The following transcript is of Paul Cienfuegos’ speech at the Unitarian Universalist Church in downtown Portland on February 26th, 2010. You can hear the speech HERE.
“May you live in interesting times.”
No one knows the origins of this saying. It’s claimed to be an ancient Chinese proverb, and is thought to be both a blessing and a curse. I think it’s a really good description of our current situation. We do indeed live in interesting times! In fact, in my almost 52 years of life, I can’t recall any times more interesting than these.
We humans, on this stunningly beautiful planet, have never experienced anything remotely like what we are experiencing today. There’s a sense of unreality. Outside our windows, everything seems pretty normal. Life appears to be flowing by just as it did a year ago, 10 years ago, 50 years ago. But we know there are enormous changes taking place all around us.
25 years ago, when I was still a young man, I was aware that there was a lot of ecological destruction going on around me. But I hadn’t yet realized how close to the abyss we already were on planet earth. The groups I worked with at the time – fighting clearcut logging, trying to stop the construction of a nuclear submarine base, just to name two of them – we didn’t really understand that we were nearing the end of life as we knew it. I was a very politically well-read young man. I knew we had big problems everywhere. My eyes were wide open. But I wasn’t aware of anyone who was sounding the alarm about the end of oil, about an impending climate catastrophe, about larger and larger areas of our oceans no longer able to support marine life.
In a very short amount of time – in just a few decades – a large percentage of the planet’s inhabitants have woken up to the reality that we have very little time remaining to literally recreate our lives and our communities. To start living as if we really get it that our Mother Earth – Gaia – is a finite floating sphere, and offering us her amazing services if only we would live in a way that is truly sustainable for thousands of years into the future.
The problem is – we have to act quickly and boldly.
For example, most climate scientists now agree that we must cut our greenhouse gas emissions by 80 to 90% within 20 years or less if we want to avert global catastrophic climate destabilization. To succeed at making such drastic cuts, according to George Monbiot, one of Europe’s leading writers on climate change, the only way to reach such goals is to end almost all private driving of cars, to end almost all commercial flights, to end all long-distance transport of food and manufactured goods, to shut down all of our coal-fired power plants, to insulate and retrofit all of our existing homes and offices. This is a tall order. And we have 20 years or less to complete it.
“I’ve realized that the trends that are undermining the world food economy: soil erosion, aquifer depletion, overgrazing and grassland deterioration, collapsing fisheries, deforestation and all the problems it leads to. We haven’t reversed a single one of these trends. We’ve been tracking them now for decades at the WorldWatch Institute, going back to the mid-seventies.”–from a speech by Lester Brown, the founder of Worldwatch Institute, and president of the Earth Policy Institute
But that’s not the only immediate crisis we face. Energy analysts tell us it is likely that we reached Peak Oil in the last year or two, and we will reach Peak Coal in 15 to 20 years. And our global oil consumption is still increasing so rapidly that we may not have enough oil left, according to Worldwatch Institute, even to use as a bridge to get us to a renewable-energy-based society.
In other words, to build all of the necessary photovoltaic panels and solar hot water systems and wind turbines and micro-hydro systems and all of the other parts of a sustainable energy future – that absolutely massive new infrastructure may require more oil and coal and raw materials simply to get it built than we can spare, or that would be allowed as we work feverishly to cut our greenhouse gas emissions.
These projections make it crystal clear that the days of so-called “normal” are over.
But that’s not all. Just at the moment that people are waking up and demanding bold action from our local, state and federal governments, our economy is in crisis too. There are fewer and fewer government dollars available to spend on the bold and rapid policy changes that are urgently needed.
The last thing I said is not completely true, because our federal government spends 51% of all the tax dollars it collects, on our military budget – about $1,450,000,000,000 is spent annually paying for past, present and future wars. So there actually IS an enormous amount of capital that could be spent on these urgent matters, but our elected officials refuse to do so, thus far.
It’s the year 2010. We have until 2030 at the absolute latest to have completed a fundamental restructuring of our entire society.
