative Agenda for the coming year that the city supports amending the constitutional to make clear that corporations are not people and that money is not speech.

Additionally they instructed the city attorney to research the requirements to refer a measure to the voters like that which Boulder, Madison and Missoula have already passed. Commissioner Fritz specifically indicated support for a referral.

The vote was 3 to 0 in favor with 2 commissioners absent. One of those was sick but had indicated his support for the resolution in emails to the public in advance of the hearing and vote.

The resolution text is available here.

Approximately a month ago the first version of the resolution was posted. That version needed work and modification. Members of Move to Amend, Alliance for Democracy, and Occupy Portland worked with the Mayor's staff to make the modifications needed to get the language right. While not all of our suggestions were accepted, most of them were and the Mayor acknowledged the work of our organizations, especially of Alliance for Democracy/Move to Amend members David Delk, Donna Noonan and Jeff Stookey.

Last Wednesday we had a rally at city hall prior to two of our members testifying before the council. Video of the three speakers at the rally is available here.

At the next meeting of Move to Amend we will discuss next steps. David Delk has already spoken with the Multnomah County Board Chair, Jeff Cogen, and he is interested in bringing a resolution to the county as well.

Read it: Corporations Are Not People

2012-01-16T11:29:00.000-05:00

Corporations Are Not People: Why They Have More Rights Than You Do and What You Can Do About It is a new, practical guide to dismantling corporate rule and building a working-for-the-people democracy. Jeffrey Clements, of Free Speech for People, presents the history of how some of the largest corporations in the world pushed a decades-long campaign to take over American politics and policy, most recently through the Citizens United decision. The website's here, with links to order the book (ideally from your local bookstore), info and reviews. This one is worth buying for you and for your local library!

Jeff will be a guest on the Portland AfD show Populist Dialogues in February. Check back for a link to the show, which can be rebroadcast on your own local community access station.

Occupy the Courts: Videos to share

2012-01-16T10:50:00.000-05:00

Post, tweet and get 'em viral for Friday's Occupy the Courts action and for building the movement.

Jawnzap7 of Occupy Philly demands Reasonable Solutions while providing some good background on Citizens United, political bribery, and how corporations legally masquerade as human beings.

David Swanson will be speaking in Charlottesville, VA, because he's been banned from speaking on Capitol Hill. Here's his take on how how getting rid of "the corporate right to speak by bribing people with money" will help dismantle the military-industrial complex and redirect some federal spending to what the people want.

Lastly, the Coffee Party introduces "Citizens United the Musical," and adds corporate personhood and speech-is-money to the great American song and dance book.

AfD Co-chair on "Occupy the Courts" January 20

2012-01-11T11:27:00.000-05:00

AfD co-chair and Portland (OR) president David Delk supports Occupy the Courts on January 20. Be a part of this action. See the Move to Amend website for links to demonstrations in more than 90 cities, as well as talking points, fliers, and info on permitting. Check out the Alliance for Democracy Occupy the Courts page for links to all our organizing material. If you're planning an event, let us know before and after--send notices, pictures, and links to video to afd@thealliancefordemocracy.org.

Monterey County (CA) AfD holds local Occupy the Courts action

2012-01-11T11:16:00.000-05:00

Monterey County Alliance for Democracy will be heading to the San Jose Occupy the Courts event on Friday, January 20, but on Saturday, January 21 they'll be holding a local event starting at 11 a.m. at Windows on the Bay in Monterey. There will be a vigil and street theater in Custom Plaza downtown to protest this disaster for our democracy. Voice your dissent! For info, contact afdmonterey@hotmail.com, and if you want to be part of the street theater, please come to an event prep meeting on 1/16.

David Cobb on Move to Amend's Occupy the Court action

2012-01-08T10:59:00.000-05:00

Get out and join us! Actions in more than 80 cities at federal district courts--check out MovetoAmend.org.

Help spread the word--repost this video!

Corporate rule and the environment: Bill McKibben on why you should Occupy the Courts on January 20

2012-01-06T10:44:00.000-05:00

In support of the January 20 Occupy the Courts action, here's Bill McKibben on our "money talks" political system, climate change, and the need for environmental activists to be involved in the democracy movement. Get to MovetoAmend.org to find the Occupy the Courts action near you.

Alliance for Democracy is part of the Move to Amend coalition and most AfD chapters are planning or will be involved in Occupy the Courts events. Our local chapter list is here. If you're heading to an action check out material (signs, fliers, bumper stickers) here.

A Bill of Rights for Occupied Communities

2012-01-05T11:28:00.000-05:00

A bill of rights that protects the rights of people and nature, but removes them from corporations? Ordinances restricting corporate personhood have been introduced and passed in some small towns with the goal of protecting local ecosystems. Follow the "read more" link to see a template that can be used as a starting point for local discussion and action. Your community could be next to say no constitutional rights for corporations!

by Thomas Linzey and Jeff Reifman. Posted January 4 on CommonDreams.org

When communities try to keep corporations from engaging in activities they don’t want, they often find they don’t have the legal power to say “no.” Why? Because our current legal structure too often protects the “rights” of corporations over the rights of actual human beings.

If we are to elevate our rights and the rights of our communities above those of a corporate few, we, too, need to transform the way laws work.

As we wrote in Turning Occupation into Lasting Change, mainstream progressive groups have failed by constraining their activities within legal and regulatory systems purposefully structured to subordinate communities to corporate power. Truly effective movements don’t operate that way. Abolitionists never sought to regulate the slave trade; they sought to transform the legal structure that supported it by treating slaves as property rather than people under the law. Suffragists did the same with the legal status of women.

This style of organizing moves away from traditional activism—mired in letter writing campaigns and lowest common denominator federal and state legislation—toward a new activism in which communities claim the right to make their own decisions, directly.

To help them do so, we’re offering the model Community Bill of Rights template below, a legislative template for communities that want to protect their own rights. It’s based on real laws already passed from the municipal to the national level—from Pittsburgh stripping drilling corporations of Constitutional “rights” to Ecuador including legal rights for nature in its Constitution. Think of the template as a menu to pick and choose what’s important in your community. It’s meant to provide a framework and a starting point, not necessarily to be used in its entirety.

Passing a new bill of rights is a way for activists to “occupy” their cities with new legal structures that empower community majorities over corporate minorities, rather than the other way around.

Community Bill of Rights of [your city]

Section 1 - Authority
This Community Bill of Rights is enacted pursuant to the inherent right of the residents of the City of [your city] to govern their own community, including, without limitation, the Declaration of Independence’s declaration that governments are instituted to secure the rights of people, and the [your state] Constitution’s recognition that all political power is inherent in the people.

Section 2 - Findings and Purpose
Whereas, the citizens of [your city] recognize that environmental and economic sustainability cannot be achieved if the rights of municipal majorities are routinely overridden by corporate minorities claiming certain legal powers; and

Whereas, the citizens of [your city] believe that local legislation that embodies the interests of the community is mandated by the doctrine of the consent of the governed, and the right to local, community self-government;

Whereas, the citizens of [your city] believe that the protection of residents, neighborhoods, and the natural environment constitutes the highest and best use of the police powers that this municipality possesses;

Therefore, the residents of the city of [your city] hereby adopt this ordinance which creates a community bill of rights for the residents and communities of the City, and removes certain legal powers from corporations operating within the City of [your city].

Section 3 - Statements of Law - A Community Bill of Rights
3.1. The Right to a Locally-Based Economy
Residents have the right to a locally-based economy to ensure local job creation and enhance local business opportunities. The right shall include the right to have local monies reinvested locally by lending institutions, and the right to equal access to capital, credit, contracts, incentives, and services for businesses owned by [your city] residents.

3.2. The Right To Affordable And Safe Housing
Residents have the right to affordable housing, the right to a safely-maintained dwelling, and the right to be free from housing discrimination. The City shall ensure the availability of low-income housing stock sufficient to meet the needs of the low-income housing community. People and families may only be denied renting or buying of a dwelling for non-discriminatory reasons and may only be evicted from their residence for non-discriminatory causes.

3.3. The Right To Affordable Preventive Health Care
Residents have the right to affordable preventive health care. For residents otherwise unable to access such care, the City shall guarantee such access by coordinating with area health care providers to create affordable fee-for-service programs within eighteen (18) months following adoption of this provision.

3.4. Rights for Nature
Ecosystems and natural communities within the City of [your city] possess inalienable rights to exist and flourish. The rights of rivers, streams, and aquifers shall include the right to sustainable recharge, flows sufficient to protect native fish habitat, and clean water. The City of [your city] and any resident of the City or group of residents have standing to enforce and protect these rights.

3.5. Right to Water
All residents, natural communities and ecosystems in [your city] possess a fundamental and inalienable right to sustainably access, use, consume, and preserve water drawn from natural water cycles that provide water necessary to sustain life within the City.

3.6. Right to Sustainable Food System 
All residents of [your city] possess a fundamental and inalienable right to access, use, consume, produce and distribute foods generated from sustainable farming practices, and to be free of infection, or infestation or drift by any means, from genetically engineered life forms or genetically modified organisms.

3.7. The Right To Affordable And Renewable Energy
Residents have the right to access affordable and renewable energy sources.

3.8. Right to Constitutional Protections in the Workplace
Employees shall possess United States and [your state] Bill of Rights’ constitutional protections in the workplace within the City of [your city], and workers in unionized workplaces shall possess the right to collective bargaining.

3.9. Right to Determine the Future of Neighborhoods
Neighborhood majorities shall have the right to approve all zoning changes proposed for their neighborhood involving significant commercial, industrial, or residential development. It shall be the responsibility of the proposer of the zoning change to acquire the approval of the neighborhood majority, and the zoning change shall not be effective without it.

3.10. Right to a Free, Open and Accessible Internet
(a) All residents of the City of [your city] shall possess the right to a free and open internet, which shall include, but not be limited to, the right to access, use, send, post, receive, or offer lawful content, applications, or services of the user’s choice.
(b) All residents of the City of [your city] shall possess the right to be free from provider service and performance level discrimination based on the identity, source or type of individual content or service providers.

3.11. Right to a Citizen Managed and Accountable Police Force
All residents of the City of [your city] have a right to a police force managed by a civilian police chief held fully accountable by an elected panel of citizens.

3.12. Right to Clean and Fair Elections Free from Corporate Interference
Residents of [your city] possess the right to fair elections, which shall include the right to an electoral process free from corporate involvement.

3.13. Right to Clean Government
Residents of [your city] have the right to clean government, which shall include the right to a City legislative process free from corporate lobbying and involvement.

3.14. Right to Marriage Equality
Residents of [your city] have the right to gender-neutral marriages for both same- and opposite-sex couples.

Section 4 - Prohibitions and Corporate Legal Privileges
4.1. Prohibition on Corporate Personhood and Privileges
Corporations and other business entities which violate the rights secured by this Community Bill of Rights shall not be deemed to be “persons,” afforded by the United States and [your state] Constitutions, nor possess any other legal rights, privileges, powers, or protections which would interfere with the enforcement of rights enumerated by this Charter.

4.2. Ban on Electioneering
It shall be unlawful for any corporation to make a contribution or expenditure to influence any election within the City of [your city].

4.3. Ban on Lobbying
It shall be unlawful for any corporation to communicate with an elected official within the City of [your city] urging support or opposition to pending legislation. This ban shall not be construed to prohibit open forum communications between corporate lobbyists and elected officials.

Section 5 - People’s Right to Self Government
All residents of [your city] possess the fundamental and inalienable right to a form of governance where they live which recognizes that all power is inherent in the people, that all free governments are founded on the people’s authority and consent, and that corporate entities and their directors and managers shall not enjoy special privileges or powers under the law which make community majorities subordinate to them.

Section 6 - Enforcement
6.1. The City of [your city] may enforce this Community Bill of Rights through an action in equity brought in the [your court of jurisdiction]. In such an action, the City of [your city] shall be entitled to recover all costs of litigation, including, without limitation, expert and attorney’s fees.

6.2. Any resident of [your city] shall have the authority to enforce this Community Bill of Rights through an action in equity brought in the [your court of jurisdiction]. In such an action, the resident shall be entitled to recover all costs of litigation, including, without limitation, expert and attorney’s fees.

Section 7 - Severability
The provisions of this Community Bill of Rights are severable. If any court of competent jurisdiction decides that any section, clause, sentence, part, or provision of this Ordinance is illegal, invalid, or unconstitutional, such decision shall not affect, impair, or invalidate any of the remaining sections, clauses, sentences, parts, or provisions of the Community Bill of Rights.

Section 8 - Repealer
All inconsistent provisions of prior Ordinances adopted by the City of [your city] are hereby repealed, but only to the extent necessary to remedy the inconsistency.

This model was developed by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. You can learn more about CELDF’s theory of change, its democracy school educational programs on corporate power and its global organizing efforts for community rights at their website.

You can also find the model Community Bill of Rights template for Occupy Communities as a google doc or as a pdf.
Thomas Linzey is the Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit law firm which provides legal assistance to communities struggling to protect community self-government and the natural environment from corporate decision-making. Jeff Reifman is co-founder of Envision Seattle, a rights-building effort modeled after CELDF’s work. He’s also a technologist, freelance writer and organizer. Visit his wesbite here.

The return of clean elections?

2012-01-04T13:29:00.001-05:00

A few days ago, NPR's On Point focused on campaign finance with guest Lawrence Lessig, who made a good point: overturning Citizens United does not ensure that politicians will operate free from the influence of the very small slice of the population who contribute mightily to political parties and to election and re-election campaigns. If the first step is to amend the Constitution to end corporate access to personhood rights and to allow the re-regulation of campaign finance, the second has to be setting up some kind of public financing program so that the decent candidates don't have to court the overprivileged to get into office, and to prevent the indecent candidates from using elected office as a "farm team for K Street."

You can hear the show online, and watch his slideshow here.

Then you can add your name to Jack Lohman's Change.org petition entitled Congress: Pass public funding of campaigns!!! Jack edits the newsletter ThrowTheRascalsOut.org.

Populism isn't dead, it's marching: What 19th century farmers can teach Occupiers about how to keep going

2012-01-04T12:42:00.000-05:00

A side-by-side look at the Populists and the Occupy Movement--how do we learn from our past and move on to confront oppression as a true movement of the 99%? Ashley Sanders was a speaker at this summer's Democracy Convention, and is currently connected with Peaceful Uprising.

by Ashley Sanders. Posted December 30 on Truth.out-org.

Not so long ago, Americans witnessed the beginning of a mass democratic uprising. Thousands of average people, disgusted by greedy elites and corporate control of government, launched a movement that spread to almost every state in the nation. They did it to reject debt. They did it to fight foreclosures. They did it to topple a world where the 1 percent determined life for the other 99. And they did all of it against incredible odds, with a self-respect that stymied critics.

The year? 1877. The people? Dirt-poor farmers who would come to be known as Populists.

Now it's 2011, and the People are stirring again. It's been over two months since a few hundred dreamers pitched their tents in Zuccotti Park and stayed.
These people weren’t Populists, but they had the same complaints. They couldn't make rent. They had no future. They lived in a nation with one price for the rich and another for the poor. And they knew that whatever anyone said that they didn’t have real democracy.

Okay, and so what? What do a bunch of century-dead farmers have to do with the Occupy movement? Well, quite a lot, actually.

You see, the Populists came within an inch of changing the entire corporate-capitalist system. They wanted a totally new world, and they had a plan to get it. But as you may have noticed, they didn’t. And now here we are, one hundred years later, occupying parks where fields once stood. We’re at a crucial phase in our movement, standing just now with the great Everything around us—everything to win or everything to lose. It’s our choice. And that’s good, because the choices we make next will echo, not just for scholars and bored kids in history class, but in the lives we do or don’t get to have. The good news is this: the Populists traveled in wagons and left us their wheels. We don’t have to reinvent them. We’re going in a new direction, but I have a feeling they can help us get there.

Occupy has done a lot of things right, and even more things beautifully. But strategy has not been our forte. That was okay at first, even good. We didn’t have one demand, because we wanted it all. So we let our anger grow, and our imagination with it. We were not partisan or monogamous to one creed. That ranging anger got 35,000 people on the Brooklyn Bridge after the Wall Street eviction, and hell if I’m not saying hallelujah. But winter is settling now, and cops are on the march. Each week we face new eviction orders, and wonder how to occupy limbo.

It’s time for a plan, then, some idea for going forward. This plan should in no way replace the rhizomatic-glorious, joyful-rip-roarious verve of the movement so far. It can occur in tandem. But we need a blueprint for the future, because strategy is the road resistance walks to freedom.

In that spirit, I sat down a few years ago and devoted myself to studying social movements of the past. I wanted to see what I could learn from them—where they went wrong, where they went right. I didn't trust this exercise to random musings. No, like a good Type A kid, I made butcher paper lists of past movement features and mapped them onto current ones. I asked: What is the revolt of the guard for the climate movement? What’s the modern anti-corporate equivalent of the Boston Tea Party?

As I read, I learned a lot about the phases movements go through as they form, what common features they share, and what often breaks them apart.

I could name these phases myself, but it’s already been done. And no one has named them better than historian Lawrence Goodwyn, a thinking human if there ever was one and a student of the Populist movement.

Goodwyn said that successful movements go through four stages:
1) First, the movement forms. This happens when people acknowledge oppression and defy it. They create physical and psychic spaces where they can cast off conventional modes of deferment, reject resignation and start acting with radical self-respect. This self-respect involves speaking with the tongue of truth, in the language of radical experience. Millions of people acting with self-respect become a body collective self-confidence, reordering what is politically possible.

2) Second, the movement recruits. It finds a way to attract masses of people while sharing its message of resistance. Radical recruitment is done systematically and strategically, and recruiters attract people in two ways: they promise tangible relief and provide a motive and blueprint for action.

3) Third, the movement educates. It articulates the ideology of the movement. It offers an analysis of power that liberates folks from past thinking patterns, renames what is possible, and unveils a plan to make the possible plausible. It names both the enemy in power and how to get power back. It’s a murder mystery: It gives folks a suspect, a motive, and a scheme for restoring justice.

4) Fourth, the movement politicizes. The movement politicizes when its alternative solutions run up against the powers that be. It admits that power must change for change to work, and it ousts old regimes through direct confrontations with power. Having created alternative economies, practices and paradigms, it creates an alternative political structure—laws, government, and process—to protect its brave new world.

Occupy Wall Street is by and large in phase one. Fair enough; it’s been only two months. Building a movement took the Populists ten or twenty years, so we could easily rest easily. But for most people I know, there is a deep, darkening sense that we do not have that kind of time. We’ve got to change it all, and we’ve got to do it before the ice caps melt, before that python, global finance, dies and squeezes its victims one last and lethal time. We are on the edge of history. We are urgency embodied.

And so we learn from that history. We must. We’ve got to get serious, and fast. We’ve got to make a plan. This plan has to give masses of Americans new paradigms, concrete alternatives, something to join, a way to join it, and a political insurgency to protect it. Along the way, we’ll have to keep a grip on the slippery soul of democracy, practicing consensus and conversation while developing a system of internal communication.

So I’m here to publish my lists. In what remains of this essay, I’ll chart a sample way forward. I’ll take you through each phase of movement building, and make suggestions and critiques. I’ll show how the Populists approached the stage; I’ll say what Occupy’s done well; I’ll dig into dangerous attitudes we should avoid; and I’ll offer suggestions for effective actions. Finally, I’ll close with questions we must answer as a movement whatever methods we decide to use.

But first, let me tell you where I’m coming from. I am not a pure -ism or -ist, but a mutt: part anarchist, part green, part interim socialist. This is no screed for a certain sect, or the fancy footwork of a shill tripping on a movement I don’t move to. This is an essay written by me, a complicated person who desperately wants a complicated movement to succeed in desperate times. Because I care, I critique. A movement is always a bag of new thinking, old thinking, dangerous and helpful ideas. In this mix I am a free agent. I tell the truth as an act of love. This truth-telling should not be confused with the snark of the bourgeois press, who use condescension as credentials and write dismissive missives to fall asleep at night. There is no snark here. I am no reporter, except in the basic sense: I report what I see, what I observe. Call me an embedded editor-anthropologist—someone who tries to understand the culture of a big idea, then challenges it to be bigger, bolder, more beautiful. And of course, I speak as an occupier, not for the occupation. My observations come from my limited experience and my limitless desire to experience more. It's in that spirit I write today, straight from the hum of perpetual noticing.

So let’s begin.

Movement Forming
Populist Example
In the late 19th century, farmers everywhere lived on the brink of total poverty. All across the South and West, furnishing merchants gave them credit in exchange for exorbitant interest rates and the claims to their cotton harvest. These farmers were the ultimate throwaway people: poor, uneducated, desperate. And yet they built a mass insurgency movement that nearly transformed the agrarian system into a series of cooperatives. They did this by forming the Farmer’s Alliance, an institution that functioned on the state, county and local levels to benefit, radicalize and defend the poor. The Alliance experience let farmers use their own language to throw down on corporations, capitalism and false democracy. Within a few years, these same farmers were calling for a whole new economy based on new ideas that they had developed themselves. And for a movement that began with poor white southerners, they were astoundingly democratic, defying social censure to include Blacks, women, and immigrant workers in the movement. What’s more, the Alliance had style and knew how to occupy. When they called for mass education or decision-making camps, alarmed townspeople reported wagon trains stretching as far as the eye could see, festooned with signs, banners and evergreen boughs.

What We’ve Done Right
On my second day at Occupy DC/Freedom Plaza, I looked around me and thought, “Someone needs to do more outreach.” And then it hit me: Someone else didn’t have to. I did. All I had to do was form a committee and decide a time to meet. So I did. It felt so good to act, to move instead of freezing in despair, to be a real human solving real problems. When I left the Plaza, I was a different person, too. I picked up trash instead of balking at the Entire Trash Problem. I spoke to homeless folks instead of retreating in overwhelm. I was that buzziest of activist buzzwords: I was empowered. And I had discussions, too. I talked to a woman who’d walked hundreds of miles to be with us. I talked to a kid who’d walked out of his movie theater job and never looked back. Some of those conversations were gorgeous, and some were the goddamned hardest, most frustrating talks I’ve ever had. Some had me waving my ego like a badge until finally, hours or weeks later, I’d drop it. I realized I was not nearly as democratic as I thought. But it was good to come alive, to see myself as I actually was: a human being amongst human beings, all capable of great goodness and great failure. And I knew this was what corporate reporters could not understand. They wanted our demands. But our first demand was simple. We wanted to come alive. We were there to be somewhere fully, maybe for the first time ever. The media wanted headlines, but we were starting from our toes. What they could not see was this: the dark, fungal growth of decomposing, of old things dying to nourish a new world.

