Right of local community self-government advances

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Tish O’Dell, Ohio Community Organizer
440-552-6774
tish@celdf.org

COLUMBUS, OHIO: Yesterday, the Ohio Ballot Board unanimously approved two proposed state constitutional amendments, determining they each meet the single subject requirement. A legal representative of the people, community members, and several members of the Ohio Community Rights Network (OHCRN) attended the hearing to voice their support to the Ballot Board members.

Ohio residents are advancing the Ohio Community Rights Amendment and the Initiative and Referendum for Counties and Townships Amendment.  The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) assisted residents and the OHCRN to draft and legally review the measures.

Gwen Fischer, a member of Portage County Community Rights Group, helped gather initial signatures for the measures. She stated, “The people working on Community Rights in Ohio know that it is standard practice for our state legislature to propose and pass laws that violate the single subject rule in the constitution, so it was gratifying to see the Ballot Board not apply a stricter standard to the people.”

The Ohio Community Rights Amendment codifies the right to local community self-government, enabling local governments to protect and expand fundamental rights and prohibit corporate activities that violate those rights. It also secures the authority of communities to put in place stronger environmental rights and protections than those recognized at the state, federal, or international level.

The Initiative and Referendum Amendment for Counties and Townships amendment extends the right to initiative and referendum to residents living in townships and counties. Today, only city and village residents can exercise their inalienable right to propose and repeal laws. However, nearly 39% of Ohio’s population resides in townships. They do not have the same constitutional right to legislate. This amendment extends equal rights to local self-government to all Ohio residents, regardless of where they live.

The Attorney General certified both initiatives on November 27th. With the approval of the Ballot Board, residents will begin gathering signatures.

Residents are facing ongoing efforts by state government to strip local-governing authority over fracking, gun control, predatory lending, minimum wage, and more. Corporate lobbyists draft state preemptive laws, which are then adopted by state legislators.

“Since 2012, residents have advanced local Community Rights laws to stop fracking, pipelines, and other fossil fuel projects threatening their health, safety, and welfare as well as local election law and rights of nature. As those efforts build, so have efforts to stop the people from protecting themselves and creating the communities they envision. These state constitutional measures ensure that the authority of we, the people, is elevated above corporate or state claims to have decision-making powers over us,” stated Tish O’Dell, CELDF’s Ohio organizer.

This grassroots movement by the people of Ohio is not backed or funded by large corporate donors. The OHCRN and its allies invite residents from across the state to join the fight for rights! Sign up to volunteer at www.ohcommunityrights.org.

Ohio Communities Part of Growing Movement

Local communities and state Community Rights Networks are partnering with CELDF to advance and protect fundamental democratic and environmental rights. They are working with CELDF to establish Community Rights and the Rights of Nature in law, and prohibit extraction, fracking, factory farming, water privatization, and other industrial activities as violations of those rights. Communities are joining together within and across states, working with CELDF to advance systemic change – recognizing our existing system of law and governance as inherently undemocratic and unsustainable.

Additional Information

For additional information regarding the state amendments, contact CELDF at info@celdf.org. To learn about the Ohio Community Rights Network, visit ohiocrn.org. To learn about the Community Rights Movement, visit www.celdf.org.

About CELDF — Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund is a non-profit, public interest law firm providing free and affordable legal services to communities facing threats to their local environment, local agriculture, local economy, and quality of life. Its mission is to build sustainable communities by assisting people to assert their right to local self-government and the Rights of Nature.

 

CELDF: Forging a Movement for Rights

Please Donate!

It’s not every day that a public interest law firm and the communities it serves begin a movement! But what began over twenty years ago as an effort to help communities enforce the nation’s environmental laws, has now fully evolved into a resistance movement focused on driving rights for local self-determination and nature into the highest levels of law.