Is it the greatest opportunity we have ever been handed to create a truly sustainable society? Yes! Is it also the largest emergency we have ever faced as modern human beings? Yes!
So let’s take an honest look at what people are doing to respond to this growing emergency in the United States, so that we can determine whether our efforts are sufficient for the task. I mainly see two kinds of activity taking place.
Americans are taking a fresh look at how our own personal behaviors impact the planet. We are rethinking our daily personal decisions about what we choose to eat, how we choose to transport ourselves, how we choose to heat and cool our homes, what we choose to buy in the stores, how we choose to make a living, etc. In other words, every day we are making hundreds of private decisions that influence our personal consumption patterns.
In addition, many of us are involved in activist groups, almost entirely focusing on single issues – literally thousands of specific campaigns like making it safer to bike on city streets, or keeping GMO crops from being planted, or stopping the construction of more big box stores, or demanding universal health care, or changing our agricultural practices so we don’t keep losing topsoil, or trying to stop salmon from going extinct, or trying to get people to stop buying plastic water bottles. It’s an endless list!
There’s very little overlap between any of our groups. We tend to not work with each other because it’s hard to see how our issues are connected. We frequently don’t have much awareness about what other groups are doing. Our single-issue groups tend to be under-funded and understaffed. Most of us still need to work for a living, so we scratch out some extra hours in our hectic schedules to do our activism.
Many of us also join regional and national advocacy organizations, but they tend to be so isolated from their members, that they rarely request more of us than writing a letter to an elected official or to the editor of a local newspaper, signing an online petition, or sending a donation. These larger groups are ALSO almost always focused on a single issue, and frequently, much of their funding comes from large corporations, and sometimes their boards of directors are CEO’s of large corporations. Two examples of this are the Natural Resources Defense Council and the American Cancer Society.
These are all fine things for us to be doing –
To be re-examining our daily private lifestyle decisions so we consume less, and to be joining mostly single-issue organizations.
But is this sufficient to get Portland, to get Oregon, to get the United States turned 180 degrees in the next 10 to 20 years? I really think the answer.… is NO.
The harsh reality is that even given the gazillion hours that activists work, year after year, almost every single ecological and social trend continues to get worse and worse and worse. Lester Brown, the founder of Worldwatch Institute, and president of the Earth Policy Institute, recently gave a speech in which he said, …
“I’ve realized that the trends that are undermining the world food economy: soil erosion, aquifer depletion, overgrazing and grassland deterioration, collapsing fisheries, deforestation and all the problems it leads to. We haven’t reversed a single one of these trends. We’ve been tracking them now for decades at the WorldWatch Institute, going back to the mid-seventies.
And you don’t have to be an ecologist to realize if we don’t get these trends turned around, we’re going to be in trouble on the food front. You can’t over-pump aquifers forever. You can’t have soils eroding at the rate they are in the world today without eventually paying a price for it.”
Let’s be honest with ourselves. Our personal consumption choices and our single-issue activism aren’t having very much impact in reversing these trends. And let’s not make the same mistake that single-issue activists make so often – thinking that if we just work harder at what we’re already doing – that we’ll start to win our battles. It’s not that simple.
The problem is structural. …..
What most of our activist groups continue to ignore, at their peril, is that our governmental institutions are mostly now so corrupted and overwhelmed by corporate demands that they simply do not function as they were designed to. I think every one of you in this room knows this in your gut. And yet, we ACT as if we still believe that our governmental institutions are functioning to serve US. There’s a real disconnect there. Can it really be this bad? Surely our elected officials will do the right thing if only we work a little harder to convince them. One more letter – one more phone call. I’m afraid that path is a dead end. We simply have to examine some current legislative efforts to understand how bad things have become. Here are two examples.
* What do a majority of Americans want regarding health care reform? We want single-payer universal health care. Like every other industrialized nation. That’s what we want. The polls have been showing this for decades. The nurses’ associations want it. The unions want it. Even some of the doctors’ associations now want it. People are better organized around this issue than perhaps any other issue in the country today.
