This audio interview took place on January 24th, 2018 on KBOO public radio in Portland, Oregon. This 62 minute audio can be downloaded and listened to HERE. Historian Ray Raphael discusses his research and its implications with Community Rights activist Paul Cienfuegos Drawing on oral histories and in-depth research, historian Ray Raphael of Humboldt County, CA, has written over 20 [...]
A Blog Posting by Thomas Linzey of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, from November 9, 2017. While I shouldn’t be surprised anymore when someone at a conference asks why CELDF’s community organizing doesn’t take on capitalism directly, the question still startles me. The intimation is that our work nibbles around the edges, rather than being focused [...]
This original essay was written by Paul Cienfuegos, Founder and Co-Director of Community Rights US. It has also been published in The PeaceWorker, Oregon’s monthly PeaceWorks news magazine. Paul welcomes other media to publish it also. In early October, Project Censored released its always-newsworthy Top 25 Most Censored Stories of the past year. These are urgent [...]
This original article by Julie Turkewitz appeared in The New York Times, September 26, 2017. Does a river — or a plant, or a forest — have rights? This is the essential question in what attorneys are calling a first-of-its-kind federal lawsuit, in which a Denver lawyer and a far-leftenvironmental group are asking a judge [...]
"For several decades, the term was a fixture of newspaper headlines and campaign speeches. Then something changed." This article was published in The Atlantic magazine. Although it covers a very significant and under-reported topic, it also misses some truly key points and context. The author starts her history lesson in the 1920's, the very first [...]
This news story appeared as a headline on Democracy Now, and kicks off our new series that critiques existing single-issue activism through a lens analyzing corporate constitutional so-called "rights". Here's the brief story as written: Tens of thousands of people took to the streets for Pride marches on Saturday and Sunday in cities across the [...]
Paul Cienfuegos was interviewed for the hour, with live call-in questions, on Mendocino County, California's, community radio station KZYX on April 25, 2017. The station has had a monthly show, 'Corporations & Democracy', for many many years. You can listen to the interview or download the podcast by going HERE. On that new page, scroll [...]
A Blog Posting by Kai Huschke of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, from November 29, 2016. Shonto Pete. Otto Zehm. Scott Creach. It’s very likely these names mean nothing to you. Pete, Zehm, and Creach were all victims of police violence in Spokane, Washington in the last 10 years. Shonto Pete was shot in [...]
This article was written by Paul Cienfuegos, and published in CounterPunch on August 18, 2016. Beloved historian Howard Zinn once said, “Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. … Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves [...]
This audio interview with attorney Thomas Linzey originally happened on Resistance Radio with Derrick Jensen, June 19, 2016. Thomas Linzey is the executive director and an attorney for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, which has assisted close to 200 communities across the country in eight states to adopt binding local laws that elevate community [...]