Attitudes to Avoid
Aesthetic Anarchism/Damn the Plan. I am all for mass democratic, non-hierarchical movements. I am in favor of taking down the system. I want to work from an outsider position of independence and autonomy. But I have noticed in many occupations a pernicious spirit of aesthetic anarchism. When I say aesthetic, I’m not talking about looks. I’m talking about image. I’m talking about when the form of an idea replaces its substance, or when the rituals of belief replace the point of believing. Aesthetic attitudes prevail when our motive is not to change power, but to be right, fashionable, or cool--a perfect -ism. And since aesthetic beliefs are more about approval than victory, aesthetic believers spend very little time thinking about what victory means or requires. Every movement has its aesthetics (think hippies) and that would be fine if they didn’t disrupt the entire point, which is to win. Because in order to win, you need a plan, and to plan you must consider an array of ideas, challenging conventional wisdom to get at effective action. Radicals say: 6,000 people lost their homes to banks today. Did we help them? What would it take to help them? Then they go from there, letting the need dictate the action. Aesthetic anarchists, however, are content to wait for the word from their chosen Sinai, saying, “If New York does it, we do, too,” or “so sayeth the man in punk-rock black.” They are inheritors of a received culture of ideas—-a splinter culture, but a shallow one nonetheless. Their goals are purity and counter-cultural conformity, a strange form of leftist fundamentalism. One of the worst forms of aesthetic anarchism confuses having a plan with being The Man. Aesthetic anarchists equate all structure and strategy with fascism, defining ‘true’ actions as spontaneous and random. Similarly, they see radicalism in terms of approved actions rather than methods. But this Ivory Gutter Attitude gets us nowhere. So let’s be clear, then. Having a plan is not being The Man. It’s not selling out. It’s not fascist. Having a plan means deciding how to engage with power, and how to make power engage with you. Going forward, let’s do less Damning the Plan and more Damning the Man. Let’s decide what we want and create a plan to get there, choosing our actions to fit the problem, not the fashion. So far our movement’s a radical noun; let’s strategize to make it a radical verb.

Suggestions
Practice democracy fairly. Hold ongoing teach-ins on racism, classism, and patriarchy developed by those most oppressed and supported by their allies.
Practice democracy fully. Most of us weren’t taught how to make decisions together, so we need to learn. Invite professional facilitators to do trainings on true consensus. Pinpoint places where democracy is breaking down and find solutions.
Know your neighbor. Set up a storytelling tent by the info booth. Talk to people about why they are here, what they’re angry about, who they are, what solutions they have. Record the sessions and screen them for the camp at night.
Heal. We’re all coming to this with emotion and history. Some of us are new, and impatient. Some of us are old, and can’t bear to fail again. A lot of infighting is the result of unspoken despair and disillusionment. The ‘real’ world silences those emotions, but Occupy is an opportunity for voice. Have a therapist or healer lead the group through grief work—for example, Joanna Macy’s "Work That Reconnects".
Strategize. Take Goodwyn’s four phases of movement building and brainstorm ways to make them flourish. Challenge cavalier assumptions about what does and doesn’t work. Merge this into a multi-day, consensus-based visioning session and come up with concrete goals and strategies for your local Occupy.

Questions
What inherited cultural assumptions am I bringing to the Occupy movement? How do dominant societal narratives on race, class, gender, resistance and revolution impair my organizing? How do fashionable resistance models inform my work, and do they help or harm? And finally: How bad is x problem, how long do we have to fix it, and what would it take to win?

Movement Recruiting 
Populist Example
The Populists did not confuse action with aimlessness; they were radicals with a plan. Being destitute, they understood the need to create economic alternatives that immediately relieved other poor people and brought them into broader struggle. They began by identifying their central problem: they needed credit to get farming supplies, but the furnishing merchant controlled credit and exploited them. So they created the Farmers Alliance Exchange, a cotton co-op that pooled resources to buy equipment, market the harvest, and sell in bulk to foreign and domestic buyers. This system allowed the farmers to depend less on the merchant for credit and to sell their crops at better prices. It also served as a powerful recruitment tool: the co-op attracted recruits and showed them through their own experience how and why the dominant economic system failed them. Two millions farmers joined in a matter of three years, forming thousands of sub-alliances—each with their own cotton buying agent and farmer-lecturer. The Alliance would eventually mobilize this massive and structured base to break up farming monopolies, push for a new financial system, and create a formidable third party. Participating in the co-ops gave average farmers a sense of dignity, greater economic independence, class consciousness, and experience solving complicated problems together.

What We’ve Done Right
My first day at Freedom Plaza, I lost my wallet. The weird thing is, it didn’t matter. The communal kitchen gave me breakfast, lunch and dinner. Concerned people offered money. The after-dinner dance party and discussion were way better than seeing a movie, and if I’d needed it, there were blankets, sleeping bags and tents for those without. That’s when I realized it: Right there in the capitol of capital, I was in a money-free zone, in a community that met both my physical and emotional needs. When I met an exile from Katrina-era New Orleans, I could invite him to the plaza. He got some pasta and a rousing discussion on the Fed; we heard from him on FEMA, poverty and homelessness. Occupy’s genius is combining what is normally separate. We were meeting our immediate needs while preparing for long-term resistance. We created alternatives that got people involved, then involved ourselves in creating alternatives.

Attitudes to Avoid
The Rhizome Religion. Biologically, rhizomatic organisms send out roots underground that pop up as random shoots above. Each root, if cut in pieces, can regenerate the whole plant. Politically, a rhizomatic movement has no leader, no main branch, and can reproduce anywhere. The good thing about rhizomes is they’re essentially unstoppable (when was the last time you fought an aspen grove and won?). The problem is they’re random—bad for recruitment. Right now, Occupy may represent the 99 percent, but in reality we’re our least favorite number: the 1 percent. To really get people involved, we can’t ask people to come to us. We have to come to them. We have to diligently and deliberately reach out to those most affected by our rapacious financial system: people of color, the poor, immigrants and women. And we should do this by working with established community groups and individuals, radically listening to what folks really want and need. Some Occupies have done a great job reaching out to unions, community groups and regular folks, and the rest of us are trying. But by and large we’ve been practicing the rhizome religion, believing that good ideas will spread spontaneously and recruits will pop up accordingly. In ten years of organizing, though, I have learned one thing for certain: recruitment is not an accident. It takes planning and dogged determination. It takes humility and a high tolerance for discomfort. And it takes realizing that most people are busy trying to survive and need solutions that will tangibly improve their lives. There is magic to any movement, yes-—that soul that makes it sing—-but in organizing no rabbits pop out of hats. If you want to reach the people, you have reach out, one hand in welcome and the other in offering. You do this door by door, neighborhood by neighborhood, church by church, until you’ve not just imagined the 99 percent: you’ve met them.

Suggestions
Occupy (your) neighborhoods! Find out where people in your Occupy live. Form neighborhood councils in those communities. Go door to door, meeting people you live by and asking them how the economy’s treating them. Talk to them to learn what skills, needs and interests they have. Ask what organizations are helping already, and talk to those folks, too. From these discussions, create a People’s Map of needs and assets for each neighborhood in the city. Form a spokescouncil of neighborhood representatives to discuss the map, then use this information to keep organizing those communities. Each neighborhood starts creating alternatives that meet their specific needs and the needs of the whole city, growing food, making clothing, or building shelters. Teams of emergency responders could fight foreclosures and feed the hungry. There could be neighborhood-level, worker-owned co-ops and health care clinics. We could disappear from the corporate economy and make wealth where we live.

Questions
What are the most pressing needs in my community? What tangible solution would address them? Do I know my neighbors, and if not, why not? What groups are already working on these problems, and what do they need from me? If the economy tanked tomorrow, what would my community need to survive? How can we start to meet those needs? What assets do people on my block have? What assets do I have?

Movement Educating 
Populist Example
Ironically, it was the failure of the cotton cooperative, the Populists’ economic alternative, that pushed them toward their radical ideology. As brilliant as it was, the co-op effort stalled on bare fact: they needed money to function, the farmers had none, and bankers had lots but hated co-ops. So try as they might—and they tried, raising thousands of dollars from penniless farmers and swaying small landowners to co-sign loans with landless tenants—farmers could not get the credit they needed. But instead of letting that daunt them, they let it move them from economic cooperation to social and political insurgency. They used the co-op failure to teach people about power. If bankers had power, and their power was political, no alternative would be safe until the People got enough power to change the law. This cold truth led to a fiery ideology: a whole new Treasury and currency system tied to a radical third party that called for land reform, socialization of major industry, and better conditions for millions of industrial laborers. But by far the most impressive thing about the ideology was the way the Populists spread it. In less than two short years, they democratically developed their power analysis and relevant solutions, trained 40,000 uneducated farmers to convey the message, then sent them fanning out across the South and West. These lecturers helped start thousands of new sub-alliances and cooperatives, radicalized rural America economically and politically, and paved the way for coalitions with labor, urban immigrants, and Black sharecroppers. They also formed the Reform Press Association, a massive network of radical agrarian presses that challenged the corporate political perspective and disseminated declarations and agreements.

What We’ve Done Right
At every Occupy I’ve been to, I’ve seen folks in the grip of democratic discussion. In one corner, a vet teaches military counter-recruitment tactics. A suited woman talks foreclosures and how to fight them. Paul-ites speak of fiat currency while a mohawked kid hands out ‘zines. After a whole lifetime of trusting experts, people are waking up to the value of their own experience. They are starting to believe in what they know. And they are sharing it with each other. They didn’t get us into this mess, but hell if they don’t believe we can get ourselves out. It’s like a light went on in one person’s head, and then another and another. All these problems, all these intractable problems we’ve suffered so long—well, they aren’t intractable! Capitalism is not inevitable. Poverty is not inevitable. In other words, they’re fallible. They can be fought, resisted. In that sense, Occupy is not an occupation, but a giant exercise in decolonization. It’s a battle to oust the false masters of our minds.

Attitudes to Avoid
Raising Awareness, not Rising Up. For the last decade, I’ve had my awareness raised so many times my brain should have popped. And when each successive awareness-raising moment ended, a bunch of newly brain-pained people asked what to do next. The answer? Raise more awareness. Of course, Occupy has done much more than raise awareness—-we have taken the streets and stayed despite rain, snow and fatigue. But our default stance on ideology is still quite liberal: people talk and their minds change; changed minds change society. More important is the thorny issue of demands. In the beginning, we had none, which was cunning. But the persistent refusal to create any highlights a mistake that democratic movements often make: that forming clear analyses and demands and agitating around them is necessarily presumptuous, invasive, and authoritarian. That’s not true, though. An ideology is, at its most basic level, a description of power and a plan for fighting it. An ideology sets goals and decides how to engage with the enemy. Ideologies can be developed democratically, with input from all affected parties. They flag common mistakes and build cohesion. They are the basis for radical demands. Without ideology, you can be highly aware but have no plan for political action. In other words, you’re easily co-opted. A rigorous ideology guards against co-optation by showing people why they're acting and what they’re acting for. That’s why radical ideology must lead to radical recruitment. This process is not accidental and doesn’t remotely resemble awareness-raising. Raising awareness is a piecemeal act that does not provide people with an analysis for action. To illustrate the difference: a lot of people who opposed neoliberal nation-building voted for Barack Obama in 2008, despite the fact that he fully intended to continue the same. This occurred not because these people were stupid or needed one more teach-in on Afghanistan; it happened because the left did not offer clear reasons and means to do anything else. The Occupy movement needs demands, especially now that many Occupies are facing eviction. It needs to spread them systematically, giving everyone who is discontented a mandate and method for change. This is not presumptuous if we do it together. If we do it together, it’s called democracy. Let’s not raise awareness. That gives us grief but nothing to do. Let’s educate toward action. Let’s rise up.

Suggestions
This one’s going to be hard, but worth it. Let’s use our General Assemblies to develop an ideology, then federate to hammer out demands. Each occupation takes the next month to democratically develop their top three grievances and demands. (There are many consensus models available for developing ideas and solutions that go beyond the scope and format of a General Assembly.) After they’re done, they send two delegates to an Occupy convention, where we’d come up with a declaration (our grievances) and a new constitution (our demands and solutions). The process of coming up with these documents would itself be revolutionary and would deepen our understanding of each other and our fight, and the finished product could be used to educate, agitate and get started on a new world.

Questions
Who are our friends? Who are enemies? What do we want? What is the main obstacle that keeps us from getting it? How have we tried to fight that problem before? Did it work? Why or why not? What would it take to be successful? Even with diverse opinions, what are a few things we agree on? What solutions already exist, and what solutions do we need to invent? What is uniquely ours to give in the long fight against elitism? What are our weaknesses and how might they be exploited? What education do we need to act successfully? How do we get it to them? How do we come up with demands, and how will we disseminate them?

Movement Politicizing 
Populist Example
The Populists made every attempt to create a new world through non-cooperation—-functioning as if the State didn’t exist. But the State did exist, and it combined with corporations to control everything the Populists needed: credit, land, a fair currency. The Populists realized they had no choice. In order to operate their co-ops and implement their new Treasury program, they had to change the law. And to change the law, they had to confront power. So radicals within the movement pushed a new plan. They urged the agrarian movement to form a political third party, a militant coalition of rural and urban workers that sought to transform the very foundations of government. The bulk of the movement responded in kind, and farmers met en masse in 1892 to fashion the Omaha Demands-—the foundation of The People’s Party. These demands called for the abolition of national banks, reclamation of corporate land for use by the People, a graduated income tax and the prohibition of agricultural speculation. Populists once again mobilized their massive, educated and organized base to run third party and fusion candidates for every level of office in the land. In states like Kansas, they won straight tickets. Railroad magnates wrote letters to colleagues, invoking God to spare them a Populist legislature. In other states, the party did not fare as well. Rampant election fraud and vigilante action stymied campaigns in the South; two-party emotional appeals leveled the rest.

Despite its real success, the People’s Party imploded for several reasons. First, it didn’t organize urban-rural coalitions soon enough. Second, Alliance members split over the politics, many preferring alternatives to confrontation. And third, the movement’s failure to create co-ops in key states led to lack of organization, recruitment and radical education. This, in turn, produced the shallow analysis and lack of self-respect that make movements ripe for accommodation. Within four years, the movement caved to the comfort of received culture and nominated William Jennings Bryan-—a Democrat—-as their presidential candidate. With that move, America lost one of the most inspiring democratic movements it has ever seen.

What We’ve Done Right
We’ve rejected the two-party system and refused to pander to politicians. Screaming fire couldn’t clear an Occupy faster than a Democratic operative, and that’s good. This time around, we’re insisting on autonomy first and demands second. This is the opposite of 2008, when so many auctioned off autonomy to buy futures in the grossly inflated hope and change market. But that bubble crashed, too, and promises are no longer worth what we’ve got to pay for them. Now we’re wiser. Now we’re the ones making promises—this time to ourselves.

Attitudes to Avoid
The Complicity Complex. The politicization of the Populist movement appears to be a simple moral tale: the Populists got political and so got coopted. The solution is, of course, to not engage in conventional politics. But the real lesson is actually double-edged. Because it is just as true that the Populists failed because they didn’t engage enough, believing they could do radical economics without radical politics. In reality, though, noncooperation can’t work without transforming power at the level of government. The Populists didn’t fail because they got political; they failed because they didn’t organize enough before they did. This statement will be controversial to some Occupiers, many of whom reject conventional politics because the system has failed. And they’re right. The two-party capitalist system has failed. I am not advocating a return. But consider this: If we don't confront political power directly-—replace it, dismantle it, infiltrate it, whatever-—then we actually depend more on it than if we did. Up until now, the Occupy movement has focused on reclaiming space, direct action, and noncooperation. But that doesn't mean we’re politically independent; it simply means we depend on politics indirectly. That is being co-opted by default. As my friend likes to say: “You may not believe in the State, but the State believes in you.” You can ignore it and avoid it, and for some goals, that works. But any successful alternative will fail precisely by being successful unless it finds a way to confront and change the law. If, on the other hand, you say what you want and how you want it, then form an autonomous group to get it-—and if what you want scares the powerful and improves material realities for millions of people—that's independence.

Now, there are lots of ways to build political power besides running for office, some of which I will list below. But we shouldn't confuse a slicked-out politico pawning our movement with creating populist political force. Remember: radical change is not action-specific. Actions are radical when they challenge the balance of power. A strike could be totally symbolic if it’s not well-planned, while a legal strategy that questions the legal structure can be quite radical indeed. In other words, an action is radical if shifts power to the oppressed. The question should not be what appears most radical; the question should be what works most radically in a given situation. If, for example, your goal was ensuring food justice for millions of people, you could grow a vast network of gardens without anyone’s say-so. But if you are trying to stop a foreign war, there aren’t a lot of alternatives available. In the former case, you drop out. In the latter, you engage. This engagement can take the form of direct action. It can take the form of a third party. It can take the form of people’s laws. What it can’t do is confuse confrontation with complicity, or else it will fail. If we want to win, we must find a way to challenge political power without compromise.

Suggestions
Delegates return from the national convention and use the demands and grievances to start an Occupy Party. This party wouldn't join power, but confront it. It would exist to change the system, but also to recruit masses of people to the Occupy movement and get working for a new world. The candidates would not be leaders but conduits, wearing Everyone masks and refusing to reveal their identity. They could literally change with every debate, every interview, physically embodying the diversity they represent. Yard signs wouldn’t have names but manifestos: “I Am Everyone and I Want ______.” And the name on the ballot? The 99 percent.
Engage in massive, coordinated direct action. Delegates at the Occupy convention could also decide priority targets for direct action, then organize local Occupies to coordinate simultaneous actions. With only a few thousand people well-organized people we could shut down, say, the banking system in the United States. We just need to pick a goal and get the numbers. (Direct action is an especially good tactic for people who don't like to mess with electoral politics. But if it's to be effective, it has to be massive and it has to be coordinated. Creative actions get publicity, raise awareness, intimidate the powerful, and make people feel empowered and important. Mass action stops the machine.)
Create People’s Laws. This could be coordinated on a national level or done to suit each particular Occupy, but the idea’s the same. Come up with a law that dramatically shifts power (for example abolishing corporate personhood) and run it as a ballot initiative—-a form of direct democracy. Use the ensuing organizing drive to educate and recruit people into the movement, then fight like hell to pass the law. Remember, though: This is municipal civil disobedience, so prepare to escalate in court.

Questions
You might not agree with my suggestions, but you’ve got to answer my questions. First, what kind of government do I want? (Because a government is, at its core, a decision-making process and body. Everyone has a government. They just have to say what kind it is.) For the Occupy movement, this will probably involve describing both an interim government and an ultimate government. What do we want while the current system exists, and what do we want when we’ve won? Then ask: Do I want to replace, transform, infiltrate or abolish the government? If I do not want to engage in conventional politics, then what is my plan for confronting existing power?

Two last last things
First, Goodwyn names four movement phases, but he also names a movement necessity: internal communication. Successful movements, no matter how far-flung and rhizomatic, find ways to communicate their ideas, their methods, their models and their plans. Movements that don't do this form pockets of intensity or slump into irrelevance. The genius of the Occupy movement is leaderless, local autonomy, but that genius is also a pitfall if we can't find a way to coordinate efforts. So far, individual Occupies can throw out ideas or even call for actions, but it's very difficult to organize around something massive or share crucial information. In a leaderless movement, it can be difficult to know where to go to share or get a question answered. It is good to keep in mind that democratic movements often require more structure than hierarchical ones, since in hierarchies you ask the person in charge and in democracies you ask the structure itself—a committee whose membership is always in flux. This makes it more important than ever to identify a clear process of getting information, making decisions, and federating to make large decisions. The Populists had a system of sub-alliances that each had their own flavor and attitudes, but they coordinated through a system of trained lecturers and annual convergences. In between big events, they communicated through their own Reform Press Association, a collection of local, regional and national papers that communicated key ideas, agreements and perspectives to farmers all over the country. Occupy Nashville has met this need by reviving the Revolutionary-era Committees of Correspondence, using these working groups to communicate throughout the state. Others have suggested an Occupy news network or a kind of informational Pony Express where appointed people travel to share critical information. Whatever the solutions are, Occupy must create a centralized virtual and physical space to share and plan together or we will fight too much alone.

Second, as I finished this essay, the evictions started. One by one, Occupies faced police in riot gear solving ‘public health threats’ with tear gas and pepper spray. Some of us held our ground, some were routed but regrouped and reclaimed, and others are in limbo, wondering what to do next. There are signs at most evictions that say something simple and profound: You can’t evict an idea. That’s true, and the idea of an occupation is capable of outlasting a centralized physical occupation, going forward to occupy homes against foreclosure, occupy classrooms, occupy elections, whatever. But this is an uncomfortable stage because the magic of Occupy has been the centralized physical occupation, a place where so much more happens than the tasks at hand. As my friend bemoaned: “I don’t want us to go back indoors to meetings only ten people attend, only to go back out and find all the people who gathered once but then dispersed.” And that is a real concern. On the other hand, occupations can become mired in problems of self-defense, and the occupation itself can supersede the work that needs doing. We need to regroup our local Occupies and ask ourselves some serious questions. First, what are the pros and cons of a centralized, physical occupation? What are the most pressing needs in our community and are they met better by one occupation, many small and targeted occupations, or another route altogether? If our occupations went dark or indoors, would we lose a certain magic and hutzpah that we need? If yes, how can we best defend or reclaim an occupy space, and what skills do we need to do that? How can we get those skills, and how can we divvy up our energies to meet both the needs of the occupation and its purposes? What are our goals and how do we meet them in the style and spirit of the Occupy movement? And finally, how do we keep the magic alive? That last question might sound silly, but it’s the most important. Because the Occupy movement didn’t invent the grievances its making or the problems it’s fighting. Most of these problems have existed for decades or even centuries, and have been fought for just as long by devoted dissidents. What Occupy has brought to this mix is radical hope and the magic of gathered imagination, gathered rage, gathered force. It’s brought possibilities so fast and thick they feel like the new texture of reality. And that’s what we cannot afford to lose.