What are we going to get? Almost nothing. Why? Because health-insurance company executives like it just the way it already is. It’s that simple.
Corporations have so much power because their leaders have been winning Supreme Court Case after Supreme Court case, going all the way back to the early 1800’s.
Another example:
* What do a majority of Americans want regarding a government response to the financial crisis? Again, the polls are very clear. We want a massive new green jobs program. We want the tens of millions of Americans who are about to lose their homes to get some sort of legal protection so they have time to renegotiate their mortgages before they end up on the streets. We want an end to giant bonuses for corporate leaders who created this mess, and for criminal charges to be filed against many of them.
What are we going to get instead? More nuclear power plants subsidized with our money, a tiny jobs program, and no end to the huge bailouts of the companies which have created the mess in the first place. Why? Because the financial industry likes it just the way it already is. It’s that simple.
Same with climate change. We urgently need bold legislation from Washington. What are we going to get? Either nothing at all, or a carbon-trading plan, which most of Europe has already decided doesn’t work.
How did it come to pass that large corporations wield so much political clout? People tend to think it’s because they have lots of money to throw around, but that’s actually not the main reason at all.
Corporations have so much power because their leaders have been winning Supreme Court Case after Supreme Court case, going all the way back to the early 1800’s. You’ve probably all heard of the Santa Clara decision in 1886. But that’s just one story among many. If you can picture all of those wins as picture puzzle pieces, they’ve now pretty well succeeded in creating a mosaic of corporate constitutional “rights” that effectively blot out OUR constitutional rights.
Here are some highlights from our history:
• In 1819, in what is now referred to as the Dartmouth Decision, the Supreme Court ruled that a corporate charter was a contract and could not be altered by government. This was the first time in our history that the courts claimed that corporations could use the Constitution for legal protection.
• Beginning in the 1870’s, the Supreme Court began using the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution to overrule one local and state law after another that had been passed to protect the health and welfare of the people in all of those local places.
• In 1886, in Santa Clara County vs Southern Pacific Railroad, the court claimed that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution – which provided equal protection under the law to freed male slaves – also applied to corporations. For the first time, it was claimed that the word “person” also included the corporation. Corporate personhood was born.
• In 1893, corporations won 5th Amendment protections against the taking of its property without due process.
• In 1906, corporations won the 4th Amendment, protecting them against search and seizure.
• In 1908, corporations won the 6th Amendment, guaranteeing them the right to a jury trial in criminal cases.
• In 1919, the court ruled that corporate boards of directors MUST prioritize the maximizing of profits as their central goal. Large companies that had until then balanced profit-making with other goals were forced to complyIn 1936, corporations won the 1st Amendment, giving them protected free speech for the very first time.
• In 1976, the court ruled that money and free speech are equivalent. From that day forward, limits on campaign expenditures by corporations were severely limitedAlso in 1976, the court expanded a corporation’s First Amendment free speech protections to include advertising
• In 1977, the court ruled that corporations have the same rights to the First Amendment as do real people and can spend unlimited money to “speak” in ads to overturn referendum.
• In 1986, the court ruled that corporate free speech includes the right NOT to speak, which dramatically impacted the government’s ability to pass new product labeling laws.
This is just a small sampling of Supreme Court cases granting “rights” to corporations. Corporate directors have skillfully molded these “rights” into an impenetrable barrier that has successfully overwhelmed our government’s capacity to do its job.
How can we create a sustainable society in just 10 to 20 years? Is it even possible? I believe it is, but only if we end our addiction to single-issue campaigns as quickly as we possibly can, and start challenging corporate constitutional rights head-on.
And let’s not forget the icing on the cake – the latest Supreme Court outrage just weeks ago – Citizens United vs the Federal Election Commission – removing some of the very last legal limits on how much money corporations can give to influence elections.
Much of our media, including our progressive independent media, has misreported this story, claiming that this recent decision gave corporations personhood rights. As you can clearly see from this short history lesson, the latest win is just one more expansion of these rights. Yes, it’s a very significant expansion. For the first time ever, a corporation may spend unlimited piles of cash directly from it’s general fund, which will have an immediate chilling affect on any elected official who wants to go against the corporate agenda.
