New Civil Rights Movement

In our nation whose founding documents enshrine the civil rights of all, the American experience has been one of long hard-fought struggles by minorities to achieve that lofty goal. No one who lived through the sixties will ever forget the monumental fight for civil rights for Black Americans. We appear to be reaching a tipping point in the civil rights of Gay Americans with the recent cascade of judgments overturning unjust laws denying them the human right to marry whom they please and establish legally recognized families. America, by its nature, is an evolving entity as it strives to live up to our founding principles.

Human rights for many marginalized groups have become the law of the land with eternal vigilance the price of maintaining them. However, there is one forgotten group which continues to see their own civil rights violated against an entrenched dominant group which oppresses them. This is illustrated by one uncomfortable fact:

Corporations became persons under the law a full forty years before women were granted that status.

The above quote is from Thomas Linzey, environmental attorney and CEO of the non-profit Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) who spoke to an overflow crowd last night in Eugene, Oregon. He described the early years of the organization as one of shepherding communities through the regulatory maze of the permitting process for various industrial activities which those communities objected to such as factory farming and disposal of toxic sewage sludge on agricultural land. The first eight years of their existence, they racked up an impressive list of courtroom wins over losses (130 -4). They won awards from progressive groups and were honored by then Vice President Al Gore for their work. The problem was that none of those "victories" resulted in communities being able to say NO to the corporate harms visited upon them. They could only win minor concessions such as forcing a factory farm operation that wished to house 10,000 pigs in one building to house 2,000 pigs in five buildings.

The only thing that environmental regulations regulate are the environmentalists.
                                            ~Jane Anne Morris, Corporate Anthropologist

One community which CELDF had helped win this kind of minor concession asked the vital question of why? If we won, why did it not help us? The ultimate answer was that the legal framework represented two hundred years of constitutional and case law granting supremacy of property and commerce over their civil rights as communities. When these environmental lawyers asked the community what they wanted them to do, they made a revolutionary request: Sit down and write us an ordinance that elevates our rights over corporate power and states' rights to preempt local laws.

We have the tools to undo corporate personhood and the ascendency of their rights over community rights in our hands. We don't need to call a new Constitutional Convention on the federal level. We can do this in our own backyards which are being fracked, mined, and factory farmed.

It will not be easy. It will not be quick. However, if the words in the Declaration of Independence investing all inherent rights in the people to govern themselves for their own health, safety and happiness have any meaning at all, the result is assured. Democracy no longer exists on the federal or state levels; however, if enough communities assert their rights to self-governance locally, we can virtually force democracy up through the system.

This is being done in Colorado. The small town of Lafayette has passed their own rights-based bill banning oil exploration and are now being sued by the Colorado Oil and Gas Association (COGA), the industry's major trade group. Lafayette is fighting back with a counter suit--naming the Governor, the State of Colorado and COGA--demanding immediate enforcement of their ban and dismissal of COGA's suit. To further protect community rights, the statewide Colorado Community Rights Network, which is a coalition of local CR groups, drafted the Colorado Community Rights Amendment, ballot measure #75.

In a move that our better Democrats ought to note and emulate, the Colorado Democratic Party 2014 platform includes the following plank endorsing Community Rights:

MAKE  COMMUNITY  AND  INDIVIDUAL  RIGHTS  SUPERIOR  TO  THOSE  OF  CORPORATE  PERSONS  

WHEREAS  Article III of the Colorado Constitution states: All persons have natural, essential and  inalienable  rights,  among  which  may  be  reckoned  the  right  of  enjoying  and  defending  their lives  and  liberties;  of  acquiring,  possessing, and protecting  property; and seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness; and

WHEREAS,  among  these  rights  are  the  right  to  fair  and  equitable  treatment  under  the  law,  the  rights  to  clean  air  and  water,   and  the  rights  to  protect  property  and  health;  and    

WHEREAS,  corporate  persons  have  been  given  special  entitlements,  privileges,  access  and  exemptions  and  treated  as  if   their  rights  are  superior  to  the  natural,  essential  and  inalienable  rights  of  individual  persons;  and    

WHEREAS,  the  grant  of  special  entitlements  to  some  corporate  persons  or  groups  of  corporate  persons  has  resulted  in   exploitation,  decreased  protection  of  the  public  health,  preferential  tax  treatment  of  some  industries,  increased  community   infrastructure  costs  as  well  as  increased  air  pollution,  potential  risk  to  citizen  water  supplies,  chemical  trespass,  and   lawsuits  against  local  communities  seeking  to  protect  their  community  welfare;  

BE  IT  RESOLVED  that  when  there  is  a  conflict  involving  the  natural,  essential  and  inalienable  rights  of  individual  persons  and   the  communities  in  which  they  live,  the  Colorado  Democratic  Party  supports  the  protection  of  the  rights  of  those  individual   persons,  as  well  as  the  right  of  local  communities  to  represent  and  protect  their  residents.

     

In my county, citizens persisted over two years in court to bring our own community bill of rights concerning agriculture to the ballot. Not a simple ban of GMO cultivation, this ordinance specifically claims our rights ascendant over those claimed by corporations, seed patent holders and the right of the state to preempt any laws we make. It specifically negates corporate personhood.

In just two weeks of gathering signatures, we are half way to our goal of placing the ordinance on the November ballot for a vote of the people. If approved by the voters, our community will have committed civil disobedience by directly confronting corporate and state power. We fully expect the full might of corporate and state power to fall upon us. We want that fight. We are ready for that fight.

Despite the near blackout of corporate media about this new civil rights movement, corporate America is well aware of the threat it poses. The following quote by a New Mexico petroleum executive reveals their view of the Community Rights Movement which is currently fighting fracking:

"While industry, the media and the public might ignore all the commotion created about the hydraulic fracturing discussion, this issue is the beginning of a social movement that is greater than just the oil and gas industry, it is a potential game changer for all of corporate America."

                     ~ Independent Petroleum Association of New Mexico, Energy New Mexico

A game changer is just what we need. One community at a time.

See below the orange regulatory maze for more information on how people are fighting back against corporate personhood and our governments which support them.