CELDF and our partner communities are leading the charge! This year was marked by several historic firsts —

  • The adoption by Lafayette, Colorado’s City Council of the nation’s first “Climate Bill of Rights.” The ordnance bans fracking for natural gas in the City as a violation of the right of residents to a healthy climate, and the right of the climate itself to exist and flourish;
  • CELDF litigated a case resulting in a landmark ruling: The Ohio Supreme Court overturned an Ohio statute — adopted by the Ohio legislature last year — that enabled local election boards to unilaterally deny ballot placement for local, rights-based laws;
  • CELDF’s International Center for the Rights of Nature met with Parliamentarians in Nepal and Sweden. Further, CELDF helped to draft new constitutional amendments and laws in India and Nepal that would recognize legal rights for ecosystems and nature;
  • CELDF helped to draft and file the first lawsuit brought by the Colorado River, Colorado River State of Colorado. The River seeks constitutional recognition for its rights to exist and flourish;
  • With Tulane Law School, CELDF co-hosted the first U.S. “Rights of Nature” Symposium, featuring speakers from Nepal, Australia, Ecuador, Sweden, tribal nations, and local communities. These key leaders spoke about the movement towards expanding legal rights for ecosystems and nature. Karenna Gore delivered the keynote at the conference;
  • In New Hampshire, Ohio, and Oregon, CELDF Community Rights Networks continued to advance state-level constitutional amendments. The rights- based amendment would explicitly recognize the local authority of communities to adopt local bills of rights limiting corporate “rights” and recognizing rights for ecosystems and nature;
  • The Arizona Journal of Environmental Law and Policy published “A Phoenix from the Ashes: Resurrecting a Constitutional Right of Local, Community Self- Government in the Name of Environmental Sustainability.” This is a CELDF law review article that explores the legal doctrine behind the Community Rights movement;
  • CELDF led several workshops for tribal nations, including the tribes of the Colorado Plateau, the Chippewain Minnesota, andthe Ho-Chunkin Wisconsin, focused on establishing legal rights for ecosystems and nature within their tribal constitutions
  • CELDF litigated a case resulting in a landmark ruling: The Ohio Supreme Court overturned an Ohio statute

Along with these new initiatives, CELDF continues to support and defend those community partners who we’ve been fighting alongside over the past decade. Those include the people and elected officials of Grant Township, Indiana County, Pennsylvania — recently featured in Rolling Stone magazine — who have steadfastly refused to allow an oil and gas company to inject fracking fluids into their Township. For the past five years, that epic battle between the company and the Township has raged, with the company forcing a jury trial on its claims against the Township for violating the company’s constitutional “rights.” On May 14, 2018, the people of Grant will collide with the oil and gas company in that trial, and CELDF will represent them.

Right down the road, the people of Highland Township, Elk County, are traveling a similar path. Unwilling to allow an oil and gas company to use their Township as a dumping ground for fracking waste, they too have made a stand of their own. CELDF stands with them.

There have been other “firsts” as well, which show the system in its true light. In response to Grant Township standing up against the oil and gas companies that seek to use Grant and other localities as dumping grounds, Grant was hit with another lawsuit from an unexpected source — the state itself. In March, the State’s Department of Environmental Protection sued Grant, seeking to overturn the Township’s ban on frack injection wells. Grant Township is fighting back, and CELDF stands with them.

A big thank you to everyone who has stood with CELDF over the years. Your support allows us to do what we do in the name of Community Rights and nature. If you’re not a supporter, please consider becoming one; and be- coming part of this resistance movement that is changing both the law and our culture.

Stand with us, so that we can continue to stand with the people across this country — and beyond — who are making a difference.

Your donation is tax deductible!

Please Donate!

Featured image: Occupy Sydney by Kate Ausburn Flickr Creative Commons

Please Donate!

It’s not every day that a public interest law firm and the communities it serves begin a movement! But what began over twenty years ago as an effort to help communities enforce the nation’s environmental laws, has now fully evolved into a resistance movement focused on driving rights for local self-determination and nature into the highest levels of law.

CELDF and our partner communities are leading the charge! This year was marked by several historic firsts —