Most of the previous court decisions took place with very little attention from the public. Yet this latest decision has awakened a firestorm of public anger. Just days ago, ABC News published a poll showing that a staggering 80% of Americans are opposed to the Court’s decision and want it overturned. And it’s not just progressives who feel this way.
It’s 85% of Democrats, 76% of Republicans, 81% of Independents. They didn’t identify Greens or Libertarians in the survey.
Across the board, Americans are saying no way.
I’ve been educating people about this issue since 1995, and this is the first time in those 15 years that the entire country is paying attention to corporate rights. It’s a VERY exciting moment. And many groups have already launched campaigns to challenge the court’s decision. The one that excites me the most is the Campaign to Legalize Democracy. Their website, MoveToAmend.org, asks Americans to sign a petition calling for a Constitutional Amendment to end corporate constitutional “rights”. More than 66,000 people have already signed on. I hope you do too! Again, that’s MoveToAmend.org.
But let’s not stray too far from the central focus of my talk tonight –
How can we create a sustainable society in just 10 to 20 years? Is it even possible? I believe it is, but only if we end our addiction to single-issue campaigns as quickly as we possibly can, and start challenging corporate constitutional rights head-on.
I’m not saying we should stop working on health care reform or bank reform or climate change or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the humanitarian crisis in Haiti. I’m saying we need to change the framing of our campaigns – away from being just about specific issues. Let me offer some examples.
I would claim that the problem is not that corporations are clearcutting our forests. That’s just a symptom of the problem. The real problem is that We the People are allowing corporations to decide whether to log our forests, how to log our forests, where to log, when to log.
Who gave them the authority to make those decisions?
If they hadn’t won corporate personhood in the Courts, they wouldn’t have the power to make these decisions. So if we want to end clearcutting, the fastest route is to end corporate constitutional “rights.”
The same is true regarding the climate change crisis, the energy crisis, the poisoning of our air and waters, the home mortgage crisis. All of these are symptoms. In all of these cases, We the People are allowing corporations to pour their poisons into our air and water, we are allowing corporations to grow GMO crops, we are allowing corporations to build nuclear power plants, we are allowing corporations to blow the tops off mountains to dig for coal, …..
We are allowing corporations to write laws, to lobby our government, to fund our candidates. They wouldn’t be allowed to do any of these activities if they hadn’t won personhood!!! So if we want to stop them from doing all of these things, the fastest route is to end their constitutional rights. It’s that clear.
Now I’m not claiming this will be easy. But just look at how effective our existing single-issue campaigns have been so far in responding to these ecological and social crises. Not very effective. It’s time to turn the corner and try something new. It’s time to remember who we are. We are We the People. We are The Sovereign People. And in many cases, we are the majority – in a country where majority rule is the law of the land.
The Constitution, for all its flaws, is very clear about one thing. All legitimate power resides in the People – that’s US.
WE HAVE ALL THE LEGAL AUTHORITY WE NEED TO GOVERN OURSELVES.
Unfortunately, for a century now, we Americans have been slowly forgetting where our power resides. There are many reasons for this cultural change. The primary reason is this: Large corporations have become such dominant players in all aspects of our lives, that what I call “corporate culture” has become the dominant culture. We swim in “corporate culture”. It’s everywhere around us. We barely notice many of its manifestations.
For example, we tend to identify ourselves as consumers, as workers, as activists, as private individuals. Rather than as citizens, acting in public.
But we are not just private individuals leading private lives.
We’re not just consumers. That’s a term made up by corporate think thanks, to try to convince us that all we have to do is vote with our dollars, and everything will be fine. That our choice in the marketplace is our real power. That’s a lie.
A sovereign people doesn’t just decide between Coke and Pepsi, between paper and plastic. A sovereign people exercises our political authority. It’s up to US to decide whether a dangerous or toxic product should get produced in the first place. Not just whether we’re going to buy it after it’s produced.