...

Those are my lists. I’m done, and we’re just starting. I have only one brain, and this is just one way forward. Probably there are as many ways as hearts, and we’ll need every beating one. But there are two things for sure: All the ways are steep, and some of them are worth it. There’s another side to this mountain, and it’s lovely and shot with light. Like the bear, we’re going over to see what we can see. We’ll know when we arrive, because we’ve carried the idea of this place for lifetimes, centuries. Sometimes it’s whispered and sometimes, shouted. It’s been killed and resurrected, celebrated and spurned. It’s suffered with aplomb, and so it’s ragged-beautiful. Sometimes it seemed so far, and we were in the dark. And other times we were sure it was just around the corner, right up against our skin. Always it’s been a world we made with voices, heads, and hands.

This wagon train is long, and it doesn’t stop. It loses people, wheels—re-finds them. We die on the march, mostly, and often the point is marching. But there is always the mountain, and still the other side. We are pulling toward it, all of us. And we are pulled by one great question: What would it look like to win?

This is the question you must ask. You ask it for yourself, and for your children. You ask it alone, and we answer it together. But you must ask it, and not let anything get in the way of the answer—not your ego, not your assumptions, not your weary, tired heart.

Because democracy is not an idea, a monument or a building. Democracy is nothing short of being fully alive and defending the fully living.

So write your lists and make your map. Have a plan and damn The Man. Because populism isn’t dead, you see: it’s marching.

South Korea's National Assembly sees problems with FTA's investor-state dispute resolution rules

2012-01-04T11:10:00.000-05:00

Janet Eaton writes,
Finally the investor state dispute [ISD] mechanism is being scrutized and challenged by governments entering into Free Trade Agreements with the US.

[Investor state dispute mechanisms are those clauses in trade treaties that allow investors to initiate suits directly against foreign governments, rather than petition their own nation to negotiate disagreements. Suits are heard before international trade boards, rather than in open courts of law. Investor state claims threaten the ability of democratically-elected government to write laws and regulation with an eye to protecting labor rights, the environment, or public health. NAFTA's Chapter 11 is an example.]

On Dec. 30 the National Assembly of South Korea adopted a resolution calling for a renegotiation of the KORUS FTA, including the abandonment, postponement, or modification of provisions on the ISD system, which emerged as the chief issue during the National Assembly's debate over the KORUS FTA.

Just a few months earlier Julia Gillard's Australian government rejected Investor-State arbitration provision in trade agreements after an Australian Productivity Commission could find no compelling economic rationale for the inclusion of investor- state arbitration mechanisms in its trade and investment agreements. In fact it concluded that there were few clear benefits, and several worrying risks, associated with such provisions.

Janet adds that the accountability and impartiality of the arbitrators are also at issue. This article by Jung Eun-joo on Korea's recent rejection of investor state dispute mechanism focuses on an early trade arbitration decision, in which the presiding judge came under much US pressure to rule in that country's favor.

Iowa is the future of post-Citizens United politics

2012-01-03T15:09:00.000-05:00

Toward the end of this clip from today's edition of Democracy Now, John Nichols, blogger and writer for The Nation, totes up the spending by candidates and superPACs in Iowa and estimates that it works out to about $200 per vote cast, most of it going to broadcast last-minute negative ads. That's just one reason why anti-corporate personhood advocates will be attending both Democratic and Republican caucuses this evening in hopes of passing Move to Amend resolutions calling for an amendment overturning the Citizens United decision, and allowing for the re-regulation of campaign spending.

If you're in Boston on Thursday, help prevent tar sands development and climate disaster

2011-12-14T11:39:00.000-05:00

We're posting this for our friends at Tar Sands Action Network.

Dear Climate Activists,
We need you to join us outside Senator Scott Brown's office, 2400 JFK Building, 15 New Sudbury Street, Boston, on Thursday at 11 a.m. prevent future natural disasters from hitting our Commonwealth and nation.

RSVP here if you can make it--we need 48 people to sign up to represent the 48 states that have each had a FEMA-declared national disaster this year.

Fossil fuel companies are trying to force a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline by attaching it to the payroll tax cut bill rapidly working its way through Congress. This pipeline would accelerate the development of the Tar Sands, meaning "game over for the climate" (according to NASA's top climate scientist) and countless new natural disasters across Massachusetts and the world. Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown is one of the few swing votes on this bill. It's up to us to win his vote or expose him as a puppet of the fossil fuel industry.

Scott Brown is a member of the Massachusetts National Guard and is on the Subcommittee for Disaster Recovery in the Senate, so he should know and care that 2011 was a record year for FEMA-declared emergencies. It should be clear to him that climate change is already costing us lives and billions of dollars--yet his campaign bill is footed by massive fossil fuel corporations such as Koch Industries and Exxon Mobil.

Tomorrow's action is a follow-up to a meeting with constituents held on Monday, at which they asked him to help prevent future Hurricane Irenes by blocking the pipeline. The alternative? Increased funding for FEMA and the National Guard to deal with the upcoming disasters that burning the Tar Sands oil will create.

If he does not pledge to vote against the pipeline before Thursday at noon, we will start a march, led by a former National Guardsman and a giant puppet of Scott Brown, through the streets of Boston to the local Massachusetts National Guard recruiting office to let them know to start recruiting and training future disaster responders to deal with the more frequent and more serious natural disasters that will be brought by burning the Tar Sands.

Want to be a part of this? Show up on Thursday at 11AM at Brown's office (2400 JFK Building, 15 New Sudbury Street, Boston). RSVP here--we're asking willing individuals to commit to specific roles in our demonstration before the march.

Please dress professionally. We need to show Senator Brown and those considering voting for him that we take our future very seriously. We will be polite, professional, and principled. Please wear the nicest outfit you have that you feel comfortable marching two miles in.

Please forward this email widely to your networks. Thank you all for your efforts, and we hope to see you on Thursday.

- Craig, Roger, Kathryn, Nathalie, Alli, and other Massachusetts supporters of Tar Sands Action network

OREP Action Bulletin out now

2011-12-13T11:34:00.000-05:00

The Oregonians for Renewable Energy Policy (OREP) Action Bulletin is online here. Check it out! Highlights include upcoming events, links to online video on feed-in tariffs, frequently-asked questions to bring you up to speed on equitable and localized development of solar power. OREP is a sponsored project of Alliance for Democracy.

Did you know...
Last month, OREP was invited to join the Steering Committee for Alliance for Renewable Energy... That OREP's outreach to Occupy Portland activists added feed-in tariffs to the Solutions Work Group's discussion... that OREP is now a member of the NW Energy Coalition, an alliance of more than 100 environmental, civic, and human service organizations, progressive utilities, and businesses in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Alaska and British Columbia. NWEC promotes development of renewable energy, energy conservation, consumer protection, low-income energy assistance, and fish and wildlife restoration.

For more information, see the OREP website, www.oregonrenewables.com.

Check out OREP organizer Judy Barnes on the Alliance for Democracy show, "Populist Dialogues":

In Maine, East-West Highway feasibility study moves forward

2011-12-13T11:13:00.000-05:00

by Chris Buchanan, Defending Water in Maine

LR 2358, An Act To Provide Funding to the Department of Transportation for a Feasibility Study for an East-West Highway, has been given the green light for consideration this session. If you live in Maine, see below for actions you can take with AfD's Defending Water in Maine campaign to help protect your state's ecosystems.

Background
The idea of a Maine East-West highway has been kicked around the Maine Legislature since 1981. However, public and/or private funding has never been provided to study the feasibility of such a highway or to finance its construction.

Canadian businesses want an East-West highway to move goods more cheaply from inland Canada to its eastern provinces and to a proposed Super-Port at Halifax, Nova Scotia, for export. Maine would be used as a throughway. But the highway could also accelerate the exploitation of Maine’s natural resources. Of particular concern to Defending Water in Maine, is the likelihood that the highway would make it economical for giant corporations to profit from cutting down Maine’s forests to supply wood chips to Europe as “green energy” and from exporting Maine’s water in bulk and in bottles to global markets.

Defending Water in Maine and others ask: How will increased truck traffic crossing the state benefit the people of Maine? Simply, it will not. But, it will benefit transnational corporations like Nestlé which can profit from using the highway to exploit and export Maine’s water to sell it around the world.

Why now?
Peter Vigue, CEO of Cianbro, Maine’s largest construction firm, has reignited conversations among business leaders about the East-West highway. The last time Vigue was vocal about the project was in 2007, when he proposed the private toll road from Coburn Gore to Calais. Vigue again is promoting the highway to be built on private land with other business leaders and with state legislators. Cianbro is poised to profit considerably, as the owner of this toll road.

Plans to construct the road are well developed. Cianbro has already identified a route, and contacted major landowners; however, Cianbro has yet to make public the route they are pursuing. See our website for a map of the most likely route.

Key business leaders appear unified, and are organizing influence.

Eastern Maine Development Corporation has formed Mobilize Eastern Maine, a new business leader group to promote economic development. They appear to be networking with community college educators. For instance, Washington County Community College (WCCC) is starting a new international commerce business program, stating that they anticipate the East-West highway and increased business at the ports.
The Summit to Connect Education and Business in Eastern Maine is hosting an event to reach out to educators on December 8. (Here is information on this event, and the new program at WCCC: WCCC creates new International Commerce Business program)

LR 2358 was just unanimously moved forward for consideration as an emergency bill by the Legislative Council for the upcoming second legislative session. In 2007, Vigue said that, except for river crossings and connecting to the interstate, Cianbro didn’t need to go to the government for permitting, since this would all be privately funded on private land.

However, Senator Doug Thomas just sponsored a bill for a feasibility study. The bill summary states it, “would provide funding for an independent, investment-grade feasibility study to determine the need for and location of an east-west highway in Maine.” Bill sponsor, Senator Doug Thomas, said that, “a surprising amount of work has been done,” that this project is “doable”, and that this would be a boost to the Maine economy. (video of Thomas's testimony is here.)

Action Items
Join our east-west highway watch group. We will maintain a separate list of people who want more information on the development of this threat so we can continue to update you and network without burdening everyone on our listserv.

Identify Landowners. If you or someone you know has been approached about the highway running through their land, let us know! In the near future, we will be organizing to canvass the area as well and will need your help.

Contact your Local Representative and Senators, and the Members of the Transportation Committee re LR 2358. Some talking points:

There is no reason for this to be considered as an emergency bill. Even Rep. Thomas admits that this has been under discussion for 20 years. The “emergency” seems to be that Cianbro wants to move ahead.
Emergency legislation will not take into account potential environmental impacts of this highway, particularly impacts to Maine’s water and forests.
A feasibility study of the East-West highway as a private toll road should not be funded by potential investors. It is unethical to have an investor-funded study of a project that benefits investors. Any study must be unbiased, because we are confident that an East-West highway will not benefit Maine people, or the environment.
This bill is being rushed through to serve the interests of Cianbro, a private corporation, and Canadian businesses looking to cut transportation costs, without looking at the public interest of all Mainers. Will the cutting down of our forests, the selling of our water, and being a transport throughway be in the best interest of Maine residents now and in the future?

List of Transportation Committee Members:
Senators:
Douglas Thomas- R (sponsor) 277-3017 firewood@tds.net
Ronald Collins- R 985-2485 SenRonald.Collins@legislature.maine.gov
Bill Diamond- D 892-8941 SenBill.Diamond@legislature.maine.gov

Representatives:
Wayne Parry- R 286-9145 RepWayne.Parry@legislature.maine.gov
Alexander Willette- R 689-8332 alexander.willette@gmail.com
James Gillway- R 548-6372 RepJames.Gillway@legislature.maine.gov
Kimberley Rosen- R 469-3779 Kurlykim40@aol.com
Peter Rioux- R 659-2293 RepPeter.Rioux@legislature.maine.gov
Richard Cebra- R 693-6782 RepRich.Cebra@legislature.maine.gov
Ann Peoples- D 287-1430 RepAnn.Peoples@legislature.maine.gov
Charles Theriault- D 728-4526 RepCharlesK.Theriault@legislature.maine.gov
Edward Mazurek- D 542-0017 RepEd.Mazurek@legislature.maine.gov
George Hogan- D 423-4293 RepGeorge.Hogan@legislature.maine.gov

Please let us know whom you have contacted. Thanks!

Chris Buchanan, chris@defendingwater.net

Our support letter to the LA City Council

2011-12-07T21:55:00.000-05:00

AfD Co-chairs Nancy Price and David Delk wrote the following resolution support letter to the LA City Council:

December 5, 2011

Honorable Los Angeles City Council Members
Los Angeles City Hall
200 North Spring Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012
RE: Resolution 11-0002-S123 - Corporate Activities in Electoral Processes

Dear Los Angeles City Council Members,

We write on behalf of the Alliance for Democracy in support of Los Angeles City Council resolution 11-0002-S123 - Corporate Activities in Electoral Processes which calls for a Constitutional Amendment and other legislative actions to establish that only living human beings, not corporations, have inalienable Constitutional rights and that money should not be protected as a form of free speech.

The Alliance for Democracy is a national organization that has members and Branches in California and is also a member of the Move to Amend coalition.

The pernicious doctrine of "corporate personhood" promulgated by the courts has meant that the rights originally intended for natural persons and to protect American citizens from the potentially oppressive powers of our government now belong as well to the corporation, an artificial entity.

Corporations claim these constitutional rights in Federal court to overturn, weaken, or by-pass laws designed to protect the environment, worker safety, public health and a myriad of other laws, including campaign finance laws, of which the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is the most recent and egregious example.

A recent poll by ABC News/Washington Post reveals that over 80% of the American public already
oppose the concept of “corporate personhood’ and that this opposition cuts across the political
spectrum.

We urge the City of Los Angeles to join in the movement to reverse the doctrine of corporate personhood and that money is equal to speech and on December 6th we ask for your “Aye” vote on this vitally important resolution.

LA City Council approves resolution against corporate constitutional rights

2011-12-07T21:49:00.000-05:00

Congratulations to Move to Amend Los Angeles. Organizing paid off as hundreds of supporters packed the City Council's chambers to speak in favor of a resolution barring corporations from accessing constitutional personhood rights, and allowing the re-regulation of political spending. LA now becomes the first major US city to rule that corporations are not people and money is not speech.

The council's unanimous vote came before a standing room only crowd. The resolution was sponsored by City Council President Eric Garcetti and seconded by Council Members Bill Rosendahl and Paul Krekorian with passionate support by Council Members Richard Alarcon and Paul Koretz.

Mary Beth Fielder, Move To Amend-LA founder, spearheaded the effort to bring the resolution to the LA City Council. “It’s a great day for Los Angeles and it’s a great day for the United States of America," Fielder said. "I hope this is the vote heard around the world and that it will inspire other who want to reclaim our democracy to begin organizing in their communities. Together we can build the grassroots support we need to actually amend our constitution.”

“Every struggle to amend the constitution began as just a group of regular Americans who wanted to end slavery, who thought women should vote, who believed that if you’re old enough to be drafted, you should be old enough to vote,” said Council President Eric Garcetti. “These are how American amendments move forward from the grassroots when Americans say enough is enough. We’re very proud to come together and send a message but more than that, this becomes the official position of the City of Los Angeles, we will officially lobby for this.

"I also chair a group which oversees all the Democratic mayors and council members in the country and we’re going to share this with all our 3,000 members and we hope to see this start here in the west and sweep the nation until one day we do have a constitutional amendment which will return the power to the people. ”

“What we saw in that chamber today was the beginning of a sea change in the way people think about politics in America and I hope that this will be the first day of a long and sustained movement that changes the way we represent ourselves and the way we demand the kind of government that we deserve,” said Council Member Paul Krekorian.

“I could not believe the coalition of energy that filled the council chambers today,” said Council Member Bill Rosendahl. “It made a huge difference. It was democracy at its best! ”

Here's the video:

Los Angeles may be the first major US city to call for an end to corporate personhood

2011-12-03T08:55:00.000-05:00

Move to Amend LA and Move to Amend write:

Next week the Los Angeles City Council will vote on a resolution that calls on Congress to amend the Constitution to clearly establish that only living persons--not corporations--are endowed with constitutional rights and that money is not the same as free speech. If this resolution is passed, Los Angeles will be the first major city in the U.S. to call for an end to all corporate constitutional rights.

The campaign in Los Angeles is the latest grassroots effort by Move to Amend, a national coalition working to abolish corporate personhood. “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," said Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, a national spokesperson for Move to Amend. "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 ballot measures calling for an end to corporate personhood and the legal status of money as speech by 84% and 78% respectively. In November voters in Boulder, Colorado and Missoula, Montana both passed similar initiatives with 75% support.

“We are experiencing overwhelming support for what may be a historic turning point in restoring a voice to the voters and setting an example for the rest of the country," stated Mary Beth Fielder, Coordinator of Move To Amend LA. "This action would provide the basis for overturning the recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.”

Move to Amend volunteers in dozens of communities across the country are working to place similar measures on local ballots next year, including West Allis, WI, a conservative suburb of Milwaukee where last week local residents successfully qualified a measure for their spring ballot.

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 these campaigns help our federal representatives see that we mean business. Our very democracy is at stake,” stated Sopoci-Belknap.

The campaign in Los Angeles is endorsed by a growing list of organizations including Common Cause, Occupy LA, LA County Federation of Labor, Physicians for Social Responsibility, The Environmental Caucus of the CA Democratic Party, Southern California Americans for Democratic Action, MoveOn LA, Progressive Democrats of the Santa Monica Mountains, Democracy for America, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, AFSCME 36, LA Green Machine and California Clean Money Campaign.

Here's a list of resolutions passed to date. You can read Move to Amend's proposed amendment here.

"Hallelujah Corporations!"

2011-12-02T17:51:00.000-05:00

Get into the corporatized spirit (wait--isn't that a contradiction in terms?) with this "Hallelujah Chorus" spoof sung by Stanza XXI.

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

2011-11-15T12:35:00.001-05:00

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.

Two days away: house parties!

2011-11-07T12:29:00.000-05:00

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!

Elinor Ostrom outlines the best strategies for managing the commons

2011-11-07T12:00:00.000-05:00

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.

Sunday's DC action against KeystoneXL

2011-11-07T11:41:00.001-05:00

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.

Another layer of support for cold-weather Occupiers

2011-11-07T11:08:00.000-05:00

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.

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

2011-11-02T12:35:00.002-04:00

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

Occupy Earth: nature is the 99%, too

2011-10-31T12:07:00.000-04:00

Years of organizing to stop environmental degradation often boils down to "Somebody got rich and somebody got sick." Changing the corporatist view of nature as resource and communities as expendable will help safeguard environmental systems and human health.

by Chip Ward. Posted on TomDispatch.com October 27

What if rising sea levels are yet another measure of inequality? What if the degradation of our planet’s life-support systems--its atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere--goes hand in hand with the accumulation of wealth, power, and control by that corrupt and greedy 1% we are hearing about from Zuccotti Park? What if the assault on America’s middle class and the assault on the environment are one and the same?

Money Rules: It’s not hard for me to understand how environmental quality and economic inequality came to be joined at the hip. In all my years as a grassroots organizer dealing with the tragic impact of degraded environments on public health, it was always the same: someone got rich and someone got sick.

In the struggles that I was involved in to curb polluters and safeguard public health, those who wanted curbs, accountability, and precautions were always outspent several times over by those who wanted no restrictions on their effluents. We dug into our own pockets for postage money, they had expense accounts. We made flyers to slip under the windshield wipers of parked cars, they bought ads on television. We took time off from jobs to visit legislators, only to discover that they had gone to lunch with fulltime lobbyists.

Naturally, the barons of the chemical and nuclear industries don’t live next to the radioactive or toxic-waste dumps that their corporations create; on the other hand, impoverished black and brown people often do live near such ecological sacrifice zones because they can’t afford better. Similarly, the gated communities of the hyper-wealthy are not built next to cesspool rivers or skylines filled with fuming smokestacks, but the slums of the planet are. Don’t think, though, that it’s just a matter of property values or scenery. It’s about health, about whether your kids have lead or dioxins running through their veins. It’s a simple formula, in fact: wealth disparities become health disparities.

And here’s another formula: when there’s money to be made, both workers and the environment are expendable. Just as jobs migrate if labor can be had cheaper overseas, I know workers who were tossed aside when they became ill from the foul air or poisonous chemicals they encountered on the job.

The fact is: we won’t free ourselves from a dysfunctional and unfair economic order until we begin to see ourselves as communities, not commodities. That is one clear message from Zuccotti Park.

Polluters routinely walk away from the ground they poison and expect taxpayers to clean up after them. By “externalizing” such costs, profits are increased. Examples of land abuse and abandonment are too legion to list, but most of us can refer to a familiar “superfund site” in our own backyard. Clearly, Mother Nature is among the disenfranchised, exploited, and struggling.

Democracy 101: The 99% pay for wealth disparity with lost jobs, foreclosed homes, weakening pensions, and slashed services, but Nature pays, too. In the world the one-percenters have created, the needs of whole ecosystems are as easy to disregard as, say, the need the young have for debt-free educations and meaningful jobs.

Extreme disparity and deep inequality generate a double standard with profound consequences. If you are a CEO who skims millions of dollars off other people’s labor, it’s called a “bonus.” If you are a flood victim who breaks into a sporting goods store to grab a lifejacket, it’s called looting. If you lose your job and fall behind on your mortgage, you get evicted. If you are a banker-broker who designed flawed mortgages that caused a million people to lose their homes, you get a second-home vacation-mansion near a golf course.

If you drag heavy fishnets across the ocean floor and pulverize an entire ecosystem, ending thousands of years of dynamic evolution and depriving future generations of a healthy ocean, it’s called free enterprise. But if, like Tim DeChristopher, you disrupt an auction of public land to oil and gas companies, it’s called a crime and you get two years in jail.

In campaigns to make polluting corporations accountable, my Utah neighbors and I learned this simple truth: decisions about what to allow into the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat are soon enough translated into flesh and blood, bone and nerve, and daily experience. So it’s crucial that those decisions, involving environmental quality and public health, are made openly, inclusively, and accountably. That’s Democracy 101.