  • The adoption by Lafayette, Colorado’s City Council of the nation’s first “Climate Bill of Rights.” The ordnance bans fracking for natural gas in the City as a violation of the right of residents to a healthy climate, and the right of the climate itself to exist and flourish;
  • CELDF litigated a case resulting in a landmark ruling: The Ohio Supreme Court overturned an Ohio statute — adopted by the Ohio legislature last year — that enabled local election boards to unilaterally deny ballot placement for local, rights-based laws;
  • CELDF’s International Center for the Rights of Nature met with Parliamentarians in Nepal and Sweden. Further, CELDF helped to draft new constitutional amendments and laws in India and Nepal that would recognize legal rights for ecosystems and nature;
  • CELDF helped to draft and file the first lawsuit brought by the Colorado River, Colorado River State of Colorado. The River seeks constitutional recognition for its rights to exist and flourish;
  • With Tulane Law School, CELDF co-hosted the first U.S. “Rights of Nature” Symposium, featuring speakers from Nepal, Australia, Ecuador, Sweden, tribal nations, and local communities. These key leaders spoke about the movement towards expanding legal rights for ecosystems and nature. Karenna Gore delivered the keynote at the conference;
  • In New Hampshire, Ohio, and Oregon, CELDF Community Rights Networks continued to advance state-level constitutional amendments. The rights- based amendment would explicitly recognize the local authority of communities to adopt local bills of rights limiting corporate “rights” and recognizing rights for ecosystems and nature;
  • The Arizona Journal of Environmental Law and Policy published “A Phoenix from the Ashes: Resurrecting a Constitutional Right of Local, Community Self- Government in the Name of Environmental Sustainability.” This is a CELDF law review article that explores the legal doctrine behind the Community Rights movement;
  • CELDF led several workshops for tribal nations, including the tribes of the Colorado Plateau, the Chippewain Minnesota, andthe Ho-Chunkin Wisconsin, focused on establishing legal rights for ecosystems and nature within their tribal constitutions
  • CELDF litigated a case resulting in a landmark ruling: The Ohio Supreme Court overturned an Ohio statute

Along with these new initiatives, CELDF continues to support and defend those community partners who we’ve been fighting alongside over the past decade. Those include the people and elected officials of Grant Township, Indiana County, Pennsylvania — recently featured in Rolling Stone magazine — who have steadfastly refused to allow an oil and gas company to inject fracking fluids into their Township. For the past five years, that epic battle between the company and the Township has raged, with the company forcing a jury trial on its claims against the Township for violating the company’s constitutional “rights.” On May 14, 2018, the people of Grant will collide with the oil and gas company in that trial, and CELDF will represent them.

Right down the road, the people of Highland Township, Elk County, are traveling a similar path. Unwilling to allow an oil and gas company to use their Township as a dumping ground for fracking waste, they too have made a stand of their own. CELDF stands with them.

There have been other “firsts” as well, which show the system in its true light. In response to Grant Township standing up against the oil and gas companies that seek to use Grant and other localities as dumping grounds, Grant was hit with another lawsuit from an unexpected source — the state itself. In March, the State’s Department of Environmental Protection sued Grant, seeking to overturn the Township’s ban on frack injection wells. Grant Township is fighting back, and CELDF stands with them.

A big thank you to everyone who has stood with CELDF over the years. Your support allows us to do what we do in the name of Community Rights and nature. If you’re not a supporter, please consider becoming one; and be- coming part of this resistance movement that is changing both the law and our culture.

Stand with us, so that we can continue to stand with the people across this country — and beyond — who are making a difference.

Your donation is tax deductible!

Please Donate!

Featured image: Occupy Sydney by Kate Ausburn Flickr Creative Commons

Please Donate!

It’s not every day that a public interest law firm and the communities it serves begin a movement! But what began over twenty years ago as an effort to help communities enforce the nation’s environmental laws, has now fully evolved into a resistance movement focused on driving rights for local self-determination and nature into the highest levels of law.

CELDF and our partner communities are leading the charge! This year was marked by several historic firsts —

  • The adoption by Lafayette, Colorado’s City Council of the nation’s first “Climate Bill of Rights.” The ordnance bans fracking for natural gas in the City as a violation of the right of residents to a healthy climate, and the right of the climate itself to exist and flourish;
  • CELDF litigated a case resulting in a landmark ruling: The Ohio Supreme Court overturned an Ohio statute — adopted by the Ohio legislature last year — that enabled local election boards to unilaterally deny ballot placement for local, rights-based laws;
  • CELDF’s International Center for the Rights of Nature met with Parliamentarians in Nepal and Sweden. Further, CELDF helped to draft new constitutional amendments and laws in India and Nepal that would recognize legal rights for ecosystems and nature;
  • CELDF helped to draft and file the first lawsuit brought by the Colorado River, Colorado River State of Colorado. The River seeks constitutional recognition for its rights to exist and flourish;
  • With Tulane Law School, CELDF co-hosted the first U.S. “Rights of Nature” Symposium, featuring speakers from Nepal, Australia, Ecuador, Sweden, tribal nations, and local communities. These key leaders spoke about the movement towards expanding legal rights for ecosystems and nature. Karenna Gore delivered the keynote at the conference;
  • In New Hampshire, Ohio, and Oregon, CELDF Community Rights Networks continued to advance state-level constitutional amendments. The rights- based amendment would explicitly recognize the local authority of communities to adopt local bills of rights limiting corporate “rights” and recognizing rights for ecosystems and nature;
  • The Arizona Journal of Environmental Law and Policy published “A Phoenix from the Ashes: Resurrecting a Constitutional Right of Local, Community Self- Government in the Name of Environmental Sustainability.” This is a CELDF law review article that explores the legal doctrine behind the Community Rights movement;
  • CELDF led several workshops for tribal nations, including the tribes of the Colorado Plateau, the Chippewain Minnesota, andthe Ho-Chunkin Wisconsin, focused on establishing legal rights for ecosystems and nature within their tribal constitutions
  • CELDF litigated a case resulting in a landmark ruling: The Ohio Supreme Court overturned an Ohio statute