A sovereign people doesn’t just decide between organic produce and cancer-causing produce in the supermarket. That’s not where our power resides. We exercise our legal authority, and we decide that we will not allow toxic and cancer-causing foods to be produced in the first place. That it’s not okay to have a two-tiered food supply, one for those of us who can afford safe food, and the other for everybody else. No. We say you can’t produce toxic food in the first place.
Consumer power is false power. It’s a dangerous diversion for us to engage in.
And….
We’re not mere activists either. That’s exactly where the corporate elite wants us. Isolated from each other in thousands of single-issue groups, and mostly pleading with government and corporate authorities to do the right thing. As long as they can keep us separated from one another, as long as they can get us to think of ourselves as David up against Goliath, they win. It’s that simple.
What if I were to tell you that We The People are Goliath and the corporations which are causing so much harm, and interfering so massively in our ability to govern ourselves – that they are David? That we have all the legal authority we need today to create a sustainable society that we can all be proud of. But we can’t accomplish this if we don’t understand who we are.
Perhaps the most dangerous manifestation of corporate culture is something I just mentioned – that we organize ourselves in isolated single-issue groupings whenever we’re trying to tackle a social or ecological problem. This began in the late 1800’s, just as large corporations were starting to overpower a century of law that had given governments the power to define what a corporation could and could not do. Once corporations began to win the right of personhood under law, defining law was no longer possible. Now, governments could only regulate corporate harms, rather than prohibiting them.
Regulatory agencies were set up to regulate entire industries in the late 1800’s. The first regulatory agency was the ICC, the Interstate Commerce Commission. These agencies were given the authority to decide what amount of harm would be permittd in the manufacturing process. That’s why they’re called permits! They permit harm. It has created the absolutely absurd situation where a regulatory agency can now give a permit to a pulp mill to dump 8 PPM of mercury into a bay, having decided that that’s the safe allowable limit of mercury – rather than prohibiting the releasing of any poisons into our natural world.
Before the birth of regulatory agencies in the late 1800’s, before corporations claimed constitutional rights, We the People insisted that corporations cause no harm. It was written right into their charters. After these monumental changes in law and culture, people were forced into the single-issue arena. That’s the primary reason activists today fight one corporation at a time, one corporate harm at a time, using regulatory law. That’s the main reason we now have thousands of isolated organizations working so hard on thousands of issues. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Remember: All LEGITIMATE POWER RESIDES IN THE PEOPLE. We have all the legal authority we need to respond to this growing emergency in a very different way – IF WE DARE. But to do so, we’re going to have to learn again how to practice democracy. Democracy isn’t just about voting every year or two. It’s about the people governing themselves.
Do you know what the word democracy means? It comes from the Greek words ‘Demos’ (the people) and ‘Kratia’ (power).
It literally means “People Power” or “The People Rule”. It’s about who’s in charge? About who gets to decide the important things that make a society the way it is.
Remember, ALL LEGITIMATE POWER RESIDES IN THE PEOPLE. And those of us in this room tonight – if most of us already knew this history and therefore already understood that there is no force more powerful than We the People, and already understood that corporate political power is fundamentally illegitimate political power, then we would already be acting en masse very differently than we are. Which is why it is so critical that we take the time to learn this hidden history. It is only because we have mostly forgotten this history that we are even willing to contemplate consumer power or single-issue activism as our primary involvement in the world
The first step in transforming our involvement in solving these critical issues is to rethink our relationship with these issues. Here are some examples.
Every month, when you pay your gas and electric bill, who gets to decide where all of your money goes? Will it get invested in building a new nuclear power plant? A new solar array or wind farm? Will it be turned into deep discounts for homeowners wanting to solarize their homes? Will it simply end up in million-dollar year-end bonus checks for utility company executives? Who gets to make these decisions? Those of you who pay your bills every month?
If we continue in the mode of single-issue activism, we see ourselves merely as ratepayers battling rate increases. But if we act as the sovereign people, whole new pathways appear in front of us. We can replace private utility companies with public utilities. Or alternately, we can allow large corporations to continue to provide our energy, but reign in their decision-making authority, so that WE decide their policies. To do this, we must end corporate constitutional rights.