The corporations that shred habitat and contaminate your air and water are anything but democratic. Stand in line to get your 30 seconds in front of a microphone at a public hearing about the siting of a nuclear power plant, the effluent from a factory farm, or the removal of a mountaintop and you’ll get the picture quickly enough: the corporations that profit from such ecological destruction are distant, arrogant, secretive, and unresponsive. The 1% are willing to spend billions impeding democratic initiatives, which is why every so-called environmental issue is also about building a democratic culture.

First Kill the EPA, Then Social Security: Beyond all the rhetoric about freedom from the new stars of the Republican Party, the strategy is simple enough: obstruct and misinform, then blame the resulting dysfunction on “government.” It’s a great scam. Tell the voters that government doesn’t work and then, when elected, prove it. And first on the list of government outfits they want to sideline or kill is the Environmental Protection Agency, so they can do away with the already flimsy wall of regulation that stands between their toxins and your bloodstream.

Poll after poll shows that citizens understand the need for environmental rules and safeguards. Mercury is never put into the bloodstreams of nursing mothers by consensus, nor are watersheds fracked until they are flammable by popular demand. But the free market ideologues of the Republican Party are united in opposition to any rule or standard that impedes the “magic” of the marketplace and unchecked capital.

The same bottom-line quarterly-report fixation on profitability that accepts oil spills as inevitable also accepts unemployment as inevitable. Tearing apart wildlife habitat to make a profit and doing the same at a workplace are just considered the price of doing business. Clearcutting a forest and clearcutting a labor force are two sides of the same coin.

Beware of Growth: Getting the economy growing has been the refrain of the Obama administration and the justification for every bad deal, budget cut, and unbalanced compromise it’s made. The desperate effort to grow the economy to solve our economic woes is what keeps Timothy Geithner at the helm of the Treasury and is what stalls the regulation of greenhouse gasses. It’s why we are told we must sacrifice environmental quality for pipelines and why young men and women are sacrificed to protect access to oil, the lubricant for an acquisitive economic engine. The financial empire of the one percenters and the political order it has shaped are predicated on easy and relentless growth. How, we are asked, will there be enough for everyone if we don’t keep growing?

The fundamental contradiction of our time is this: we have built an all-encompassing economic engine that requires unending growth. A contraction of even a percent or two is a crisis, and yet we are embedded in ecosystems that are reaching or have reached their limits. This isn’t complicated: There’s only so much fertile soil or fresh water available, only so many fish in the ocean, only so much CO2 the planet can absorb and remain habitable.

Yes, you can get around this contradiction for a while by exploiting your neighbor’s habitat, using technological advances to extend your natural resources, and stealing from the future--that is, using up soil, minerals, and water your grandchildren (someday to be part of that same 99%) will need. But the limits to those familiar and, in the past, largely successful strategies are becoming more evident all the time.

At some point, we’ll discover that you can’t exist for long beyond the boundaries of the natural world, that (as with every other species) if you overload the carrying capacity of your habitat, you crash. Warming temperatures, chaotic weather patterns, extreme storms, monster wildfires, epic droughts, Biblical floods, an avalanche of species extinction… that collapse is upon us now. In the human realm, it translates into hunger and violence, mass migrations and civil strife, failed states and resource wars.

Like so much else these days, the crash, as it happens, will not be suffered in equal measure by all of us. The one percenters will be atop the hill, while the 99% will be in the flood lands below swimming for their lives, clinging to debris, or drowning. The Great Recession has previewed just how that will work.

An unsustainable economy is inherently unfair, and worse is to come. After all, the car is heading for the cliff’s edge, the grandkids are in the backseat, and all we’re arguing about is who can best put the pedal to the metal.

Occupy Earth: Give credit where it’s due: it’s been the genius of the protesters in Zuccotti Park to shift public discourse to whether the distribution of economic burdens and rewards is just and whether the economic system makes us whole or reduces and divides us. It’s hard to imagine how we’ll address our converging ecological crises without first addressing the way accumulating wealth and power has captured the political system. As long as Washington is dominated and intimidated by giant oil companies, Wall Street speculators, and corporations that can buy influence and even write the rules that make buying influence possible, there’s no meaningful way to deal with our economy’s addiction to fossil fuels and its dire consequences.

Nature’s 99% is an amazingly diverse community of species. They feed and share and recycle within a web of relationships so dynamic and complex that we have yet to fathom how it all fits together. What we have excelled at so far is breaking things down into their parts and then reassembling them; that, after all, is how a barrel of crude oil becomes rocket fuel or a lawn chair.

When it comes to the more chaotic, less linear features of life like climate, ecosystems, immune systems, or fetal development, we are only beginning to understand thresholds and feedback loops, the way the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. But we at least know that the parts matter deeply and that, before we even fully understand them, we’re losing them at an accelerating rate. Forests are dying, fisheries are going, extinction is on steroids.

Degrading the planet’s operating systems to bolster the bottom line is foolish and reckless. It hurts us all. No less important, it’s unfair. The 1% profit, while the rest of us cough and cope.

Mendocino AfD banner leads Occupy SF march

2011-10-28T10:34:00.000-04:00

Tom Wodetzki of the Mendocino (CA) AfD chapter and his step-daughter Alexei led last Saturday's Occupy SF march holding this banner, which was made by Fort Bragg AfD friends for their Move to Amend entry in the Mendocino 4th of July Parade.

Tom and Alexei were followed down Market Street by 1,000 militant chanting folk--you can see the video here. Tom also attended OccupySF's Friday and Saturday General Assemblies.

This isn't the only occupy action that Tom and other AfD people have been involved with; there's also ongoing Friday afternoon protests in front of Bank of America and Chase offices in Fort Bragg. You can connect with efforts on the groups's Facebook page.

City of Marina California resolves to amend the Constitution to control corporate "free speech"

2011-10-28T10:23:00.000-04:00

On Tuesday October 18, the Marina (CA) City Council became the first on the Monterey Peninsula to pass a resolution calling for a constitutional amendment in response to the Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission case. The resolution concludes:

Therefore, Be It Resolved that the Marina City Council calls for amending the U.S. Constitution to establish that:
1. Corporations should not be exempt from campaign finance restrictions on the basis of campaign contributions being the same as political speech protected by the First Amendment; and,
2. Corporations are not natural persons, and therefore are not entitled to the same First Amendment rights provided to individual persons.

You can read the full resolution here.

The Monterey County Alliance for Democracy chapter had been working on this since December of last year and are very happy that this finally came to a vote before the City Council and passed. Congratulations, Monterey County!

If you would like to learn more about passing a local resolution, check out resources on the Move to Amend site; and to build support in your town take a look at all the resources on our Tools for Organizing and street theater pages.

"The occupation is not self-preoccupied"

2011-10-24T10:59:00.000-04:00

AfD national council members Lou and Pat Hammann recently took part in the Occupy Wall Street action in Zuccotti Park. Here's Lou's take on the scene, the participants, and what radical new social forms can grow out of this movement.

by Lou Hammann

Patricia and I visited the “Occupation of Wall Street,” October 17th and 18. We were not especially interested in getting a head count as we were in getting in on the conversations. However many bodies were in Zuccotti Park, as we ambled through the crowd, the most conspicuous experience was the courtesy that everyone showed to everyone. There was a lot of necessary jostling and casual nudging but the sense of being part of a community of like-minded folks was quite conspicuous. Then, when we took some time to engage strangers in conversation, what was clear was the friendliness, optimism and sincerity of the talk. And people knew what they were talking about. The conversations were both knowledgeable and personal.

One of our motives for the trip to Zuccotti Park was to show our white/gray hair in a conspicuously youthful crowd. Oh, there were other elders besides us, but no one seemed especially interested in the age distribution. The focus of concern was money: its unfair distribution and its bullying intrusion into the political process at every level. There was, of course, interest in the healthcare crisis, global warming, the cost of education and the other worries that currently affect most citizens. The people in the Park had a consistently broad vision of what kind of world they are NOT living in, and the personal/human responsibility that we all need to take on.

The media were conspicuously present, gathered together and sharing observations and information. These folks, however, were not representing the “corporate media” so much as smaller operations and free-lancers. And they were as willing to talk as to listen. In short this was a futuristic snap shot of the kind of world the folks, young and old, are hoping for—a time when a sense of community will define our world.

If you want verification of the cliché that “Everybody has a story,” this was the place to be. Still, the folks in Zuccotti Park were neither heroes nor idealists; somewhat naïve occasionally, but not idle dreamers. The “battle” has just begun and how long this movement can keep its momentum is uncertain. But the theme is, sooner or later, there must come a fairer, more honest distribution of the society’s resources. To put is simply: Money must be redefined and wealth redistributed. Not only money, of course, but also power must be redistributed so human community becomes the “life style” of the immediate and the long-term future.

It is also encouraging how some of the celebrity pundits at least try to take the side of the “Occupation.” If some such folks can set aside their reflex skepticism, the movement may continue indefinitely. This is not simply a repetition of Woodstock. The “Occupation” is not only an effort to redefine popular culture. The stakes are much higher, the motives more sophisticated, having to do with human rights and the economy. The values played out at Zuccotti Park are communal not selfish. If on-lookers suspect that there are no well-defined goals or strategies, they may be right. But what we will see if we look for it is a new perspective on personal existence and our national life emerging. Is it possible that Darwin is actually watching a stage in human evolution, when the Law of the Jungle is giving way to the Law of the Commons?

I remember a cartoon in a recent New Yorker: Two plutocrats sitting next to each other in a private jet; one says to the other, “I’d be willing to pay higher taxes if some one would make me.” The visionaries of the “Occupation” are perhaps getting ready to do just that. How remains to be seen.

Defending Water for Life in Maine: tabling at the Common Ground Fair

2011-10-19T10:32:00.000-04:00

Defending Water for Life organizers Denise Penttila and Chris Buchanan spent three days in Unity, ME at the Common Ground Fair, September 23rd – 25th, an annual event sponsored by Maine Organic Farmers and Growers Association, which attracts people from all over the state. Chris writes:

Over the course of the weekend, we talked with hundreds of people. We used interactive activities to draw people, including a poster-sized anti-bottled water pledge for folks to sign and drawing on quilt squares to add to our water quilt (pictured at right).

We had the opportunity to talk about taking a rights-based approach to undermine corporate power and to educate many people about how to empower themselves at the local level. Only a few people had ever heard about this method. Folks who approached us with concerns about Nestle in their towns or neighbors’ towns appeared excited and inspired by the end of our talks!

We also learned a great deal about some core issues concerning Maine residents that want to buck the bottle, but feel helpless. In many locations, Mainers have problems with arsenic and radon in their water. This is a rural, well-water issue that we will address more moving forward. It was powerful to hear so many people across Maine share their stories and their passion for water.

Solidarity on the bridges!

2011-10-13T14:12:00.000-04:00

Alliance for Democracy Downeast (ME) and Hancock County (ME) Towns in Transition co-sponsored two Occupy Wall Street solidarity rallies last weekend. Organizers write, "there was such an enthusiastic response to the two local democracy rallies last weekend that a group of us intend to do this every weekend. We had 50 attend the rally in Blue Hill and 52 in Ellsworth with very short notice. Our goal is to line both bridges and then extend into town. The weekly rallies are as follows:

Blue Hill on the bridge- Every Saturday 12-1 PM
Ellsworth on the bridge - Every Sunday 12-1 PM

"If you want to join us, bring a sign and a smile and we’ll send a message to New York and DC that we are standing in solidarity with them. If you don't have a sign, come anyway. It's a fun way to connect with like minded individuals who believe we need to reclaim America.

"Tips for new sign makers and rally attenders: Make signs with big dark letters and not too many words--individuals are reading them while driving. Point the signs toward the drivers. Smile and wave to them."

Ellsworth and Blue Hill are just two of the 1,300 occupations that have formed across the US in the last three weeks. Some are actual encampments, some are regular solidarity rallies. If there's not one near you, hit the streets! Downloadable posters, fliers, etc. are here, suggestions for street theater here!

You can see some pictures from Blue Hill on our Facebook page. AfD'ers are involved with occupations in Portland, Davis, Wall Street, Washington and Boston as well.

Nomi Prins on ongoing financial turmoil

2011-10-12T13:55:00.000-04:00

There's a new "Corporations and Democracy" show online at www.afdradio.org. Nomi Prins, author and senior fellow at Demos, discusses the continuous banking and financial disaster and what listeners can do about it with hosts Tom Wodetzki and Toni Rizzo.

Nomi is a journalist and senior fellow at Demos. Her latest book is It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bonuses, Bailouts, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street (Wiley, September, 2009). Her 2004 book, Other People’s Money: The Corporate Mugging of America (The New Press, October 2004) was chosen as a Best Book of the year by The Economist, Barron's and The Library Journal.

She talks about the financial industry's resistance to structural reform, and industry leaders' lack of concern for long-term stability if the regulation that would achieve it comes at the cost of short-term profit.

"Corporations and Democracy" is aired every other week on KZYX&Z-FM, Mendocino County Public Broadcasting in Philo, California.

Defending Water for Life coordinator testifies against Keystone XL Pipeline

2011-10-12T12:57:00.001-04:00

Here's Ruth Caplan's statement at the State Department Hearing on Keystone XL Pipeline, which was held October 7.

Ruth was arrested earlier this month protesting the pipeline project. She spoke as a past chair of the Sierra Club's National Energy Committee, as well as National Coordinator of the Alliance's Defending Water for Life Campaign. Video of the full four hours of public testimony is here.

Ruth quotes an op-ed by Daphne Wysham, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and is the founder and co-director of the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network (SEEN), which was also excerpted by the New York Times.

I’m not here today to argue about pounds per square inch or parts per million.

I’m not here today to say move the pipeline one mile east or west.

I’m not here today to say put inspectors along the pipeline every 10 miles or even every one mile.

I am here today to speak for my godson, and for my grandson, and for Malia and Sasha and for Chelsea.

And so I will read to you part of what my godson’s mother (Daphne Wysham) wrote after being arrested in front of the White House, a few days before I too was arrested protesting the pipeline.

In Daphne’s words....
“As I stood before the White House gates ... listening to the police issue their warnings of our impending arrests to our group of over 100 demonstrators, I thought of what I would say as they carted me away – what cry I wanted the president to hear.

“And I recalled the day Obama stood before the American people, in those days and months as BP’s deepwater well billowed millions of barrels of oil from that horrifying wound in the Gulf of Mexico floor. I remembered him remarking that, yes, he was very concerned about the spill because, while he shaved one morning, his 11-year-old daughter Malia had asked him, ‘Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?’

“Children have a way of speaking to our hearts. And so, I mused, even if President Obama didn’t hear the songs and the chants of the more than 1,000 people who were arrested over the course of two weeks, even if the prayers of religious leaders and Native American elders went unanswered, even if he didn’t read the editorial opposing the Keystone XL pipeline in The New York Times, even if he ignored the advice of his very own EPA, perhaps, in this instance, Sasha or Malia might see us outside the White House gates and ask him, “Did you stop the pipeline yet, Daddy?”

“As the police handcuffed my hands behind me and led me off to a white school bus, I shouted: ‘For Sasha and Malia.’

“I don’t think Obama or his daughters heard me, I thought, as I watched my fellow protesters be cuffed, searched and photographed through the bus’s caged windows. But perhaps, if we keep this up, they will.”

And so I am here to keep this up.

Mr. President, do this for Malia and Sasha, not for Jeff Berman your former National Delegate Director and current lobbyist for the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Secretary Clinton, do this for Chelsea and her future children, your grandchildren, and not for Paul Elliott, who was the senior official for your Presidential bid and is now a lobbyist for the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Did you stop the pipeline yet Daddy?

Did you stop the pipeline yet Mom?

Our future is in your hands.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, October 12: Congress to vote on FTAs

2011-10-11T15:10:00.000-04:00

It's time to make one more call. Jobs and justice are on the line!

If you have not spoken out against these trade agreements, now must be the time. If you have called, speak out again. Please contact your senators and representative at 1-800-718-1008 and tell them NO Colombia, Panama, or South Korean FTAs.

These three undemocratic and job-killing free trade agreements will be voted on tomorrow by Congress.

We've sent out several alerts as these agreements have worked their way closer to a vote, and we thank you for speaking out against them.

All of these FTAs allow corporate attacks on democratic laws, and will result in the loss of US jobs and the further abuse of communities overseas. And each of the three agreements undermines the democratic process and the common wealth in its own way, whether it's the Panama FTA making it tougher for our government to go after money launderers and tax evaders, to the South Korea FTA creating trade protections for sweatshop-made goods in other countries, to the Colombia FTA "rewarding" those in power for their poor protection of labor rights. For more background information, see these posts on our blog.

Congress needs to hear that the big-budget corporate backers behind these agreements, like the US Chamber of Commerce, don't speak for the majority of Americans. Call Congress at 1-800-718-1008 and demand fair trade policies that promote workplace rights, environmental justice, and democratic governance, create good jobs, and build sustainable local economies. Thank you.

Oregonians for Renewable Energy Policy: What's a feed-in tariff?

2011-10-11T13:16:00.000-04:00

What's a feed-in tariff and why is it so important for development of alternative, renewable energy? Judy Barnes of Oregonians for Renewable Energy Policy (OREP) explains it as "a piggy bank on your roof"--a guaranteed predetermined fixed price for each kilowatt hour of alternative energy you produce for a fixed amount of time, usually 20 years. OREP concentrates on developing solar power in Oregon, confident that by growing the current state feed-in tariff program, they can develop widespread solar capacity in the state. In this video, Judy gives a quick overview of feed-in tariffs and how they've worked. For instance, in Germany, feed-in tariffs have produced not just clean energy but 370,000 jobs, while lowering overall costs for solar power. Ontario's feed-in tariff program is new, but has already created 43,000 jobs, produced 5,000 megawatts of renewable energy, and has put the province on track to close all its coal-fired plants by 2014. Watch to learn more about organizing in Oregon to achieve these same successes.

The video was filmed at the international Moving Planet event in Portland, Oregon, on September 24, and was produced by Jim Lockhart, www.PhilosopherSeed.org. OREP is sponsored by Alliance for Democracy, and works closely with AfD's Portland, OR, chapter.

An Act to Criminalize Chartered, Incorporated Business Entities: A Work in Progress

2011-10-11T12:52:00.000-04:00

Here's a bold statement from Richard L. Grossman to jar conventional thinking--if what he's saying seems absurd to you be sure to read his notes. The evolution of our country's long-term conflict between personhood for all and power for some might surprise you.

Portland AfD at Occupy Portland, and an upcoming event on the city's liberal rep vs. realities for communities of color

2011-10-07T16:07:00.000-04:00

Yesterday AfD'ers were out for the opening Occupy Portland march, collecting signatures for Move to Amend, and spreading the word about Move to Amend Portland and local anti-corporate rule organizing in a march from Waterfront Park to Pioneer Square to Lownsdale Square. Portland chapter president David Delk reports more than 10,000 people in the streets. "It was awesome," he writes. "And just the beginning. The people have started to stir, and in the populist direction we all want."

Here's a link to Shamus Cooke's story in the LA Progressive.

Next week, on Thursday October 13, the chapter will sponsor a talk on "Communities of Color in Multnomah County: An Unsettling Profile," presented by Julia Meier, Coordinator, Coalition of Communities of Color. Ms. Meier will explore Portland's progressive reputation, and the reality behind the widespread assumption that it is an accepting community dedicated to economic, racial and ethnic equity.

The Coalition of Communities of Color, in partnership with researchers at Portland State University, has spent the last two years documenting racial disparities. In May they released a comprehensive report on the status of racial disparities in Multnomah County across 27 different systems and institutions. Ms. Meier will present the findings and engage the Portland progressive community in dialogue.

The talk will take place at the First Unitarian Church, Eliot Chapel, SW 12th and Salmon, from 7 to 9 p.m. Donations of $5 to 20 will be gratefully accepted, but no one will turned away. All are welcome. The Economic Justice Action Group of the First Unitarian Church is a cosponsor, with the Alliance's Portland chapter.

Demand clean, safe drinking water for all California communities! Call to support SB244 today!

2011-10-06T08:40:00.001-04:00

Note new phone number!

Californians, urgent action is needed on SB 244, one of the four bills in the Human Right to Water package.

These four bills, seeking clean drinking water for all, have passed both houses of the California legislature, but Governor Brown is being pressured to veto SB 244, the bill that will require municipalities and other water service districts to make plans to serve low-income communities that have been “redlined” out of water and sanitation services. Often these communities are islands within a municipality whose residents have safe drinking water.

We need your help to let Governor Brown know that SB 244 is important. Call the Governor today at ~~916-445-2842~~ 916-445-2841.

Script: "I am calling to ask Governor Brown to sign SB 244 into law."   Don’t be discouraged by a busy signal. Dial again. You will have to push through the automated system to record your support for SB 244. Be patient and persistent--you may initially get a busy signal and there will be buttons to push and an operator to speak to! But continue and complete the process, so that your voice will be heard and your request recorded.

Thanks in advance from AfD's Defending Water for Life campaign!

Tuesday, October 4: A national call-in to Congress may be our last chance to make our voices heard on FTAs

2011-10-04T09:42:00.001-04:00

Right after we sent this out to our email list, we learned that all three FTAs have been sent to Congress. It's time to call now!

Tell your representative and senators that you’ve had enough of "free trade" deals. Now is the time to say “NO” to the Colombia, Panama and South Korea FTAs. Call 1-800-718-1008 today!

• Don’t give corporations more power to attack US federal and state labor, health and environmental laws. Technical Barriers to Trade clauses are undemocratic and favor corporate profits over people and nature. All three FTAs contain investor protection clauses that allow corporations to sue to overturn democratically-enacted laws.

• With 25 million Americans searching for full-time jobs, we can’t afford trade agreements that off-shore jobs, out-source services and manufacturing, and hurt workers and working families. We need jobs here at home.

There's a lot wrong with these FTAs:

• The South Korea FTA is the biggest deal since NAFTA and will displace an estimated 159,000 jobs. In every state, manufacturing, high tech, and green sector jobs will be at risk. The South Korea FTA allows goods to be protected as "Made in South Korea,” even if most of the manufacturing takes place in other countries, for instance, sweatshops in Burma or North Korea—countries notorious for their human rights abuses.