Along with these new initiatives, CELDF continues to support and defend those community partners who we’ve been fighting alongside over the past decade. Those include the people and elected officials of Grant Township, Indiana County, Pennsylvania — recently featured in Rolling Stone magazine — who have steadfastly refused to allow an oil and gas company to inject fracking fluids into their Township. For the past five years, that epic battle between the company and the Township has raged, with the company forcing a jury trial on its claims against the Township for violating the company’s constitutional “rights.” On May 14, 2018, the people of Grant will collide with the oil and gas company in that trial, and CELDF will represent them.

Right down the road, the people of Highland Township, Elk County, are traveling a similar path. Unwilling to allow an oil and gas company to use their Township as a dumping ground for fracking waste, they too have made a stand of their own. CELDF stands with them.

There have been other “firsts” as well, which show the system in its true light. In response to Grant Township standing up against the oil and gas companies that seek to use Grant and other localities as dumping grounds, Grant was hit with another lawsuit from an unexpected source — the state itself. In March, the State’s Department of Environmental Protection sued Grant, seeking to overturn the Township’s ban on frack injection wells. Grant Township is fighting back, and CELDF stands with them.

A big thank you to everyone who has stood with CELDF over the years. Your support allows us to do what we do in the name of Community Rights and nature. If you’re not a supporter, please consider becoming one; and be- coming part of this resistance movement that is changing both the law and our culture.

Stand with us, so that we can continue to stand with the people across this country — and beyond — who are making a difference.

Your donation is tax deductible!

Please Donate!

Featured image: Occupy Sydney by Kate Ausburn Flickr Creative Commons

Please Donate!

It’s not every day that a public interest law firm and the communities it serves begin a movement! But what began over twenty years ago as an effort to help communities enforce the nation’s environmental laws, has now fully evolved into a resistance movement focused on driving rights for local self-determination and nature into the highest levels of law.

CELDF and our partner communities are leading the charge! This year was marked by several historic firsts —

  • The adoption by Lafayette, Colorado’s City Council of the nation’s first “Climate Bill of Rights.” The ordnance bans fracking for natural gas in the City as a violation of the right of residents to a healthy climate, and the right of the climate itself to exist and flourish;
  • CELDF litigated a case resulting in a landmark ruling: The Ohio Supreme Court overturned an Ohio statute — adopted by the Ohio legislature last year — that enabled local election boards to unilaterally deny ballot placement for local, rights-based laws;
  • CELDF’s International Center for the Rights of Nature met with Parliamentarians in Nepal and Sweden. Further, CELDF helped to draft new constitutional amendments and laws in India and Nepal that would recognize legal rights for ecosystems and nature;
  • CELDF helped to draft and file the first lawsuit brought by the Colorado River, Colorado River State of Colorado. The River seeks constitutional recognition for its rights to exist and flourish;
  • With Tulane Law School, CELDF co-hosted the first U.S. “Rights of Nature” Symposium, featuring speakers from Nepal, Australia, Ecuador, Sweden, tribal nations, and local communities. These key leaders spoke about the movement towards expanding legal rights for ecosystems and nature. Karenna Gore delivered the keynote at the conference;
  • In New Hampshire, Ohio, and Oregon, CELDF Community Rights Networks continued to advance state-level constitutional amendments. The rights- based amendment would explicitly recognize the local authority of communities to adopt local bills of rights limiting corporate “rights” and recognizing rights for ecosystems and nature;
  • The Arizona Journal of Environmental Law and Policy published “A Phoenix from the Ashes: Resurrecting a Constitutional Right of Local, Community Self- Government in the Name of Environmental Sustainability.” This is a CELDF law review article that explores the legal doctrine behind the Community Rights movement;
  • CELDF led several workshops for tribal nations, including the tribes of the Colorado Plateau, the Chippewain Minnesota, andthe Ho-Chunkin Wisconsin, focused on establishing legal rights for ecosystems and nature within their tribal constitutions
  • CELDF litigated a case resulting in a landmark ruling: The Ohio Supreme Court overturned an Ohio statute