Another example:
Who gets to decide whether the proposed Interstate-5 “Columbia Crossing” gets built, at a moment in our history when we know that car travel is likely to decline steadily in the years to come? Do the people of Portland and Vancouver, the people who will be most directly affected – do they get to decide? Are they being allowed a binding vote? Again, it all depends on how we view ourselves. Constitutionally, there is no force more powerful than We the People. But that requires that we dare to take this plunge into the unknown. To flex our collective muscle. To contest for real power, real decision-making authority. And the first step is to determine what a majority of people actually wants.
Another example:
Cell phone companies are planning to install another 800 towers in Portland over the next few years. Every time an application is filed for a new tower, neighborhood opposition grows. Ad hoc groups are formed – to challenge one cell tower at a time. When these groups ask local governments to stop the tower, they have a rude awakening – local governments are only allowed to regulate the height and placement of a tower, they’re not allowed to just say NO. Why? Because that would violate a corporation’s “rights”! So then we have to decide. Do we give up and play dead, or do we deepen our analysis of what the problem is?
So many of the crises we face could be transformed very quickly into much less daunting campaigns if we only understood how central corporate constitutional “rights” are in determining who (or what) is pulling the strings. Thus, it is urgent that we pay close attention to how these corporate rights manifest themselves in almost every significant issue we are grappling with. We’re used to doing symptom-based organizing. It’s time for a change.
Here are the two key arenas where corporate rights make democratic society literally impossible:
* Corporations now claim the legally recognized right to decide which products get produced, how those products are made, where they’re made, how the labor is organized to produce those products, whether poisons are created as a byproduct of the manufacturing process, and what happens to that poison.
Yes, the decision-making itself – about production, investment and work – is now a protected property “right” of corporations. It’s one of the many intangible property “rights” that corporations now claim as persons.
And…
* Corporations now claim the legally recognized right to lobby our elected officials, to make huge donations to their re-election campaigns. To create and fund phony citizens organizations, like Americans Against Food Taxes, created and funded by beverage corporations, and the Coalition for Responsible Health Care, created and funded by health insurance corporations, which are created explicitly to confuse We the People about where we should stand on the issues.
They can do this legally because these are all protected First Amendment “rights” of corporations. Corporations have been winning ever-expanding free speech rights for decades now, and the Citizens United case gives them even more overwhelming power to manipulate our elections, our airwaves, our public discussions.
We have a very critical choice to make, and we need to make it soon. As long as we continue to struggle one issue at a time, most of the critical decisions that impact our world will continue to be made by corporate boards of directors, behind closed doors. We have allowed that to happen now for more than a century. What if we say NO MORE! What if we decide that the future of life on this planet is too important to be left up to corporate executives in their boardroom suites?
What would it look like for the people of Portland to decide that local-self-governance was just what the doctor ordered? If the people of Portland, and the people of Oregon, came to understand, as did the Massachusetts farmers during the American Revolution in 1774, that ultimate power rests with the people.
Let us not forget what Abraham Lincoln said, in his First Inaugural speech:
“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”
Can you imagine Bill Clinton or George W Bush or Barack Obama saying those words in their inaugural speeches? How times have changed!
We’re not used to thinking this big. But these are extraordinary times. Let me offer you a small sampling of questions that a sovereign people’s movement in Portland, and beyond, might choose to ask in the very first years of the great transformation we must lead:
*What products that are currently available for sale in Portland are so destructive of basic ecological sustainability principles that we should prohibit their sale.
At a time when we need to rapidly cut our energy use, should we be allowing the sale of old-fashioned incandescent bulbs that require ten times the energy of compact fluorescents? Should we be allowing energy-hog appliances to be sold at all in local stores? Should we be allowing the distribution of those plastic throw-away grocery bags made of oil? San Francisco’s government banned their use in grocery stores and pharmacies in 2007 – first in the nation to do so.
Should we be allowing all of the excessive packaging that surrounds almost everything we buy?