• Colombia is the trade unionist murder capitol of the world, including 55 murdered in 2010. In 2011, 22 have been killed to date, despite promises from the Colombian government to stop these killings.

• Panama has become a haven for foreign tax evaders and money-laundering, but the Panama FTA would make it tougher for the US government to investigate and prosecute those who hide their money there. Don't we need these lost tax dollars to support job creation and to rebuild our failing infrastructure?

Don't believe the hype coming from big business lobbyists like the US Chamber of Commerce, or from Congress members ready to vote for the corporations who fund their campaigns rather than the people of their districts or states.

These agreements won't create jobs or rebuild the economy—but they will benefit the well-off and well-connected few at the expense of communities, democracy and working people here and overseas.

We need fair trade policies that promote workplace rights and safety and build sustainable local economies. The first step toward those goals is to stop these bad deals now. Make the calls and speak out. And thanks for all you do for democracy!

In Alliance,
Nancy Price, David e. Delk, Ruth Caplan and Barbara Clancy

Need contact info?

See this page for Senate contact information, and this page for House members. A phone call carries much more weight than an on-line comment, so we ask you to please take a few minutes on Tuesday, October 4 – National Call-In Day and contact these offices directly. Let us know what response you receive! Email afd@thealliancefordemocracy, or call 781-894-1179.

Don't give corporations more power to attack US laws

2011-09-21T14:34:00.000-04:00

Technical Barriers to Trade clauses are another reason to oppose the South Korean, Colombian and Panamanian FTAs

by David e. Delk, co-chair, Alliance for Democracy
President Obama has recently promoted three Bush regime-negotiated bilateral "Free Trade Agreements" (FTA's) with South Korea, Panama and Columbia. He claims these agreements are essential to creating jobs here in the U.S. In fact, he advocated for these agreements in his job creation address to Congress last week.

From the history of other trade agreements, we know that in fact trade agreements have resulted in a net loss of U.S. jobs. This will be particularly true for South Korea. The economies of Panama and Colombia are so small that very few jobs could possibly result.

Equally important, these bilateral agreements, just like CAFTA and NAFTA, empower corporations to sue our government directly in undemocratic trade tribunals whenever they believe that government regulation or law represents a barrier to trade, especially if future profits are alleged to be threatened!

This means that environmental protection, public health, or laws and regulations in any other area where human needs come into conflict with the corporate bottom line could be challenged and overturned by secret trade tribunals.

I offer the examples below to show the importance of strongly opposing these agreements.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) has reached two new decisions this month which further empower corporations, overriding local decision making in favor of decisions made at the international level by privately empowered WTO trade tribunals. A third decision is expected within days.

The three decisions involve the WTO...

Banning the voluntary labeling of canned tuna as "Dolphin Safe"—these labels are illegal because they're restrictive of trade, says the WTO. Mexico won this case against the U.S.

Hindering efforts to reduce teen smoking—the US had, among other actions, banned the sale of clove and other types of flavored cigarettes as being "trainers" by cigarette companies to get youth addicted to smoking. Can't be banned, says the WTO. Indonesia won this case against the U.S.

Banning country of origin labeling of beef and other meat products--the US required country of origin labels after the mad cow and e.coli scares of the 1990s. The WTO is expected to say no dice. Our neighbors Canada and Mexico brought this case against the U.S.

These decisions are based on trade language called "technical barriers to trade" which is part of just about all trade agreements. Health provisions, environmental protection, worker safety—all are technical barriers to trade in the world of "free trade" promoted by these agreements.

Under the WTO, countries have to sue on behalf of their corporations. With bilateral agreements allowing for corporations to sue governments directly, we can expect even more harmful decisions.

Prior to the advent of these trade agreements, American states or the U.S. Congress were able to decide on these types of rules and laws. Now an international trade tribunal decides with no recourse to the American court or legislative systems. With every such decision, our ability to be a sovereign people is diminished. Sovereignty indicates who gets to decide. It is clearly not "We, the People" any more.

Take action now!
Move now to stop the web of corporate power from further attacks on democratic decision making. Call your U.S. Representative and U.S. Senators and demand that they vote against the U.S.-Korea, U.S.-Colombia, and U.S.-Panama Free Trade Agreements.

David e. Delk,
Co-chair, Alliance for Democracy

Need contact info?
You can call the White House at 202-456-1111. See this page for Senate contact information, and this page for House members. A phone call carries much more weight than an on-line comment, so we ask you to please take a few minutes and contact these offices directly. Let us know what response you receive! Email afd@thealliancefordemocracy, or call 781-894-1179.

"Corporations and Democracy" focuses on consumer issues and the right to sue

2011-09-13T12:06:00.000-04:00

The September 9 edition of "Corporations and Democracy" is online on AfD's radio page. In this show, Annie Esposito and Steve Scalmanini discuss product safety and the right of individuals to sue for redress with Christine Hines, consumer and civil justice counsel at Congress Watch, an arm of Public Citizen, founded by Ralph Nader.

Listen and learn how recent court cases are helping corporations evade accountability and responsibility to their employers and clients, and actions you can take to push legislation to help level the playing field. Mendocino county callers provide lively comments.

Thanks to KZYX&Z-FM, Mendocino County Public Broadcasting in Philo for broadcasting and streaming the show, and making the programs available. To inquire about rebroadcasting the show in your area, please email afd@thealliancefordemocracy.org.

Video from Madison's Democracy Convention

2011-09-07T14:28:00.000-04:00

You can click on the links below to see video of some of the panels and workshops that AfD co-chair Nancy Price organized at the Democracy Convention last week.

The video was shot by Justice Rising editor Jim Tarbell, who was also a participant in panel discussions on community radio and building community economics.

Eco-Climate Justice: A Revolution of Values for People and Nature, featuring Alberto Saldamando, Ashley Anderson, Carolyn Raffensperger, Rachel Smolker, and Ronnie Cummins; introduced by AfD co-chair Nancy Price. This was the opening plenary of the eco-justice/earth democracy conference, one of eight that made up the full convention program. Since this was the first event, Nancy runs through the full lineup of workshops and plenaries--there was a lot going on!

Climate/Earth Justice: Debunking Climate Markets and the Neoliberal Green Economy, with Ruth Caplan, AfD vice co-chair and director of our Defending Water for Life campaign, Daphne Wysham and Rachel Smolker.

Water: A Fundamental Right for People and Nature, with Alberto Saldamando, Nancy Price and Ruth Caplan

And part two of Teaching Earth Democracy, with Nancy Price, Riki Ott, and Bob Peterson. Nancy gives a demonstration of the Tapestry of the Commons interactive project.

We hope to have more video up here and on our Youtube channel soon.

"Corporations and Democracy" interviews Wisconsin democracy activist Ben Manski

2011-08-29T16:22:00.000-04:00

Ben Manski, executive director of Liberty Tree Foundation for the Democratic Revolution and spokesperson for the Wisconsin Wave, talks to Steve Scalmanini and Annie Esposito, hosts of the August 19 edition of Corporations and Democracy, heard on KZYX&Z-FM, Mendocino County Public Broadcasting in Philo, California.

Ben, Steve, and Annie discuss heartland progressive populism and resistance to attacks on local government in Benton Harbor and other Michigan towns, to the results of the recent Wisconsin recall elections, including allegations of pro-GOP election fraud in a well-to-do county (not the first time this has happened!). Ben reviews the history of home rule provisions and the need to strengthen them today to provide a democratic bulwark against corporate personhood and corporate rule.

Listen online here!

How can communities reclaim the right to say "no" to corporations?

2011-08-29T12:15:00.000-04:00

Mari Margil, of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, recently posted this article on local rights-based ordinances, originally written for Yes! Magazine. She focuses on the recent circuit court overturn on Morgantown, West Virginia's local anti-fracking ordinance, and asks

"Why is it that cities and towns facing the direct impacts of these and a wide range of other harmful corporate activities do not have the authority to determine whether they should occur? How is it that corporate directors who live hundreds if not thousands of miles away--working hand-in-hand with the state and federal officials that residents often expect to protect them--are able to override local, democratic decision making like Morgantown's?"

Pittsburgh's anti-fracking ordinance, which declares the "fundamental and inalienable right" to water for both residents and ecosystems, also gives residents legal standing to sue on behalf of protection of the municipality's ecosystems. But passing these ordinances is nothing but show unless municipalities are also willing to enforce them.

In the meantime, as Wenonah Hauter points out, the energy industries still have too many tools at their disposal to influence public policy in the service of making money, regardless of the risk to health, environment, and local democracy.

"Hacking Democracy" screens in Peterborough, NH

2011-08-29T11:46:00.000-04:00

The documentary "Hacking Democracy" will be shown on Wednesday, September 7 at the Peterborough, NH Town Library, 2 Concord Street. The film starts at 7 p.m. You can reach the library at (603) 924-8040.

The documentary, first broadcast on HBO, exposes the dangers of voting machines widely used in the US. Electronic voting machines count approximately 90% of our votes in county, state and federal elections. The technology is also increasingly being used across the world, including in Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe and Latin America. Filmed over three years, Hacking Democracy follows a team of citizen activists and hackers as they take on the electronic voting industry, targeting the Diebold corporation, and uncovers incendiary evidence from the trash cans of Texas to the ballot boxes of Ohio, exposing secrecy, discarded votes, hackable software and election officials rigging the presidential recount.

Ultimately proving our votes can be stolen without a trace, "Hacking Democracy" culminates in the famous 'Hursti Hack'; a duel between the Diebold voting machines and a computer hacker from Finland - with America's democracy at stake.

Even though this is not a new film, easily-manipulated electronic voting equipment continues to threaten the integrity of our elections. Come see the film and talk with others about what can be done to protect the vote.

Some good media on the "Corporations are People" front

2011-08-15T14:59:00.000-04:00

Here's two articles in response to Mitt Romney's "corporations are people" statement--worth reading.

On TruthOut, Isaiah J. Poole gives the numbers that give the lie to Romney's claim that corporate activities fill "people's" pockets.

And on Aljazeera, Mark LeVine of UC Irvine talks about the (a)moral history of the corporation, with emphasis on what's going on in the developing world, as well as economic inequities here in the US.

Corporations are human!

2011-08-12T14:54:00.000-04:00

And this song, "Corporations are Human," by Massachusetts-based folk satirist (and AfD supporter) Tom Neilson, explains how.

So now what?

2011-08-12T11:51:00.002-04:00

Mitt Romney's "corporations are people" gaffe spotlights a pervasive political mindset based on expediency: candidates claim that corporations are people because the Supreme Court said so, but mostly because the people who own and manage certain very large corporations give certain candidates a great deal of money with which to campaign and win elected office. And, of course, with the Citizens United decision, a corporation can mount a campaign for a favored candidate on their own, although it's more discrete to funnel the money into a SuperPAC.

So what do real people do?

Why not a flashmob action? Get some friends together. Hold up a sign or pick a well-known local spot so people know where you are. Make noise and chant... "Who Are the People, We are the People, Move to Amend that corporations are not people!"

Post the video online and send us the link, and we'll post it here and on our Facebook page. Or see some of the other street theater action ideas here.

Mitt Romney: "Corporations are people, my friend"

2011-08-12T11:26:00.000-04:00

Open mouth, remove silver spoon, insert foot. Regardless of whether Mitt Romney was speaking from the heart or got jittery and shot from the hip, his Iowa State Fair quip that "corporations are people" set a lot of teeth on edge. For Romney, perhaps, it was a glib critique of tax increases. But it was also a sign of how closely political fortune is tied to corporate rule and corporate cash.

Romney might be correct in that the money corporations make eventually get paid out to some individuals--employees or stockholders. But to say that corporations are people, and especially to endow corporations with constitutional personhood rights, as court decisions have steadily done, endangers our nation and our democracy. Corporations have no loyalties to any concept other than making a profit. If the good of an individual, a family, a community, or even the nation gets in the way of a strong bottom line at the end of the quarter, there's no question that real people--you and me--will take a back seat to profit.

You don't have to look much further than Romney's own business career to see this concept in action, courtesy of leading political commentator (sadly, we're not being ironic) Stephen Colbert:

“You see, Romney made a Mittload of cash using what’s known as a leveraged buyout. He’d buy a company with ‘money borrowed against their assets, groomed them to be sold off and in the interim collect huge management fees.’ Once Mitt had control of the company, he’d cut frivolous spending like ‘jobs,’ ‘workers,’ ‘employees,’ and ‘jobs.’ […] “Because Mitt Romney knows just how to trim the fat. He rescued businesses like Dade Behring, Stage Stories, American Pad and Paper, and GS Industries, then his company sold them for a profit of $578 million after which all of those firms declared bankruptcy. Which sounds bad, but don’t worry, almost no one worked there anymore."

Romney's rep as a job killer led to his Senate campaign being bird-dogged by a "truth squad" ‘of striking workers from a Marion, Indiana, paper plant who had lost jobs, wages, health care, and pensions after Ampad, a Bain subsidiary, took control. Ampad eventually went bankrupt, but Bain walked away with $100 million for its $5 million investment.

The threat of profit-before-people corporate deeds are why in the early days of this country corporations were kept under tight legal restraint: chartered for a specific public purpose, dissolved when that purpose was accomplished, their books subject to inspection, and conglomerates of corporations owning other corporations forbidden. But thanks to a slew of court decisions, we've swung the other way, to where corporations are legally immortal, dedicated only to profit, and "human" enough to have the same free speech rights as individuals, although their "voice" is amplified a thousand-fold by the money they have on hand to buy, bribe, or influence the candidates of their choice.

So while the Democrats have jumped all over Romney's remark, don't believe their hype. For DNC Communications Director Brad Woodhouse, for instance, Romney's remarks amount to little more than a lack of sympathy: "There's a great message for people struggling to get by and trying to make ends meet. Don't complain -- corporations are people too!"

Here's news for both parties: it's not just the folks who are struggling who are mightily ticked off at the attitude that Romney's quip represents. It's everyone who questions whether our elected officials are more loyal to their funders than to their constituents. It's everyone who sees elections as a public good that should be publicly funded, just as our police, fire, and libraries are, to ensure every voice and every vote counts. It's everyone who sees the Citizens United decision as the ultimate auction of constitutional personhood rights to the highest bidders. We're the majority, we're the citizens, we're the voters, we're the people, and we want our democracy back.

Across the Great Divide

2011-08-03T11:37:00.000-04:00

Is corporate personhood the unifying issue for the single payer, antiwar, environmental and Tea Party movement? This article was written for the Coos County (OR) Democrats Advocate by Alliance for Democracy national council member Rick Staggenborg, MD. What do you think?

by Rick Staggenborg, MD

The corporate media and the politicians who depend on it to get their message out would have us believe that Americans are sharply divided about the issues that are causing gridlock in the US Congress. Nothing could be further from the truth. Roughly 70% of citizens want out of Afghanistan, nearly everyone wants the debt limit raised, most Americans agree in principle that we should work to achieve universal health care in some form and a large majority wants no cuts to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. The difference between what Americans want and need and what the corporate-driven Congress will give us is appropriately referred to as the “democracy gap."

What was quickly forgotten by the corporate media and largely by the “alternative” media is the fact that nearly 80% of both self-identified liberals and conservatives are opposed to the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United. Recognizing that giving corporations carte blanche to buy the politicians of their choice to serve their interests in Congress is a dagger aimed at the heart of democracy, Americans across the political spectrum were momentarily united in the common cause of defending the possibility of true representative democracy. Unfortunately, the point was lost to most as the story was quickly buried in the 24 hour infotainment cycle.

The significance of the Citizens United case is not just that it is an outrageous step closer to fascist control of the US government but lies in the possibility of using the nearly universal anger toward it to build a bridge across the artificial divide between those who regard themselves as liberals or conservatives, Democrats, Republicans or independents. We the People now have an historic opportunity to create a truly democratic Republic in which the interests of the citizens of the US take precedence over those of the corporate Puppetmasters of Congress. All we need to do is to heed the lessons of 1775 and come together to fight for liberty and justice for all.

There is a growing movement to abolish corporate personhood and overturn the Supreme Court in Citizens United by working together to get a constitutional amendment introduced and passed in Congress. Oregon’s own US Representative Kurt Schrader recently took an important first step in introducing an amendment that would give states the power to regulate corporate money in elections. While still falling short of the goal of eliminating all “rights” granted corporations by an Imperial Supreme Court, has the potential to lead to the end of corporate control of the US government. If enough in Congress are willing to step up and support it, the issue will finally get the attention it deserves in the so-called “alternative” media.

Imagine if Peter DeFazio were to support the Schrader amendment. It would shine a spotlight on the issue of where Robinson gets his campaign funding. Last year he came from nowhere to raise $1.3 million dollars, much of it as soon as he announced his run. That’s pretty good for an unknown. Apparently he is not unknown to the big money interests who supported him and other ostensible “Tea Party” candidates. As was pointed out by a member of Americans for Prosperity in the district, he cannot be both a Republican and a Tea Party candidate, since the Tea Party represents those to the Right of the Republican Party. Similarly, Sharon Angell challenged Harry Reid and almost beat him, Rand Paul was actually elected in Kentucky and other candidates who were marginal at best were elected with sophisticated and very expensive corporate-funded propaganda campaigns.  

In 2008 DeFazio won with 82% of the vote. In 2010 he won with less than 54%. Despite his liberal voting record, he has historically been supported by conservatives in his purple district because of his staunch support of veterans and his principled stands with Republicans when the Democratic leadership is on the wrong side of issues such as the first bankster bailout. In 2010, amid wild charges of socialism by the Robinson camp, his re-election was seriously challenged for the first time in years. The corporate money behind Robinson financed a very successful propaganda campaign that convinced many self-described conservatives to place a false ideological principle ahead of their own interests and that of the people of Oregon.  

Interestingly, when I asked Robinson in Roseburg at one of his mock “debates” why he referred to a government that funneled taxpayer money to corporations “socialism,” he had a momentary lapse into reason. He shouted “You’re right! It’s fascism!” Then he expounded on the point for a full five minutes while I listened in amazement. Of course, by the time he got to the real debate in Coos Bay he had returned to the script written for him by his corporate Puppetmasters. If even Art Robinson recognizes that allowing corporations to buy Congress and dictate legislation and policy amounts to fascism, why don’t more Democrats capitalize on the fact when running for Congress? Neither Defazio nor Merkley take dirty money. Making their support of a constitutional amendment to abolish corporate personhood would not only be principled but would tap into the truly independent voters who want to see something done about our system of corporate welfare.

Some time ago I wrote an editorial for the Advocate in which I argued that the key to saving the Republic is to get Tea Party supporters to join the effort to abolish corporate personhood through a constitutional amendment. Many of my friends scoffed at the idea. What they seem to have forgotten is that these people are more highly educated than the general public. They are not stupid, just misinformed and thus unable to see that the solution to our woes is not fighting the imaginary specter of “socialism” but in fighting creeping fascism. It is our job to educate them of this fact. They value democracy as much as the rest of us do. I spoke to Jeff Kropf, former state director of Americans for Prosperity about this. He was intrigued by the idea of working together to restore our democratic Republic through the process of constitutional amendment. He also confirmed my impression that although the Koch brothers initially provided funding for Tea Party events, the state organization is now self-funded.

Tea Party supporters are actually ahead of the political curve in one respect: They have rejected both Republican and Democratic politics as usual and are seeking to create the change America must see to save itself from economic, social and moral destruction. While I remain convinced that they are going about it in entirely the wrong way, they will be key allies in the fight to end corporate rule in America once they understand what Robinson in a rare moment of honesty admitted: Fascism is the enemy, not our fellow Americans. Partisan Democrats can take a lesson from the Tea Party. If they learn to put America before the Democratic Party, they can join in common cause with the Tea Party to rid Congress of the corporate tools who are destroying the American experiment in democracy.

Tim DeChristopher: I do not want mercy, I want you to join me

2011-08-01T12:14:00.000-04:00

"The rule of law is dependent upon a government that is willing to abide by the law. Disrespect for the rule of law begins when the government believes itself and its corporate sponsors to be above the law."

by Tim DeChristopher. Posted July 27 on Common Dreams

Tim DeChristopher, who was sentenced Tuesday to two years in federal prison and a $10,000 fine for 'disrupting' a Bureau of Land Management auction in 2008, had an opportunity to address the court and the judge immediately before his sentence was announced. This is his statement:

Thank you for the opportunity to speak before the court. When I first met Mr. Manross, the sentencing officer who prepared the presentence report, he explained that it was essentially his job to “get to know me.” He said he had to get to know who I really was and why I did what I did in order to decide what kind of sentence was appropriate. I was struck by the fact that he was the first person in this courthouse to call me by my first name, or even really look me in the eye. I appreciate this opportunity to speak openly to you for the first time. I’m not here asking for your mercy, but I am here asking that you know me.

Mr. Huber has leveled a lot of character attacks at me, many of which are contrary to Mr. Manross’s report. While reading Mr Huber’s critiques of my character and my integrity, as well as his assumptions about my motivations, I was reminded that Mr Huber and I have never had a conversation. Over the two and half years of this prosecution, he has never asked my any of the questions that he makes assumptions about in the government’s report. Apparently, Mr. Huber has never considered it his job to get to know me, and yet he is quite willing to disregard the opinions of the one person who does see that as his job.

There are alternating characterizations that Mr. Huber would like you to believe about me. In one paragraph, the government claims I “played out the parts of accuser, jury, and judge as he determined the fate of the oil and gas lease auction and its intended participants that day.” In the very next paragraph, they claim “It was not the defendant’s crimes that effected such a change.” Mr. Huber would lead you to believe that I’m either a dangerous criminal who holds the oil and gas industry in the palm of my hand, or I’m just an incompetent child who didn’t affect the outcome of anything. As evidenced by the continued back and forth of contradictory arguments in the government’s memorandum, they’re not quite sure which of those extreme caricatures I am, but they are certain that I am nothing in between. Rather than the job of getting to know me, it seems Mr Huber prefers the job of fitting me into whatever extreme characterization is most politically expedient at the moment.