Along with these new initiatives, CELDF continues to support and defend those community partners who we’ve been fighting alongside over the past decade. Those include the people and elected officials of Grant Township, Indiana County, Pennsylvania — recently featured in Rolling Stone magazine — who have steadfastly refused to allow an oil and gas company to inject fracking fluids into their Township. For the past five years, that epic battle between the company and the Township has raged, with the company forcing a jury trial on its claims against the Township for violating the company’s constitutional “rights.” On May 14, 2018, the people of Grant will collide with the oil and gas company in that trial, and CELDF will represent them.

Right down the road, the people of Highland Township, Elk County, are traveling a similar path. Unwilling to allow an oil and gas company to use their Township as a dumping ground for fracking waste, they too have made a stand of their own. CELDF stands with them.

There have been other “firsts” as well, which show the system in its true light. In response to Grant Township standing up against the oil and gas companies that seek to use Grant and other localities as dumping grounds, Grant was hit with another lawsuit from an unexpected source — the state itself. In March, the State’s Department of Environmental Protection sued Grant, seeking to overturn the Township’s ban on frack injection wells. Grant Township is fighting back, and CELDF stands with them.

A big thank you to everyone who has stood with CELDF over the years. Your support allows us to do what we do in the name of Community Rights and nature. If you’re not a supporter, please consider becoming one; and be- coming part of this resistance movement that is changing both the law and our culture.

Stand with us, so that we can continue to stand with the people across this country — and beyond — who are making a difference.

Your donation is tax deductible!

Please Donate!

Featured image: Occupy Sydney by Kate Ausburn Flickr Creative Commons

See original source at Vindy.com and scroll down.

If you want positive change for Youngstown, there are two citizen initiatives to support by signing petitions so we the people can vote on them in November.

The first one, the Youngstown Drinking Water Protection amendment, is about protecting our drinking water and ensuring the “discretionary water and sewer maintenance funds” are spent on replacing old water pipes and infrastructure to guarantee we have safe water coming out of our taps.

The second one, the Fair Election and Access to Local Government amendment, is about making our local elections more accessible to all candidates and committees. It proposes that only registered voters within the city can contribute to local campaign funding, and each voter is limited to $100 on any single campaign.

When the Supreme Court ruled on Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, justices prohibited the government from restricting independent political expenditures by nonprofit corporations, for-profit corporations, labor unions and other associations. This ruling has allowed those with the most money to influence the outcome of our elections. And we, the residents have witnessed, over and over again how we are silenced by these corporate donations. The Fair Election initiative attempts to level the political playing field, at least here in Youngstown.

Our petition efforts are about citizen cooperation for the common good. It is people standing up to remind alleged public servants that they work for us, not for their corporate sponsors.

This is exactly what the Youngstown Committee for the Two Community Bills of Rights: Drinking Water Protection and Fair Elections stands for. It’s why we’re proudly part of the coalition collecting signatures for these two initiatives. You can contact us and sign both petitions.

We hope you’ll join us in collecting signatures from your neighbors, family and friends, protecting the people and city of Youngstown, and enabling them to vote yes for our rights in November.

Lynn Anderson, Youngstown

the Court Finds the atrato Possesses Rights

to “protection, conservation, maintenance and restoration”


Rights of Nature Movement Gaining Ground as Court Declares Need to Move Away from Legal Systems in which Humans are the “dominator of nature”  

 

Press Statement

Contact:
Stacey Schmader
Administrative Director
Info@celdf.org
717-498-0054

MERCERSBURG, PA, USA: In November, in an extraordinary decision, Colombia’s Constitutional Court declared that the Atrato River basin possesses rights to “protection, conservation, maintenance, and restoration.”  The decision is only now being made public.