Should we be allowing products made in sweatshops to be sold in local stores?
Should we be allowing corporations with a long history of environmental and labor rights violations to do business in Portland? In Oregon?
What else would we need to change – in the first year – in the 5th year – to transform Portland into a truly sustainable city?
How much larger does the ecological and climate emergency on our planet have to become before we decide we can’t wait any longer for our governments to do it for us – and we do it ourselves?
What would a people’s transportation policy look like, if we needed to plan for a 20% cut in car use within two years, and a 40% cut in 4 years and a 60% cut in six years, and so on? And what sort of public transportation system would replace all of those cars? And how would we tax ourselves to raise the necessary revenues to create a truly sustainable transportation system?
How would we provide single-payer universal health care to all Portland residents?
How would we organize ourselves to accomplish these monumental tasks.
The people of Portland have the legal authority today to write and pass any laws they deem necessary. You have a city charter. It’s the Constitutional document – the defining document – of your city. It can be amended via ballot initiative. What do the people of Portland want? How do such sweeping societal changes take place in such a short time?
There is no one out there with more Constitutional authority than US!!! If we can’t pull it off, no one can.
There are two significant barriers to this kind of bold local action. One is institutional and the other is inside our heads.
What’s inside our heads?
It’s our cultural conditioning that’s constantly haranguing us – a voice telling us we’re not good enough. A voice that urges us to leave governing to others, because it’s too complicated for us to understand ourselves.
And what’s the institutional barrier?
If and when you choose to organize yourselves to make these essential changes under law, large corporations will insist that you can’t do that, that it’s unconstitutional, that it violates their so-called “rights”. State and federal governments may very well demand that you stop what you’re doing, insisting that you do not have jurisdiction to change the laws.
That’s what the large corporations have continued to insist in Pennsylvania, where 100 rural and mostly conservative townships have been passing one law after another in recent years banning any engagement by non-family-owned corporations in farming, in mining, in gravel operations, in groundwater extraction. And, reigning in corporate Constitutional “rights” – all in one simple local ordinance in each community.
And some of these communities – like Tamaqua Township – do something else that’s never been done before in this country. They’ve discarded the old notion of “environmental protection”, which views nature as property, and instead have included language in their ordinances that recognizes “that natural communities and ecosystems possess a fundamental right to exist and flourish, and that residents possess the legal authority to enforce those rights on behalf of the ecosystem”.
The state government of Pennsylvania is also insisting that these 100 upstart communities have no right to do what they’re doing. The local people of those places beg to differ. They understand that they are the Sovereign people. They take their right of self-governance very seriously.
Other communities in Virginia, Maine, and New Hampshire are starting to pass similar ordinances. You can find out a lot more about these east coast democratic uprisings in a new book called “Be the Change” by Thomas Linzey and Anneke Campbell, which I’m selling at my book-table down the hallway.
And just days ago, since I wrote my talk, these communities of Pennsylvania have done something quite extraordinary. I’m going to read to you from the document I just received yesterday. These communities are now laying the groundwork for a People’s Constitutional Convention in their state. They’ve just released the Chambersburg Declaration of February 20, 2010.
We declare:
- That the political, legal, and economic systems of the United States allow, in each generation, an elite few to impose policy and governing decisions that threaten the very survival of human and natural communities;
- That the goal of those decisions is to concentrate wealth and greater governing power through the exploitation of human and natural communities, while promoting the belief that such exploitation is necessary for the common good;
- That the survival of our communities depends on replacing this system of governance by the privileged with new community-based democratic decision-making systems;
- That environmental and economic sustainability can be achieved only when the people affected by governing decisions are the ones who make them;
- That, for the past two centuries, people have been unable to secure economic and environmental sustainability primarily through the existing minority-rule system, laboring under the myth that we live in a democracy;
- That most reformers and activists have not focused on replacing the current system of elite decision-making with a democratic one, but have concentrated merely on lobbying the factions in power to make better decisions; and
- That reformers and activists have not halted the destruction of our human or natural communities because they have viewed economic and environmental ills as isolated problems, rather than as symptoms produced by the absence of democracy.