In nearly every paragraph, the government’s memorandum uses the words lie, lied, lying, liar. It makes me want to thank whatever clerk edited out the words “pants on fire.” Their report doesn’t mention the fact that at the auction in question, the first person who asked me what I was doing there was Agent Dan Love. And I told him very clearly that I was there to stand in the way of an illegitimate auction that threatened my future. I proceeded to answer all of his questions openly and honestly, and have done so to this day when speaking about that auction in any forum, including this courtroom. The entire basis for the false statements charge that I was convicted of was the fact that I wrote my real name and address on a form that included the words “bona fide bidder.” When I sat there on the witness stand, Mr Romney asked me if I ever had any intention of being a bona fide bidder. I responded by asking Mr Romney to clarify what “bona fide bidder” meant in this context. Mr Romney then withdrew the question and moved on to the next subject. On that right there is the entire basis for the government’s repeated attacks on my integrity. Ambition should be made of sterner stuff, your honor.

Mr Huber also makes grand assumptions about my level of respect for the rule of law. The government claims a long prison sentence is necessary to counteract the political statements I’ve made and promote a respect for the law. The only evidence provided for my lack of respect for the law is political statements that I’ve made in public forums. Again, the government doesn’t mention my actions in regard to the drastic restrictions that were put upon my defense in this courtroom. My political disagreements with the court about the proper role of a jury in the legal system are probably well known. I’ve given several public speeches and interviews about how the jury system was established and how it has evolved to it’s current state. Outside of this courtroom, I’ve made my views clear that I agree with the founding fathers that juries should be the conscience of the community and a defense against legislative tyranny. I even went so far as to organize a book study group that read about the history of jury nullification. Some of the participants in that book group later began passing out leaflets to the public about jury rights, as is their right. Mr Huber was apparently so outraged by this that he made the slanderous accusations that I tried to taint the jury. He didn’t specify the extra number of months that I should spend in prison for the heinous activity of holding a book group at the Unitarian Church and quoting Thomas Jefferson in public, but he says you should have “little tolerance for this behavior.”

But here is the important point that Mr Huber would rather ignore. Despite my strong disagreements with the court about the Constitutional basis for the limits on my defense, while I was in this courtroom I respected the authority of the court. Whether I agreed with them or not, I abided by the restrictions that you put on me and my legal team. I never attempted to “taint” the jury, as Mr Huber claimed, by sharing any of the relevant facts about the auction in question that the court had decided were off limits. I didn’t burst out and tell the jury that I successfully raised the down payment and offered it to the BLM. I didn’t let the jury know that the auction was later reversed because it was illegitimate in the first place. To this day I still think I should have had the right to do so, but disagreement with the law should not be confused with disrespect for the law.

My public statements about jury nullification were not the only political statements that Mr Huber thinks I should be punished for. As the government’s memorandum points out, I have also made public statements about the value of civil disobedience in bringing the rule of law closer to our shared sense of justice. In fact, I have openly and explicitly called for nonviolent civil disobedience against mountaintop removal coal mining in my home state of West Virginia. Mountaintop removal is itself an illegal activity, which has always been in violation of the Clean Water Act, and it is an illegal activity that kills people. A West Virginia state investigation found that Massey Energy had been cited with 62,923 violations of the law in the ten years preceding the disaster that killed 29 people last year. The investigation also revealed that Massey paid for almost none of those violations because the company provided millions of dollars worth of campaign contributions that elected most of the appeals court judges in the state. When I was growing up in West Virginia, my mother was one of many who pursued every legal avenue for making the coal industry follow the law. She commented at hearings, wrote petitions and filed lawsuits, and many have continued to do ever since, to no avail. I actually have great respect for the rule of law, because I see what happens when it doesn’t exist, as is the case with the fossil fuel industry. Those crimes committed by Massey Energy led not only to the deaths of their own workers, but to the deaths of countless local residents, such as Joshua McCormick, who died of kidney cancer at age 22 because he was unlucky enough to live downstream from a coal mine. When a corrupted government is no longer willing to uphold the rule of law, I advocate that citizens step up to that responsibility.

This is really the heart of what this case is about. The rule of law is dependent upon a government that is willing to abide by the law. Disrespect for the rule of law begins when the government believes itself and its corporate sponsors to be above the law.

Mr Huber claims that the seriousness of my offense was that I “obstructed lawful government proceedings.” But the auction in question was not a lawful proceeding. I know you’ve heard another case about some of the irregularities for which the auction was overturned. But that case did not involve the BLM’s blatant violation of Secretarial Order 3226, which was a law that went into effect in 2001 and required the BLM to weigh the impacts on climate change for all its major decisions, particularly resource development. A federal judge in Montana ruled last year that the BLM was in constant violation of this law throughout the Bush administration. In all the proceedings and debates about this auction, no apologist for the government or the BLM has ever even tried to claim that the BLM followed this law. In both the December 2008 auction and the creation of the Resource Management Plan on which this auction was based, the BLM did not even attempt to follow this law.

And this law is not a trivial regulation about crossing t’s or dotting i’s to make some government accountant’s job easier. This law was put into effect to mitigate the impacts of catastrophic climate change and defend a livable future on this planet. This law was about protecting the survival of young generations. That’s kind of a big deal. It’s a very big deal to me. If the government is going to refuse to step up to that responsibility to defend a livable future, I believe that creates a moral imperative for me and other citizens. My future, and the future of everyone I care about, is being traded for short term profits. I take that very personally. Until our leaders take seriously their responsibility to pass on a healthy and just world to the next generation, I will continue this fight.

The government has made the claim that there were legal alternatives to standing in the way of this auction. Particularly, I could have filed a written protest against certain parcels. The government does not mention, however, that two months prior to this auction, in October 2008, a Congressional report was released that looked into those protests. The report, by the House committee on public lands, stated that it had become common practice for the BLM to take volunteers from the oil and gas industry to process those permits. The oil industry was paying people specifically to volunteer for the industry that was supposed to be regulating it, and it was to those industry staff that I would have been appealing. Moreover, this auction was just three months after the New York Times reported on a major scandal involving Department of the Interior regulators who were taking bribes of sex and drugs from the oil companies that they were supposed to be regulating. In 2008, this was the condition of the rule of law, for which Mr Huber says I lacked respect. Just as the legal avenues which people in West Virginia have been pursuing for 30 years, the legal avenues in this case were constructed precisely to protect the corporations who control the government.

The reality is not that I lack respect for the law; it’s that I have greater respect for justice. Where there is a conflict between the law and the higher moral code that we all share, my loyalty is to that higher moral code. I know Mr Huber disagrees with me on this. He wrote that “The rule of law is the bedrock of our civilized society, not acts of ‘civil disobedience’ committed in the name of the cause of the day.” That’s an especially ironic statement when he is representing the United States of America, a place where the rule of law was created through acts of civil disobedience. Since those bedrock acts of civil disobedience by our founding fathers, the rule of law in this country has continued to grow closer to our shared higher moral code through the civil disobedience that drew attention to legalized injustice. The authority of the government exists to the degree that the rule of law reflects the higher moral code of the citizens, and throughout American history, it has been civil disobedience that has bound them together.

This philosophical difference is serious enough that Mr Huber thinks I should be imprisoned to discourage the spread of this idea. Much of the government’s memorandum focuses on the political statements that I’ve made in public. But it hasn’t always been this way. When Mr Huber was arguing that my defense should be limited, he addressed my views this way: “The public square is the proper stage for the defendant’s message, not criminal proceedings in federal court.” But now that the jury is gone, Mr. Huber wants to take my message from the public square and make it a central part of these federal court proceedings. I have no problem with that. I’m just as willing to have those views on display as I’ve ever been.

The government’s memorandum states, “As opposed to preventing this particular defendant from committing further crimes, the sentence should be crafted ‘to afford adequate deterrence to criminal conduct’ by others.” Their concern is not the danger that I present, but the danger presented by my ideas and words that might lead others to action. Perhaps Mr Huber is right to be concerned. He represents the United States Government. His job is to protect those currently in power, and by extension, their corporate sponsors. After months of no action after the auction, the way I found out about my indictment was the day before it happened, Pat Shea got a call from an Associated Press reporter who said, “I just wanted to let you know that tomorrow Tim is going to be indicted, and this is what the charges are going to be.” That reporter had gotten that information two weeks earlier from an oil industry lobbyist. Our request for disclosure of what role that lobbyist played in the US Attorney’s office was denied, but we know that she apparently holds sway and that the government feels the need to protect the industry’s interests.

The things that I’ve been publicly saying may indeed be threatening to that power structure. There have been several references to the speech I gave after the conviction, but I’ve only ever seen half of one sentence of that speech quoted. In the government’s report, they actually had to add their own words to that one sentence to make it sound more threatening. But the speech was about empowerment. It was about recognizing our interconnectedness rather than viewing ourselves as isolated individuals. The message of the speech was that when people stand together, they no longer have to be exploited by powerful corporations. Alienation is perhaps the most effective tool of control in America, and every reminder of our real connectedness weakens that tool.

But the sentencing guidelines don’t mention the need to protect corporations or politicians from ideas that threaten their control. The guidelines say “protect the public.” The question is whether the public is helped or harmed by my actions. The easiest way to answer that question is with the direct impacts of my action. As the oil executive stated in his testimony, the parcels I didn’t bid on averaged $12 per acre, but the ones I did bid on averaged $125. Those are the prices paid for public property to the public trust. The industry admits very openly that they were getting those parcels for an order of magnitude less than what they were worth. Not only did those oil companies drive up the prices to $125 during the bidding, they were then given an opportunity to withdraw their bids once my actions were explained. They kept the parcels, presumably because they knew they were still a good deal at $125. The oil companies knew they were getting a steal from the American people, and now they’re crying because they had to pay a little closer to what those parcels were actually worth. The government claims I should be held accountable for the steal the oil companies didn’t get. The government’s report demands $600,000 worth of financial impacts for the amount which the oil industry wasn’t able to steal from the public.

That extra revenue for the public became almost irrelevant, though, once most of those parcels were revoked by Secretary Salazar. Most of the parcels I won were later deemed inappropriate for drilling. In other words, the highest and best value to the public for those particular lands was not for oil and gas drilling. Had the auction gone off without a hitch, it would have been a loss for the public. The fact that the auction was delayed, extra attention was brought to the process, and the parcels were ultimately revoked was a good thing for the public.

More generally, the question of whether civil disobedience is good for the public is a matter of perspective. Civil disobedience is inherently an attempt at change. Those in power, whom Mr Huber represents, are those for whom the status quo is working, so they always see civil disobedience as a bad thing. The decision you are making today, your honor, is what segment of the public you are meant to protect. Mr Huber clearly has cast his lot with that segment who wishes to preserve the status quo. But the majority of the public is exploited by the status quo far more than they are benefited by it. The young are the most obvious group who is exploited and condemned to an ugly future by letting the fossil fuel industry call the shots. There is an overwhelming amount of scientific research, some of which you received as part of our proffer on the necessity defense, that reveals the catastrophic consequences which the young will have to deal with over the coming decades.

But just as real is the exploitation of the communities where fossil fuels are extracted. As a native of West Virginia, I have seen from a young age that the exploitation of fossil fuels has always gone hand in hand with the exploitation of local people. In West Virginia, we’ve been extracting coal longer than anyone else. And after 150 years of making other people rich, West Virginia is almost dead last among the states in per capita income, education rates and life expectancy. And it’s not an anomaly. The areas with the richest fossil fuel resources, whether coal in West Virginia and Kentucky, or oil in Louisiana and Mississippi, are the areas with the lowest standards of living. In part, this is a necessity of the industry. The only way to convince someone to blow up their backyard or poison their water is to make sure they are so desperate that they have no other option. But it is also the nature of the economic model. Since fossil fuels are a limited resources, whoever controls access to that resource in the beginning gets to set all the terms. They set the terms for their workers, for the local communities, and apparently even for the regulatory agencies. A renewable energy economy is a threat to that model. Since no one can control access to the sun or the wind, the wealth is more likely to flow to whoever does the work of harnessing that energy, and therefore to create a more distributed economic system, which leads to a more distributed political system. It threatens the profits of the handful of corporations for whom the current system works, but our question is which segment of the public are you tasked with protecting. I am here today because I have chosen to protect the people locked out of the system over the profits of the corporations running the system. I say this not because I want your mercy, but because I want you to join me.

After this difference of political philosophies, the rest of the sentencing debate has been based on the financial loss from my actions. The government has suggested a variety of numbers loosely associated with my actions, but as of yet has yet to establish any causality between my actions and any of those figures. The most commonly discussed figure is perhaps the most easily debunked. This is the figure of roughly $140,000, which is the amount the BLM originally spent to hold the December 2008 auction. By definition, this number is the amount of money the BLM spent before I ever got involved. The relevant question is what the BLM spent because of my actions, but apparently that question has yet to be asked. The only logic that relates the $140,000 figure to my actions is if I caused the entire auction to be null and void and the BLM had to start from scratch to redo the entire auction. But that of course is not the case. First is the prosecution’s on-again-off-again argument that I didn’t have any impact on the auction being overturned. More importantly, the BLM never did redo the auction because it was decided that many of those parcels should never have been auctioned in the first place. Rather than this arbitrary figure of $140,000, it would have been easy to ask the BLM how much money they spent or will spend on redoing the auction. But the government never asked this question, probably because they knew they wouldn’t like the answer.

The other number suggested in the government’s memorandum is the $166,000 that was the total price of the three parcels I won which were not invalidated. Strangely, the government wants me to pay for these parcels, but has never offered to actually give them to me. When I offered the BLM the money a couple weeks after the auction, they refused to take it. Aside from that history, this figure is still not a valid financial loss from my actions. When we wrote there was no loss from my actions, we actually meant that rather literally. Those three parcels were not evaporated or blasted into space because of my actions, not was the oil underneath them sucked dry by my bid card. They’re still there, and in fact the BLM has already issued public notice of their intent to re-auction those parcels in February of 2012.

The final figure suggested as a financial loss is the $600,000 that the oil company wasn’t able to steal from the public. That completely unsubstantiated number is supposedly the extra amount the BLM received because of my actions. This is when things get tricky. The government’s report takes that $600,000 positive for the BLM and adds it to that roughly $300,000 negative for the BLM, and comes up with a $900,000 negative. With math like that, it’s obvious that Mr Huber works for the federal government.

After most of those figures were disputed in the presentence report, the government claimed in their most recent objection that I should be punished according to the intended financial impact that I intended to cause. The government tries to assume my intentions and then claims, “This is consistent with the testimony that Mr. DeChristopher provided at trial, admitting that his intention was to cause financial harm to others with whom he disagreed.” Now I didn’t get to say a whole lot at the trial, so it was pretty easy to look back through the transcripts. The statement claimed by the government never happened. There was nothing even close enough to make their statement a paraphrase or artistic license. This statement in the government’s objection is a complete fiction. Mr Huber’s inability to judge my intent is revealed in this case by the degree to which he underestimates my ambition. The truth is that my intention, then as now, was to expose, embarrass and hold accountable the oil industry to the extent that it cuts into the $100 billion in annual profits that it makes through exploitation. I actually intended for my actions to play a role in the wide variety of actions that steer the country toward a clean energy economy where those $100 billion in oil profits are completely eliminated. When I read Mr Huber’s new logic, I was terrified to consider that my slightly unrealistic intention to have a $100 billion impact will fetch me several consecutive life sentences. Luckily this reasoning is as unrealistic as it is silly.

A more serious look at my intentions is found in Mr Huber’s attempt to find contradictions in my statements. Mr Huber points out that in public I acted proud of my actions and treated it like a success, while in our sentencing memorandum we claimed that my actions led to “no loss.” On the one hand I think it was a success, and yet I claim it there was no loss. Success, but no loss. Mr Huber presents these ideas as mutually contradictory and obvious proof that I was either dishonest or backing down from my convictions. But for success to be contradictory to no loss, there has to be another assumption. One has to assume that my intent was to cause a loss. But the only loss that I intended to cause was the loss of secrecy by which the government gave away public property for private profit. As I actually stated in the trial, my intent was to shine a light on a corrupt process and get the government to take a second look at how this auction was conducted. The success of that intent is not dependent on any loss. I knew that if I was completely off base, and the government took that second look and decided that nothing was wrong with that auction, the cost of my action would be another day’s salary for the auctioneer and some minor costs of re-auctioning the parcels. But if I was right about the irregularities of the auction, I knew that allowing the auction to proceed would mean the permanent loss of lands better suited for other purposes and the permanent loss of a safe climate. The intent was to prevent loss, but again that is a matter of perspective.

Mr Huber wants you to weigh the loss for the corporations that expected to get public property for pennies on the dollar, but I believe the important factor is the loss to the public which I helped prevent. Again, we come back to this philosophical difference. From any perspective, this is a case about the right of citizens to challenge the government. The US Attorney’s office makes clear that their interest is not only to punish me for doing so, but to discourage others from challenging the government, even when the government is acting inappropriately. Their memorandum states, “To be sure, a federal prison term here will deter others from entering a path of criminal behavior.” The certainty of this statement not only ignores the history of political prisoners, it ignores the severity of the present situation. Those who are inspired to follow my actions are those who understand that we are on a path toward catastrophic consequences of climate change. They know their future, and the future of their loved ones, is on the line. And they know were are running out of time to turn things around. The closer we get to that point where it’s too late, the less people have to lose by fighting back. The power of the Justice Department is based on its ability to take things away from people. The more that people feel that they have nothing to lose, the more that power begins to shrivel. The people who are committed to fighting for a livable future will not be discouraged or intimidated by anything that happens here today. And neither will I. I will continue to confront the system that threatens our future. Given the destruction of our democratic institutions that once gave citizens access to power, my future will likely involve civil disobedience. Nothing that happens here today will change that. I don’t mean that in any sort of disrespectful way at all, but you don’t have that authority. You have authority over my life, but not my principles. Those are mine alone.

I’m not saying any of this to ask you for mercy, but to ask you to join me. If you side with Mr Huber and believe that your role is to discourage citizens from holding their government accountable, then you should follow his recommendations and lock me away. I certainly don’t want that. I have no desire to go to prison, and any assertion that I want to be even a temporary martyr is false. I want you to join me in standing up for the right and responsibility of citizens to challenge their government. I want you to join me in valuing this country’s rich history of nonviolent civil disobedience. If you share those values but think my tactics are mistaken, you have the power to redirect them. You can sentence me to a wide range of community service efforts that would point my commitment to a healthy and just world down a different path. You can have me work with troubled teens, as I spent most of my career doing. You can have me help disadvantaged communities or even just pull weeds for the BLM. You can steer that commitment if you agree with it, but you can’t kill it. This is not going away. At this point of unimaginable threats on the horizon, this is what hope looks like. In these times of a morally bankrupt government that has sold out its principles, this is what patriotism looks like. With countless lives on the line, this is what love looks like, and it will only grow. The choice you are making today is what side are you on.
Tim DeChristopher

Tim DeChristopher is a climate activist and board member for the climate justice organization Peaceful Uprising.

46 and counting: celebrate and protect Medicare

2011-07-27T11:02:00.001-04:00

Healthcare-NOW! reminds us that Saturday is the 46th anniversary of Medicare, an opportunity to tell the country how improved Medicare-for-all, and not cuts to health care and the safety net, is the fix for the nation's health care and fiscal crises.

Single payer supporters have organized more than 40 events in 20 states, and Healthcare-NOW! has resources available if you want to organize your own event, including an organizer's toolkit and sample flier. Contact katie@healthcare-now.org for more info.

Is the US and Monsanto pressuring the EU to accept genetically modified crops?

2011-07-27T10:43:00.000-04:00

William Engdahl, economic researcher, journalist and historian author of Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of GMO, offers his perspective on the subject of US pressure on Europe to accept GM crops and terminator seeds and the resistance coming from European citizens.

Thanks to Janet Eaton for forwarding the video, which was posted on Next World TV.

"Populist Dialogues" focuses on SCOTUS and corporate empowerment

2011-07-25T11:12:00.001-04:00

"Populist Dialogues," produced by the Alliance's Portland (OR) chapter, has two new shows out focusing on recent Supreme Court decisions enlarging corporate power at the expense of voters and democracy.

In this show, first broadcast on July 24, Portland attorney Dan Meek reviews recent cases involving ATT, Walmart and Arizona clean election funding, finding a pattern of ongoing privatization of the judiciary even more dangerous than the damage these decisions did to class action and voter-owned elections.

Alliance for Democracy member Nancy Matela has been a election integrity activist and currently works on water issues and the human right to water. In this show, which will air July 31, she reviews reforms to Oregon's election system. She also discusses the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, and the issue of water privatization in Oregon, including Nestle's proposals to bottle water at Cascade Locks, the Wilsonville water treatment plant and others. She emphasizes thta that bottled water is already privatization of water, a public resource, and discusses how regulation of water can depend on whether it's defined as a commodity.

RIO+20: Toward a new green economy—or a green-washed old economy?

2011-07-13T16:43:00.000-04:00

An article you may have missed, that warrants careful reading. While the author doesn't couch his warnings of what might happen at the upcoming Rio+20 summit in terms of corporate power, negotiations may very well hand control of the planet over to large corporations in an "all-for-profit" green economy.

by Jim Thomas. Posted March 26 on Grist

I've got good news and bad news about the future of the planet.

Good news first. Next year, a honking big global Earth Summit is coming our way -- one with a proud heritage. Formally titled the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, the meeting is known as RIO+20 because it will come 20 years after the first Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. That original Earth Summit (itself 20 years after the equally important Stockholm Convention on the Environment and Human Development) gave us an embarrassment of policy riches: the Climate Convention, the Convention on Biological Diversity, Sustainable Development Commission, the Precautionary Principle, a long and ambitious list of promises called Agenda 21, The Forest Principles, and much more. Over a hundred heads of state turned up to Rio Di Janeiro last time amidst intense global attention. This time, the reunion party is going back to Rio again on June 4-6 2012. Chances are it will all be a big deal again.

At a recent preparatory meeting in New York, the agenda for this next Earth Summit became clear. The leaders will issue a "focused political document" tackling the transition to a global "green economy" and reform of the international institutions responsible for sustainable development. This second "reform" strand could feasibly restructure everything ranging from the U.N. Environmental Program (UNEP) and the U.N. Development Program to the 500 different multilateral environmental treaties and agreements currently in place. These cover toxic chemicals, ocean conservation, biodiversity, desertification, climate change, ozone depletion, forest protection, and more. Given the rising trends of global temperature, hunger, water scarcity, and biodiversity loss, the existing mishmash of eco-governance is clearly failing to deliver. RIO+20 is a precious chance for decision-makers to take stock of where the world went wrong in the last 20 years and plan intelligently for the next 20. Hopefully RIO+20 will deliver a jolt of political will to the global environmental agenda, as well as a smart plan to get the planet back on track.

Or at least that's the theory. And now we come to the bad news: Far from cooking up a plan to save the Earth, what may come out of the summit could instead be a deal to surrender the living world to a small cabal of bankers and engineers -- one that will dump the promises of the first Rio summit along the way. Tensions are already rising between northern countries and southern countries over the poorly defined concept of a global "Green Economy" that will be the centerpiece of the summit.

What is a global green economy? That, of course, is the multi-trillion dollar question. We can all spell out the problems of our current polluting and unjust economy (thoughtlessly dubbed the "brown economy" by less-than race-sensitive commentators). Yet suspicion is running high that the proposed prescriptions for a "green economy" are more likely to deliver a greenwash economy or the same old, same old "greed" economy. The color-coded theory on offer goes like this: We can move from a brown economy to a green economy by investing more greenbacks in the white heat of technology and PINC (Proactive Investment in Natural Capital) including innovative market mechanisms such as REDD+ (Reducing Emissions through Deforestation and Degredation). Just to round off the color palette, ocean states are further arguing that the green economy also needs to be a blue economy.

Confused? The key words to focus on here are "markets" and "technology." Just as the global climate negotiations, most recently in Cancun, have veered away from the difficult job of agreeing to slash emissions and lurched instead toward politically easy gestures on carbon trading and solar panels, so the green economy brigade would like to steer the RIO+20 summit away from addressing the root causes of our ecological crises. They would like the emphasis to be on a "forward looking" effort to establish new financial arrangements based on so-called "ecosystem services" while liberating funds for iconic "green technologies."

Two heavyweight reports from UNEP, on "The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity" (TEEB) and a "Green Economy Report"http://www.teebweb.org/ (GER) set the tone for this plan. They argue that nature, like an industrial contractor, should be precisely measured and valued according to the natural "services" that it provides -- such as water cleaning, carbon sequestration, and nitrogen cycling. Such services can then be paid for, offset, or securitized in the form of invented credits that can be traded to raise conservation money. Meanwhile new "eco-efficient" technologies can be developed and deployed increasing the value of these ecosystem services while also generating revenue. If it sounds more like a business plan than an agreement to protect the Earth that's because business is firmly in the driving seat. The lead author of both the TEEB and GER is an investment banker on sabbatical from Deutsche Bank, and the most vocal cheerleaders are the Davos crowd of Fortune 500 companies and G8 diplomats.

Most alarmingly, some of these voices are positioning the "green economy" as an upgrade or replacement to the "outmoded" concept of "sustainable development" that was agreed on 20 years ago. They seem content to throw out Rio's "baby" of sustainable development out for new green bathwater just as the baby reaches the age of maturity. While "sustainable development" has its problems as an approach, it at least explicitly attempted to enmesh environmental goals in larger social and economic goals such as reducing poverty and creating a just and equitable society. By contrast, the idea of a green economy is sustainable-development-lite -- long on technical fixes and band-aid solutions, short on confronting the root causes of poverty, inequality, and oppression that drive environmental destruction.

At a packed side event in New York last week entitled "Whose Green Economy?," Bolivian Ambassador Pablo Salon charged that this repackaged green capitalism was a distraction from the real issues and commitments that RIO+20 needs to address to realize sustainable development. He warned that the new forms of mercantilism and speculation being proposed could further despoil nature while entrenching existing injustices. Indigenous peoples and social justice movements who have fought against land displacement brought about by the REDD+ provisions of the recent Cancun agreement are particularly alarmed that the same commodification approach is now being proposed to extend to soils, oceans, and more. As Uruguayan activist Silvia Ribeiro points out, "In the wake of the largest financial crisis in history, the same bankers who can't even keep their own house in order now claim they can manage the planet. Excuse us for not believing them."

The focus on ill-defined "green technologies" is also problematic. The UNEP Green Economy report bullishly includes biomass incineration and biofuels as possible ingredients in a "green economy" -- rising food prices, land grabs, and toxic air pollution aside. The report is agnostic on nuclear power and stops short of endorsing genetically modified crops as part of the green package.

Meanwhile the next suite of technological silver bullets are already being reframed as part of the green economy. Synthetic biology, which makes artificial microbes with unknown biosafety impacts, is being touted as the source of green fuels and green plastics. Nanotechnology, whose toxicity problems raise the specter of a rerun of the asbestos fiasco, is being embraced for solar panel production and water cleanup. Meanwhile geoengineering -- the idea of re-engineering the entire planet with clouds of sulphur dust or dumps of iron and charcoal -- could easily end up in the broad definition of "green technologies."

If RIO+20 is not to become a handy loophole for every technological wolf to assume green clothing (and funds), governments are going to need to get specific about what is and what isn't a "green and just" technology and to resurrect the precautionary principle first agreed at Rio 20 years ago. The green economy needs some trusted gatekeepers. One proposal, backed by several major groups at the U.N., is the establishment of a formal mechanism to evaluate new and emerging technologies -- such as an International Convention for Evaluation of New Technologies (ICENT). Such a convention might provide an early-warning function to governments on pitfalls of technological options before they are deployed. An ICENT might have warned against backing ethanol before food prices spiked, or challenged the wisdom of a risky energy technologies long before the wellhead explodes or the tsunami hits the reactor's cooling system. Tragically, governments agreed to a version of such a technology assessment mechanism back in Rio 20 years ago and then never delivered -- an act of negligence we are paying for today in human lives, hunger, and environmental damage.

And there's the rub: 20 years ago, governments at Rio were bold enough to lay out a set of commitments that might credibly have rescued us from some of the dire predicaments we are now in but they never fulfilled their own promises. With under 13 months to go, it's now up to all of us in global society to demand that those promises, however belated, be fulfilled. Most importantly those promises should not be abandoned for a hollow "green economy" that amounts to a Trojan horse for ongoing destruction-as-usual. The bad news on the road to Rio is that the hijackers are already seizing the reins. The good news is that we have time to organize massive campaigns to get the Earth Summit back on course -- not just for a green economy, but for a green, equitable, and just future.

Jim Thomas is a research program manager and writer at the ETC Group.

Pricele$$ screens in Laconia, NH

2011-07-12T11:30:00.000-04:00

Pricele$$ the Documentary will be shown tomorrow night in Laconia, NH, sponsored by the Belknap County Democrats, followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker, Steve Cowan. Admission is free.

The film will be shown starting at 6:30 p.m., at the Multi-Purpose Room, Laconia Middle School, 150 McGrath Street.

Pricele$$ examines the forces that control and drive industry in the United States, campaign financing. Pricele$$ asks the question, "How is big money corrupting politics in Washington and how can we fix it?"

A Concord based non-profit, Americans for Campaign Reform, is working hard on these very questions, providing voters with the information they need to make informed decisions. Pricele$$ attempts to tackle two major issues in our economy, food and energy. The film shows us that in order to be an elected official, campaigners need to seek funding from "large donors such as the oil & gas industry, agrichemical companies, health insurers, and Wall Street...you know...the type of companies they're supposed to be regulating."

The film is being shown as part of The Green Living Series.

Photos from Mendocino's 4th of July parade!

2011-07-11T11:24:00.001-04:00

There's more photos on our Facebook page!

Tom Wodetzki of Mendocino AfD writes:

Sixty people participated in our MoveToAmend entry in Mendocino's 4th of July parade. We had fun, passed out hundreds of flyers explaining our message, and were cheered by thousands. (editor's note--we'll try to post a pdf of the flier--it sounds eyecatching: big money million dollar bribery bills with the message on the back.)

We are having a meeting to review what worked well and didn't so that we will have an improved entry in Fort Bragg's Paul Bunyan Day Labor Day parade on Monday, September 5th. Please come and share your ideas. We will have this review & planning meeting this coming Friday, July 15th, in Caspar. Email afd@thealliancefordemocracy.org for location.

Facebook photos by Linda Jupiter.

"Granny D Day" bill will be signed in Concord, NH tomorrow

2011-07-11T10:36:00.001-04:00

New Hampshire's Gov. John Lynch will sign SB 173 tomorrow, proclaiming January 24 as Granny D Day in the Granite State. The signing will take place 11 a.m. in the Executive Council Chamber at the state capitol building in Concord, and the public is welcome to attend to honor a remarkable and inspiring woman.

A bronze bust of Granny D will also be on display, before heading to the Granny D archives at Keene State College in Keene, NH, where it will be formally unveiled at the opening of the archives in September.

New Hampshire clean elections activists have long campaigned for public funding, and despite state and federal level setbacks, are still dedicated to carrying on their work. If you'd like to know more about clean elections in New Hampshire or this specific event, please email grannydconcert@aol.com.

Franklin the Frog learns how our government works

2011-07-11T10:15:00.000-04:00

Franklin the Frog learns about democracy and citizen action! Have you called your Congress members about the Colombia, Panama, and South Korea FTAs yet? Our most recent action alert is here. After you make the call, you can reward yourself by watching this funny video.

Selling nature to save nature, and ourselves

2011-07-06T14:46:00.000-04:00

Don't be too alarmed by the headline to this article. The author focuses on the annual Nature Inc? conference and notes that many of the researchers who participated are extremely leery of what's been called "green capitalism," and of proposals to put a dollar value to natural systems, especially as a precursor for selling the rights to ruin those systems to corporations.

by Stephen Leahy. Posted July 5 on Terra Viva Europe

Avoiding the coming catastrophic nexus of climate change, food, water and energy shortages, along with worsening poverty, requires a global technological overhaul involving investments of 1.9 trillion dollars each year for the next 40 years, said experts from the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA) in Geneva Tuesday.

"The need for a technological revolution is both a development and existential imperative for civilisation," said Rob Vos, lead author of a new report, "The Great Green Technological Transformation".

Absent in the U.N. report is a call for the other necessary transformation: what to do with the market-driven economic system that has put humanity on this catastrophic collision course? Attempts to "green" capitalism are failing and will fail, according to many of the more than 200 social science researchers at a groundbreaking international conference in The Hague titled "Nature Inc?" Jun. 30 to Jul. 2.

"We must start tackling and questioning some core capitalist dictums, such as consumerism, hyper-competition, the notion that 'private' is always better, and especially economic growth," says Bram Büscher, the conference co-organiser and researcher at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) at Erasmus University in The Hague, Netherlands.

Equally important is to stop looking at nature as a collection of economic objects and services that "must only benefit some specific idea of human economic progress", Büscher told IPS.

Governments, the World Bank, the United Nations and development agencies, international conservation organisations and others have all come to see markets as the only way to mobilise enough money to end deforestation, increase the use of alternative energy, boost food production, alleviate poverty, reduce pollution and solve a host of other serious and longstanding problems.

Started as a small gathering of academics, Nature Inc? became a major event as hundreds of experts from around the world wished to participate. Büscher believes the main reason for this is that many are actively doing research on environmental and conservation issues and are increasingly running into new market schemes like carbon credit trading, payments for ecosystem services, biodiversity derivatives and new conservation finance mechanisms, and so on.

"Payments for ecosystem services are the newest tropical 'miracle' crop," said Kathleen McAfee of San Francisco State University.

The market is putting new values on tropical forests as carbon sinks, reservoirs of biodiversity or ecotourism destinations, McAfee said during the conference.

The World Bank, U.N. and others say that the only way to generate large corporate sector and private investment to protect tropical forests is by payments for ecosystem services such as carbon and biodiversity offset markets such as Reduced Deforestation and Degradation for biodiversity known as REDD+. These are also touted as the way out of poverty for communities living in or near forests.

"However, markets are preconditioned on inequality and will only make matters worse," McAfee said.

Markets will look for the cheapest land available, which means the poorest will be displaced because they don't have formal land tenure or they will be persuaded by promises of large payments. In order to secure the investment, carbon traders will place restrictions on the use of the land for decades.

Technical assessments and monitoring will also be needed, which results in high costs as was the case for a project in Costa Rica, McAfee said. "The poor got very little...it didn't even cover their costs," she noted.

When the European Union committed to reduce its carbon emissions by 20 percent by 2020, some European multinational industries with high carbon footprints simply moved to countries like the United States where there were no restrictions, said Yda Schreuder of the University of Delaware.

"Europe going it alone on carbon reductions has resulted in higher overall emissions globally," said Schreuder, author of "The Corporate Greenhouse", a critical look at the political economy of the climate change debate.

Globalisation greatly enables companies to quickly shift their operations to where costs or restrictions are lower. To meet its 2020 target, Europe reduced its use of coal 35 to 50 percent by switching to renewable energy like wind, but mainly through much higher use of natural gas obtained from Russia.

Natural gas emits much less carbon than coal. However, over the same time period, Russia increased its use of coal for domestic energy because it could make more money selling natural gas to Europe, Schreuder said.

"The World Trade Organization encourages all this to happen. Markets are a driving force behind increasing emissions of carbon," she added.

Digging deeper into these schemes reveals their inherent contradictions and unintended consequences, but they are "often promoted in lyrical win-win language", said Büscher.

Many believe the green technology transformation that the new U.N. report calls for is unlikely to succeed without a move away from the economic growth-at-all-costs paradigm that dominates nearly everyone's thinking. There is an overwhelming need to find alternatives and stop promoting an economic system that has created the crisis.

"These are incredibly complex problems and there are no simple solutions," Büscher concluded.

Happy (belated) birthday, Election Defense Alliance

2011-07-06T13:09:00.001-04:00

Election Defense Alliance turned five years old on Independence Day. Since then, they've worked on initiatives, advocacy and research to safeguard elections across the country. Right now they're on the ground in Wisconsin, where they are concerned that upcoming recall elections may be stolen. They are looking for volunteers, and for donations. If you can help out in Wisconsin on July 12 or 19, or on August 9 or 16, or if you can organize from home prior to the elections, please contact Mary Magnuson at MaryMagnuson@ElectionDefenseAlliance.org.

Please check out their website for more info on this important group and their work.

AfD signs onto letter requesting end to war funding

2011-07-06T12:38:00.000-04:00

Alliance for Democracy has joined other organizations in signing on to a letter from United for Peace asking members of the congressional Progressive Caucus to amend the Defense Appropriation bill to eliminate funding for the war in Afghanistan, and to vote against the bill as a whole.

Your group may still be able to sign on to this letter--see this link for more info.

Dear Progressive Caucus member,

We write to you at a time of great peril for our nation. With an economy teetering and an exorbitantly expensive, protracted military engagement in Afghanistan, Congress has been asked once again to prioritize military spending over domestic needs with a total bill of $648.7 billion for the next fiscal year. A decade of war has brought us no closer to success in Afghanistan, where fewer than 100 Al Qaeda fighters remain.

The American people have grown weary of hearing that there is not enough money for schools, jobs, health care or housing yet always enough funding for wars. The US Conference of Mayors overwhelmingly passed a resolution to end the wars and bring the money home, amplifying the voices of their constituents.

The FY 2012 Defense Appropriations bill not only allocates $530 billion for the Pentagon, it also includes $118 billion to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now that the Obama Administration has clearly decided to continue the war in Afghanistan until at least 2014, the reasons to object are stronger than ever.

What values does the appropriation of $118 billion more for war suggest to the American people and the rest of the world, while at the same time the government is closing libraries and firehouses, laying off public servants and teachers, denying care to the sick and elderly, and abandoning quality education for children?

We note that the content of the proposed FY 2012 Defense Appropriations bill is directly at odds with the important principles, expressed in the CPC People's Budget, introduced earlier this year.

We therefore urge that the Progressive Caucus and its individual members support an amendment to the FY 2012 Defense Appropriations bill, which strikes out the funding to continue the war in Afghanistan and that the Caucus vote against the bill as a whole.

By signing below, we express our commitment to supporting the Progressive Caucus in its efforts to redirect our national priorities away from militarism and towards social justice here at home.

Respectfully submitted,

Movement to Abolish Corporate Personhood Gaining Traction

2011-07-05T12:26:00.000-04:00

A big majority of voters disagree with the Citizens United decision and think that corporations have too much control over government. With the help of Move to Amend, some communities are expressing that frustration politically, by passing resolutions against corporate personhood, a move that could grow to a national call for a constitutional amendment reserving personhood rights for real people

by Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap. Posted on Common Dreams July 1.

In the year and a half since the Citizens United decision, Americans from all walks of life have become concerned about corporate dominance of our government and our society as a whole. In Citizens United v. FEC, the U.S. Supreme Court (in an act of outrageous “judicial activism) gutted existing campaign finance laws by ruling that corporations, wealthy individuals, and other entities can spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns.

Throughout the country people have responded by organizing against “corporate personhood,” a court-created precedent that illegitimately gives corporations rights that were intended for human beings.

The movement is flowering not in the halls of Congress, but at the local level, where all real social movements start. Every day Americans experience the devastation caused by unaccountable corporations. Thanks to the hard work of local organizers, Boulder, CO could become the next community to officially join this growing effort. Councilmember Macon Cowles is proposing to place a measure on the November ballot, giving Boulder voters the opportunity to support an amendment to the U. S. Constitution abolishing corporate personhood and declaring that money is not speech.
At the forefront of this movement is Move to Amend, a national coalition of hundreds of organizations and over 113,000 individuals (and counting). Move to Amend is committed to building a grassroots movement to abolish corporate personhood, to hold corporations accountable to the public, and ultimately to fulfill the promise of an American democratic republic.

Boulder is not alone in this fight, nor is it the first community to consider such a resolution. In April, voters in Madison and Dane County, WI overwhelmingly approved measures calling for an end to corporate personhood and the legal status of money as speech by 84% and 78% respectively. Similar resolutions have been passed in nearly thirty other cities and counties. Resolutions have also been introduced in the state legislatures of both Vermont and Washington.

Despite the momentum, Move to Amend organizers know this won’t be an easy fight. Corporate America controls traditional media, and has invested heavily in politicians, lobbyists, and extremist groups to oppose our efforts. We can’t expect Congress to act, nor can we depend on the courts to solve a problem of their own making. We draw our strategy and inspiration from the great social movements of history.

The abolition of slavery, the struggle for women’s suffrage, trade unions, and the civil rights movement all started with grassroots organizing. The ruling elites denounced these movements as un-American, and they will make the same accusation against this effort. Others claimed that those movements went “too far,” and were unrealistic. Thankfully, folks before us did not quit or give up. They gained traction with solid strategy, unwavering commitment, and moral authority.

Move To Amend proudly identifies with this tradition of engaged citizen participation. Building momentum with local organizing and resolutions is our best chance of driving a constitutional amendment into Congress. Recent events in Boulder provide an example of this strategy in practice. Months of education, organizing, and advocacy by Boulder Move to Amend empowered Councilman Cowles to provide political leadership and prepared the community to respond.

Awareness of corporate personhood in Boulder is now higher than ever before. It is widely viewed as a mainstream issue, having earned the support of local Democratic Party leaders. Answering critics of the measure, Boulder County Democratic Party Chairperson Dan Gould recently told the Daily Camera that corporate personhood is an issue that must be addressed locally. "This is as important as municipalization, this is as important as school bonds," he said. "This is immediate."

Move to Amend is gaining momentum rapidly in communities throughout the country precisely because the problems of corporate power are most evident locally. Developers seeking special favors pour money into elections. Big polluters avoid investigations and litigation by hiding behind their illegitimate “rights.” Bad employers lie to the public about unfair labor practices with no legal consequences. People see it every day. They get it and they’re ready to fight back. Move to Amend is here to help them do that with a strategy for long-term success.

On July 4, declare independence from corporate rule!

2011-06-30T19:01:00.002-04:00

What are you doing this July 4th? Need inspiration?

On July 4, 1997, AfD founder Ronnie Dugger and Al Krebs, a former AfD national council member and a great defender of family farms, stood side by side in front of the Liberty Bell. Each read his own version of a "Declaration of Independence from Corporate Rule."

Now, nearly 15 years later, we are still trying to keep "the big corporations and the centimillionaires and billionaires" from turning the halls of government into their private clubhouse, and still building the real democracy we need.

Do your bit! It's not too late to get together with fellow activists and plan your own July 4 action. Check out the ideas sent in by groups and individuals and posted here on the Move to Amend website. Dress as a Supreme Court "In-Justice." Be as outrageous as the idea that corporations are entitled to the same constitutional rights as real people.

Bring along copies of this "Declaration of Independence from Corporate Rule" that Nancy Price, AfD liaison to Move to Amend, helped to write. You can print out a large version or a two-to-a-sheet flier from the Move to Amend's organizing resources, or a four-to-a-sheet version on our "Tools for Organizing" page.

Thanks for all you do for democracy, and have a great 4th!

Move to Amend--mapped!

2011-06-30T10:55:00.000-04:00

Move to Amend has mapped its local affiliates--find one near you, or start one up! Tips on outreach and what to do below the map!

Panel at Netroots Nation considers corporate power in elections post Citizens United

2011-06-22T11:17:00.001-04:00

This year's Netroots Nation, featured a panel discussion on energizing voters and activists to take on issues surrounding election funding, corporate power, and how to challenge the influence of big money on public interest-based governance. "After Citizens United: Combating Corporate Power in Elections" featured Jay Harris introducing the sponsoring groups, as well as John Nichols, Laura Flanders, Amanda Terkel and Leo Gerard. Netroots Nation organizers are posting panel discussion videos online; we'll keep an eye on the site and link to the video when it's available--from reports, it was a very popular and energizing discussion.

Netroots Nation also saw the launch of the United for the People web portal, a site with links to lots of groups working on issues surrounding corporate personhood, political bribery, democratic governance, and your political participation. The portal is a project of People for the American Way. Check out all the sites and get active!

Finally, here's some good good words by blogger April Lukes-Streich, an activist working in the banking industry in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She writes for ethecofem on gender, class issues, and local politics. In the excerpt below, the emphasis is ours.