Therefore, let it be resolved:
- That a people’s movement must be created with a goal of revoking the authority of the corporate minority to impose political, legal, and economic systems that endanger our human and natural communities;
- That such a movement shall begin in the municipal communities of Pennsylvania;
- That we, the people, must transform our individual community struggles into new frameworks of law that dismantle the existing undemocratic systems while codifying new, sustainable systems;
- That such a movement must grow and accelerate through the work of people in all municipalities to raise the profile of this work at state and national levels;
- That when corporate and governmental decision-makers challenge the people’s right to assert local, community self-governance through passage of municipal law, the people, through their municipal governments, must openly and frontally defy those legal and political doctrines that subordinate the rights of the people to the privileges of a few;
- That those doctrines include preemption, subordination of municipal governments; bestowal of constitutional rights upon corporations, and relegating ecosystems to the status of property;
- That those communities in defiance of rights-denying law must join with other communities in our state and across the nation to envision and build new state and federal constitutional structures that codify new, rights-asserting systems of governance;
- That Pennsylvania communities have worked for more than a decade to advance those new systems and, therefore, have the responsibility to become the first communities to call for a new state constitutional structure; and
- That now, this 20th day of February, 2010, the undersigned pledge to begin that work, which will drive the right to local, community self-government into the Pennsylvania Constitution, thus liberating Pennsylvania communities from the legal and political doctrines that prevent them from building economically and environmentally sustainable communities.
What do you think of that?
Let me leave you with a truly wild idea that came to me after listening to Derrick Jensen discussing the urgency of salmon restoration, which, as far as I can determine, requires the removal of an awful lot of big and small dams all across the western states, and fast, before many salmon species go extinct – which could happen in the next few years, according to scientists.
How many people in this room agree that this is indeed an emergency situation? Raise your hands high. [Almost every hand in the room went up.]
Okay….How may people here agree that the dams on the lower Columbia River have to come down for the salmon to recover? Raise your hands high. [About ¾ of the hands went up.]
It seems that no one has come up with a plan to get these dams taken down quickly, other than the kinds of hush-hush planning involving top-secret teams of young folks laying dynamite to blow them up when no one is watching, and hopefully getting out of there before they get caught. In other words, an action which would be considered a major crime – one that might very well give the federal government an excuse to send the FBI out to catch the villains – who they would certainly label as eco-terrorists.
On the other extreme, state and federal governments continue to do as little as possible while trying to appear as if they care deeply about the survival of the salmon.
Here’s my wild idea: What if the rapid removal of the dams on the lower Columbia River became an early priority in a fledgling democracy movement in the greater Portland and Vancouver areas?
Imagine if local marine scientists, ecological restorationists and other experts, and hundreds of local concerned citizens started to gather in public meetings once a week with the sole purpose of designing and planning for one Columbia River dam to be taken down every year or two until all of the salmon-killing dams were gone.
How fast could it be accomplished if We the People insisted on doing it democratically and transparently? How soon could a first meeting be held? How would decisions be made? How would we react to state and federal authorities telling us to stop, that they have everything under control? Are we ready to take ourselves seriously enough to truly contemplate such a task? And if not, why not?
Is the extinction of local salmon populations preferable to We the People flexing our collective muscle? Isn’t it worth the risk – to dream big? To do it in public, as the public? To push the boundaries? To risk failure? To risk….. success?
Imagine what an extraordinary learning experience it would be for those who participated in this democratic adventure. Imagine how this one massive citizen effort could transform a region’s sense of itself. If they could pull this off, is there anything they could not do?
Imagine how the local Native community – the Celilo People – would feel as they participated in such a project – knowing that they would soon see their extraordinary waterfalls again, which once were referred to as the 8th Wonder of the World before they were drowned by the dam.
Mother Earth is in danger.
It is time to act boldly.
It is time to stand together as citizens, as the Sovereign People, as human beings.
Time is short.
I thank you……
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Paul Cienfuegos is founding director of Community Rights US.