The third session was After Citizens United: Combating Corporate Power in Elections. Like many of the panels I attended, money was a central focus of the discussion. The solution offered by the panelists here was, perhaps surprisingly, a constitutional amendment ending corporate personhood. Many people think that such an amendment would never pass, as it’s been quite some time since we’ve amended the Constitution; on the other hand, the support is behind the spirit of the amendment. It was mentioned that we often perceive the fact that there are so many grassroots, progressive non-profits that are working toward the same thing as an indication of factions within the progressive movement; this is not necessarily true. On the contrary, these groups are fighting for the same end goal and are mobilizing their communities. As is another frequent theme of Netroots this year, starting small and coming together to effect real, nationwide change is key to progressive victory. Simple measures work best, as Laura Flanders of GritTV noted: contact local media, local candidates who they are accepting donations from, be present at as many open forums and townhall meetings as you can manage. We can make a difference if we’re willing to be persistent.

AfD Monterey County sponsors US Uncut actions

2011-06-15T10:42:00.000-04:00

Sue Hubbard, of AfD's Monterey County chapter, sends the following:

Alliance for Democracy Monterey County has sponsored four US Uncut actions locally - two against Bank of America, one against Fed Ex and one against Apple.

We support US Uncut's message that corporations need to pay their fair share of taxes and if they did pay we would not have to have all the cuts in services which are hurting so many people.

We have our own Facebook page (US Uncut Monterey) and post our actions on the US Uncut website - we have had new people attend each event and good turnouts even though it rained on two of our actions.

At Apple and Fed Ex we left the street and entered the store with our signs and made some noise before leaving. The verdict was that doing this was fun and we plan to continue working with US Uncut to put pressure on tax-dodging corporations.

Mother Earth Water Walk, from Maine to Wisconsin

2011-06-14T15:02:00.000-04:00

by Chris Buchanan, AfD's Defending Water in Maine campaign

Native peoples representing the five tribes of the Wabanaki Nation of Maine and Canada gathered on May 7 at a sacred site in Machiasport to begin the Eastern Directions ceremonial walk to Bad River, Wisconsin, where they converged on June 12 with walkers from the North, South and West for a great ceremony. The mission was to raise awareness of the sacred and critical role of healthy water to all life.

As an organizer with Defending Water for Life in Maine covering this region, I supported the walkers by spreading information, organizing overnight stays in Ellsworth, Etna, Athens, and Stratton, being the primary contact for Maine walkers and supporters, coordinating safety of the walkers with local police, providing guidance on the route, and by participating in the ceremony as a walker.

The Water Walk has been one of the most powerful experiences I have had. There is something incredible about focusing all of your energy and intention on praying to water, healing water, and acknowledging the critical presence of water in everything… It was an amazing opportunity.

Grandmother Irene handing over the water to Grandmother
Josephine. In Maine, the walkers covered some 60 miles
a day, starting at 3:30 a.m. and ending around 7 p.m.

The mission of the Anishinawbe Grandmothers that started this walk in 2003 is so aligned with the mission of our project, Defending Water for Life in Maine. We want people to be aware of water in everything. We want people and ecosystems to have the right to healthy water in their communities. Never should water be mined and sold for profit by a private corporation like Nestle. Being driven by dollars, they will never have the best interests of the community, the people, or nature in mind.

Before the Walk started this year, one of the lead walkers said, “We are doing this walk on our own beliefs within our own aboriginal culture and values of the importance of our waters. [Water] is very precious and sacred to our being, as it is one of the basic elements needed for all life to exist.” The walk is, “a prayer for the water, for Mother Earth, for the animals, the birds, the insects, the trees and for us, all two leggeds. Together the walks were one prayer for life.”

For more information on the Mother Earth Water Walk, please visit the website, www.motherearthwaterwalk.com. I would also be happy to share my experiences with anyone who is interested in chatting!

You can read more at the Defending Water in Maine website, here.

July 4: Declare your independence from corporate rule

2011-06-08T13:25:00.000-04:00

As a member of the Move to Amend coalition, we're passing on this alert and we strongly urge our members and supporters to get out and organize actions for Independence Day. And, of course, let us know what you're planning and we'll help publicize it--and send us pictures afterwards!

Join Move to Amend this 4th of July as we Declare Our Independence from Corporate Rule in communities across the nation! Let's educate our fellow citizens about the corporate threat to our democracy, and get them engaged in the movement to take back our country!

View yesterday's Take Action Webinar for details and tips to organize the creative ideas listed below, and more! Need some inspiration for what to do? How about... an I Miss Democracy pageant, complete with swimsuits, tiaras and sashes, and a talent competition showcasing all the things that corporate persons are really good at. Or pick another way to be visible--and don't be afraid to be as outrageous as the idea that corporations have the same kind of constitutional rights as human beings!

Dress as corporate judges and corporate "persons" and dance and sing about the takeover of our democracy in your local 4th of July parade
Host a Corporate Personhood picnic
Stage a human-corporate mock wedding
Organize a birthday party for Democracy. Read this "Declaration of Independence from Corporate Rule".

And more!

Find tips and ideas for these events and more on our website... or invent your own creative ways to educate your community about Corporate Personhood and the Move to Amend campaign.

Don't have a Move to Amend affiliate group in your community yet? Start one up! The 4th of July is a great time to spread the word and expand the movement.

Help us collect signatures and grow the number of local Move to Amend groups across the country. Americans of all political persuasions are fed up! Let's offer them an opportunity to join our cause.

Yours for democracy,
Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap
Move to Amend Executive Committee & Field Organizing Coordinator

Thinkprogress: How The Kochs Built An Oil Speculation Empire

2011-06-08T11:44:00.000-04:00

Don't believe the hype from anyone or any organization that tells you that all we have to do to bring gas prices down is drill everywhere the oil and gas industries want to sink a well. Wheeling and dealing is responsible for a big chunk of what we are paying at the pump--and Koch Industries has played a big role in siphoning part of your energy budget off to Wall Street speculators.

by Lee Fang. Posted June 6 on Thinkprogress.org

The Koch Industries front group Americans for Prosperity is preparing a tour across America “aimed at trying to put the blame for high gas prices on the Obama administration.” The tour will feature multiple campaign-style rallies, a website, and radio and television advertisements. The tour will demand that Obama increase domestic drilling — even though domestic oil production is at an all time high and further drilling will do nothing to affect prices.

Koch’s relaunch of Drill Baby Drill appears to be a crass attempt to distract Americans from a true driver of high prices: oil speculation, coming from companies like Koch. In fact, a new ThinkProgress investigation of Koch’s oil speculation business reveals that Koch is perhaps the most important player in distorting oil markets for private profit.

Our report highlights:

Koch’s role in inventing modern oil derivatives.
Koch’s alliance with Enron and the Gramm family in deregulating oil speculation, first in the early ’90s then again ten years later.
Koch’s participation in unregulated exchanges, and the ways in which it uses its political power to allow excessive oil speculation to continue.

Experts contacted by ThinkProgress pin the blame for sky-high prices and record volatility on excessive oil speculation, the oil market corrupted by unregulated Wall Street traders who buy and hold onto oil futures contracts with no interest in the actual delivery of oil. Koch Industries — generally known as an oil pipelines and refining company — is also on the forefront of speculating on oil for profit.

Even Goldman Sachs concedes that at least $27 of the price of crude this year has been a result of rampant speculation, not supply and demand. Other experts contacted by ThinkProgress have said the number is closer to fifty dollars. To read our report about Koch Industry’s long and sordid history in the oil speculation business, click here.

Hey, Colorado!

2011-06-06T08:37:00.000-04:00

The Colorado Move To Amend group's e-newsletter is online here. Highlights include info on monthly meetings in Arvada starting June 9, a screening of "The Corporation" part II in Denver, a possible public bank for Colorado, and links to good videos.

Check it out here.

AfD National Council member on war, health care, and the central issue of corporate personhood

2011-06-01T13:40:00.001-04:00

AfD national council member Rick Staggenborg, MD, who is also founder of Soldiers for Peace International, speaks to Dan Shea, of Veterans for Peace chapter 72 in Portland, OR, about corporate personhood and the sorry state of democracy, especially as it affects veterans.

Rick has formed a new national work group for Veterans for Peace on the abolition of corporate personhood and will ask to introduce a resolution at this year's VFP national convention in Portland, OR calling for an amendment to restore constitutional rights to people. Chapter 72 has scheduled discussion of the issue and the work group at their next meeting.

What you can do to protect renewable energy development in Oregon

2011-06-01T13:28:00.000-04:00

Thanks to strong citizen advocacy and progressive political leadership, Oregon is deservedly known as a national leader in the response to climate change and the transition away from fossil fuels for electricity generation.

All that is now at risk due to proposed state budget cuts, cuts that will drastically impact Oregon's Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency funding. But with your help, we can stop these short-sighted cuts to our renewable energy programs.

Oregonians for Renewable Energy Policy (OREP) is working to preserve this funding. Join with OREP's efforts from now through the end of the legislative session in mid-June to continue Oregon's progress toward a sustainable energy future. And support OREP today with a donation, to keep its advocacy strong.

How bad are the cuts? The Tax Credit Subcommittee of Ways and Means and Senate and House leadership want to put a $10 million cap on all types of tax credits. They plan to:

Cut the available Residential Energy Tax Credit by 97%, from $34 million to $1 million.
Cut the Business Energy Tax Credit more than 99% (from $300 million for renewables alone in 2009-11 to $2 million to cover both renewables and conservation in 2011-13).

To find out more, read "BETC Facing Massive Cutbacks" here.

Our elected officials need to hear from us NOW!

Short term savings on renewable energy tax credits will cost Oregonians and their economy more in the long term:

more for oil--including the costs of military actions to secure overseas supplies
more for public health damaged by air pollution and climate change
more for climate-related damage to our environment, agriculture, fishing, and forests
more job loss in our growing green jobs sector

It's time to let your legislators know that support for clean energy is a priority, not a luxury. Fossil fuel is not our future, and the "innovative" extractive projects now underway, like the Alberta Tar Sands, create far more pollution, corruption, and destruction.

OREP has long advocated for a more stable and cost-effective financing method for renewable energy and conservation programs. They still do. It is the same funding tool Germany so successfully used to become the world’s leader in solar energy and is the reason why it can now confidently declare it will shut all its nuclear plants by 2022. Ontario, Canada is also using the guaranteed pricing structure tool (aka feed-in tariff) to shut down all its coal plants by 2014. Use of this policy tool has also created hundreds of thousands of good jobs.

Maintaining a reasonable level of maintenance funding until we have an alternative in place will preserve our prior investment. So severely de-funding the programs that built Oregon’s reputation sends the wrong message to Oregon’s citizens, to our children and the entire nation, who look to Oregon for leadership.

Responsible leadership requires a measured transition to a more stable financing mechanism while not losing our prior public investment.

What you can do!

Write letters and follow up with phone calls to your state senator and representative asking them to preserve Oregon's commitment to a clean energy future. Also contact House Co-Speakers Arnie Roblan and Bruce Hanna, Senate President Peter Courtney, Senate Majority Leader Diane Rosenbaum and Minority Leader Ted Ferrioli. Address: 900 Court St. NE, Salem, OR 97301 PH: 503-986-1000.
Call Governor Kitzhaber and ask him to play an active role in the State Legislature to retain Oregon's leadership position on clean energy (Comment line: 503-378-4582 )
Become a Facebook friend to OREP and share these action items with your network
Support OREP’s work with as generous a donation as you can. OREP’s groundbreaking work on the state’s Feed-In Tariff program has led to real progress in development of local, small-scale solar electric production—“democratizing the grid” to ensure a cleaner, and fairer, energy future. For more information on OREP, please visit their website, OregonRenewables.com

Only the voice of Oregon's citizens demanding responsible leadership will preserve our clean energy future. Please take action now to keep Oregon's renewable energy programs a model for the nation, and to preserve our environment, our economy, and our public health.

Thank you,
Nancy Price, AfD Co-chair
David e. Delk, AfD Co-chair

The people and the commons versus corpocracy: Exxon/Mobil version

2011-05-31T11:41:00.001-04:00

This video, from Class War Films tells it like it is--from how the corporation will ensure it gets what it wants by renting the appropriate lawmakers and having them blather on about how great it is to trade health, safety and the environment for a handful of temporary, no-benefit, bad-paying jobs, to the sorry state of corporate-owned and controlled "democracy" in America.

It also asks a darn good question: "Just how much arrogant contempt for you and your world would it take to make you fight back?"

Video: Gov. Shumlin signs Vermont single payer bill

2011-05-27T12:39:00.000-04:00

Here's remarks by Governor Peter Shumlin, who this morning signed a bill to bring single payer health care to a state where where 40,000 have no coverage and one in four are underinsured. Shumlin thanked everyone who contributed to the passage of the bill, and singled out the state legislature, whose work on the on this bill was "a tribute to democracy in Vermont."

“Transforming Communities Through Local Business" screens in Ashland, MA June 9

2011-05-26T10:34:00.000-04:00

Former New England regional representative David Whitty sends the following announcement about the documentary series he's helped to organize:

The Documentary Film & Discussion Series will present the film, Transforming Communities Through Local Business (56 min.), June 9 at 7:00 pm in the Community Room, Ashland Public Library, 66 Front Street, Ashland, MA. The events, presented by the Friends of the Ashland Library, are free and open to the public. Viewers are invited to stay for discussion. All points of view are welcome. For event information, contact the Ashland Library, 508-881-0134.

The film, "Transforming Communities Through Local Business," contains two conversations from Peak Moment TV’s series on sustainable communities.

Conversation I – Sustainable Connections: Transforming a Community through Local Business

Michelle Long shows us how a highly successful local, independent business network has transformed Bellingham, WA, and inspired other communities. From an initial “Think Local First” program, they expanded to business peer mentoring, support for local food producers, sustainable buildings, and green energy. An astounding sixty percent of their community is not only aware of the “Think Local, Buy Local, Be Local” campaign but have changed their buying habits. (www.sustainableconnections.org)

Conversation II – Local Living Economies: Protecting What We Love

Judy Wicks’ love of place has made widening ripples on a global scale. She’s the founder of BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies), a national network of sustainable, small businesses. After moving onto a quaint street in Philadelphia, she learned it was slated to be torn down. Organizing her community, she saved the block as a walkable community. She opened White Dog Cafe coffee shop on the first floor of her home, which grew to a large restaurant proudly serving food from local farmers. (www.livingeconomies.org, www.whitedog.com) From water withdrawal to mining, GMOs, resort development and more, the corporate few wield the law against our communities, endangering our health, safety, and the environment. Confronted by corporate harms, more than 100 communities across the US have decided to do something different, enacting laws that place the rights of communities and nature over the claimed “rights” of corporations.

The Documentary Film & Discussion Series meets every 2nd Thursday and 4th Tuesday of the month for an in-depth look at important topics of our day. The discussions are often lively and thought-provoking. All points of view are welcomed. For more information, visit www.friendsoftheapl.com.

Live from Montpelier! Gov. Shumlin signs single payer bill

2011-05-25T15:08:00.002-04:00

Watch history in the making as Vermont nudges the nation a little closer to an equitable health care system by passing a bill setting their state on the path to single payer health care.

You can watch Governor Peter Shumlin sign the bill into law live and online from the Vermont Statehouse in Montpelier. The signing takes place tomorrow, Thursday, May 26, at 9 a.m. eastern, and will be streamed here.

This isn't the end of the fight for single payer in Vermont, though. State agencies have to develop a plan to finance the bill, including setting any co-pays for services, and the scope of coverage and has to be determined as well. The plan also needs a waiver from the Obama administration to go into effect.

Nevertheless, between the state's governor, many legislators, and grassroots activists (especially the Vermont Workers Center and Vermont Health Care for All's Vermont for Single Payer campaign, there's a strong commitment to making this bill work.

It's clear that the biggest steps forward toward health care justice will be taken on the state and city level, where the needs and voices and votes of constituents outweigh the greed of the insurance and health care industry. Vermont's determination to provide the best and most accessible health care for the largest number of its citizens should give us all hope that the other state-level single-payer initiatives will get onto the law books as well. And, of course, if you live in a state with a single payer campaign, get involved!

Comments due on DOE proposal to ship nation's nuclear waste to Hanford site

2011-05-25T11:49:00.001-04:00

From AfD's Portland (OR) chapter:
The US Department of Energy proposes to take the nation's nuclear waste to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation for storage. This will bring 12,000 trucks loads of nuclear waste onto our highways, threatening the health and well being of all. Other solutions must be found and can be found.

Comment now on the US DOE proposal!

• Comments on the proposal are due on June 27, 2011. Click here to comment.
• Background and talking points are available on the Heart of America Northwest's website and their 4 page Citizen's Guide and their fact sheet.
• Read the Oregonian editorial opposing the proposal as well as the City of Portland Statement, read by Mayor Sam Adams at the recent public hearing. This statement is signed by all members of the Portland City Council.
• Listen to and watch Populist Dialogues interview with Gerry Pollet, Ex. Director of Heart of America NW, below.

Trenton, ME, passes local food and self-governance ordinance

2011-05-24T08:50:00.002-04:00

The fifth Maine town to vote on the Local Food and Community Self-Governance Ordinance, Trenton, passed it at their town meeting Saturday morning. The vote was close, at 29-25 (Trenton has only about 1000 year-round residents, and there was a fire alarm early in the meeting which cleared the hall and thinned the crowd a little).

AfD vice co-chair Bonnie Preston, who has been working to help spread the word about these ordinances, writes that pro-ordinance people plan to do some follow-up with the town and select board to try to make sure they better understand this issue. They learned a lot from this town meeting about how important the ground-work is, and how important it is to understand the circumstances in each town, something that can really only be done by that community.

They are still anticipating a re-vote in Brooksville this summer; this was the one town where the ordinance was defeated, although a town board may have improperly recommended that it not be passed. Right now Local Food and Community Self-Governance ordinances are 4-1; they will work to make it 5-0.

Portland AfD sponsors organizer training session with David Cobb of Move to Amend

2011-05-19T11:51:00.001-04:00

David Cobb will be returning to Portland, OR, to facilitate a Move to Amend organizer training on June 18, sponsored by AfD’s Portland chapter. AfD members, supporters and friends from several groups are coming together to form a local Move to Amend coalition and are bringing David in for a day-long training.

We'll be posting more information and a downloadable flier here soon!

Tuition for the June 18 training, from 9 am - 6 pm, is $50 to $100, sliding scale. It will be at the First Unitarian Church, 1011 Southwest 13th Street, Portland. Space is limited! To register or find out more, contact David Delk.

Democracy matters in Indianapolis council race

2011-05-19T11:45:00.000-04:00

Congratulations Conrad! AfD Indianapolis Chapter contact Conrad Cortellini recently ran for a seat on the Indianapolis City-County Council under the banner of "Community Matters." Democracy was the first element under this banner, along with child- and family-focused support for communities, and sustainable development.

He was up against an incumbent Democrat who had the full weight of the local party machinery behind him, but Conrad still won a third of the primary vote, despite running an all-volunteer campaign on a shoestring budget. The campaign is encouraged by the showing and is considering a write-in campaign in November. You can learn more at cortellini.net.

Today's news and views

2011-05-19T11:38:00.000-04:00

● A group of more than 80 business groups have told President Obama to "abandon" a draft executive order requiring federal contractors to disclose political contributions. Groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, the National Retail Federation and the National Association of Manufacturers claimed the disclosure requirement would "chill their free speech rights" according to The Hill.

● Federal contributions are down 30 percent to the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund and Clean Water State Revolving Fund, the two federal programs that offer no- or low-cost loans to upgrade municipal drinking water systems, and small towns are feeling the pinch.

● Five Republican Senators—Orrin G. Hatch (Utah), Jon Kyl (Ariz.), Pat Roberts (Kan.) John Cornyn (Texas), John Thune (S.D.) and Richard Burr (N.C.)—have signed on to a letter to IRS commissioner Douglas H. Shulman asking why the agency has begun investigating potential tax liability in large donations to 501(c)4 groups after decades of looking the other way, and asking whether following the rules represents a violation of donors' constitutional rights.

● Scott McLarty looks for a language to describe a radical ideology for the 21st century.

Portland AfD's "Populist Dialogues" looks at OREP, Hanford

2011-05-18T12:01:00.000-04:00

"Populist Dialogues" most recent show features guest Judy Barnes of Oregonians for Renewable Energy Policy (OREP) who explains how feed-in-tariffs have created big increases in production of renewable energy and in good paying jobs in Germany, Gainesville FL, and elsewhere. Judy answers frequently asked questions on this means of financing renewable solar energy which OREP is spearheading in Oregon. Read their brochure here.

The series' next show focuses on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, campaign finance, and Portland's radical history. Featured are Gerry Pollet of Heart of America NW speaking on Hanford, the most contaminated nuclear site in the country and the focus of needed environmental clear-up due to long-term contamination of the surrounding area and eco-systems; Steve Cowan, director of PriceLess,the Movie on the problem of money and lobbyists in our political system and the role of public election financing; and Michael Munk, author of Portland Red Guide, a history of people and places in Portland's radical history.

No cable? Not in Portland? Watch the show from the AfD-Portland website. Or get "Populist Dialogues" on your local cable access station—contact David Delk for further information.

Remembering Bill McCann

2011-05-18T11:40:00.000-04:00

We're saddened to note the death of Bill McCann, New Hampshire organizer for the Alliance's Defending Water for Life campaign. Bill was badly injured this winter and despite several months of rehabilitative care, passed away May 6.

Defending Water for Life campaign coordinator Ruth Caplan recalled, "I first met Bill in 2005 at a gathering of US/Canada water activists in Traverse City Michigan. We bonded around the idea that water is a fundamental right for people and nature, a right to be protected by local communities. Thanks to Bill, this idea was brought to NH and within a year, Barnstead passed the first ordinance in the country declaring water to be a fundamental right which could not be taken away by corporations. Now there are four such ordinances in New Hampshire and two in Maine.

"Bill worked with Defending Water for Life for the next six years. His work on protecting NH's groundwater is just one of many legacies he has left to future generations. It was a gift to know and work with him.

"Thank you Bill! May we all be inspired by you and carry on your work."