The Court’s ruling comes in a case brought to address the significant degradation of the Atrato River basin from mining, impacting nature and indigenous peoples.

Declaring that the river has rights comes after thousands of years of history in which nature has been treated as “property” or “right-less” under the law.  Much like women, indigenous peoples, and slaves have been treated as property under the law, without legal rights, so today do legal systems treat nature.  Under this system, environmental laws regulate human use of nature, resulting in the decline of species and ecosystems worldwide, and the acceleration of climate change.

Transforming nature to be considered as rights-bearing – and thus in possession of legally enforceable rights – is part of the growing “Rights of Nature” movement.  The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) has been at the forefront of this movement, partnering with communities and governments in developing the world’s first Rights of Nature laws.

The first law was passed in Tamaqua Borough, Pennsylvania, in 2006.  Today, dozens of communities in 10 states in the U.S. have enacted Rights of Nature laws.  CELDF assisted in drafting the first Rights of Nature constitutional provisions, which were promulgated in the Ecuador Constitution in 2008.

The November decision in Colombia comes ahead of a March 2017 decision in India, where a state High Court found that the Ganges River and other ecosystems were “legal persons” with certain rights.  In addition – as the Colombia Court refers to in its decision – it comes as a settlement between the Maori people and the government of New Zealand is finalized.  In that settlement, the Whanganui River is recognized as having personhood rights.

The Colombia Constitutional Court explained the need to move away from this human dominating system, writing:

“(I)t is the human populations that are interdependent of the natural world – and not the opposite – and that they must assume the consequences of their actions and omissions with the nature. It is a question of understanding this new sociopolitical reality with the aim of achieving a respectful transformation with the natural world and its environment, as has happened before with civil and political rights…Now is the time to begin taking the first steps to effectively protect the planet and its resources before it is too late…”

The Colombia Court further explained, that, “(P)olicies and legislation have emphasized access to economic use and exploitation to the detriment of the protection of the rights of the environment and of the communities.”

The Court ordered a number of steps to be taken, including establishing a joint guardianship for the Atrato River basin.  The guardians will be a representative from the national government and a representative of the indigenous people living in the basin.

Further, the Court is requiring the establishment of a restoration plan for the river basin, to be overseen by the guardians, as well as requiring baseline studies and plans for recovery and implementation of protective measures in the basin.

A CELDF representative explained, “The Court’s decision is an important step forward in moving to legal systems which protect the rights of nature, rather than regulate human use of nature.  As the Court explained, to protect nature for future generations, it’s time to move away from legal systems in which humans are the ‘dominator of nature.'”

CELDF has been working in Colombia with the indigenous Raizal people to advance the Rights of Nature to protect their ancestral lands on the San Andres Archipelago.  “The Court’s decision is a critical step forward to empower the Raizal people to protect the rights of their communities and nature,” a CELDF representative stated.

The Colombia and India court decisions, as well as the Rights of Nature laws that have been passed comes with a growing recognition around the world that environmental laws premised on regulating the use of nature, are unable to protect nature.  A CELDF representative explained, “The collapse of ecosystems and species, as well as the acceleration of climate change, are clear indications that a fundamental change in the relationship between humankind and the natural world is necessary.”

About the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) & the International Center for the Rights of Nature

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund’s mission is to build sustainable communities by assisting people to assert their right to local self-government and the rights of nature.  CELDF’s International Center for the Rights of Nature is partnering with communities and organizations in countries around the world to advance the rights of nature.

Today, CELDF is partnering with communities and organizations across the United States, as well as in Nepal, India, Australia, Sweden, and other countries to advance rights of nature legal frameworks.

###

Community Rights Paper #14: Democratic Rights Matter

In 2015, residents of several rural Ohio counties watched in shock as Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted unilaterally removed citizen-sponsored initiatives from county ballots. The initiatives, which had already qualified for the ballot, would have banned oil and gas drilling and fracking in those communities.

The Ohio Supreme Court sharply rapped Husted’s knuckles for using authority he didn’t have. However, a year later, the people of those same counties watched in disbelief as Husted again blocked their initiatives.  This time, the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed his actions.

It is not surprising that Husted – who as of this writing is running for governor – is the darling of the very oil and gas industry targeted by those local initiatives. Indeed, the industry has long-supported his electoral campaigns.

Democratic Rights Matter

The people of Ohio aren’t the only victims of their own government. Across the country we are seeing government efforts, often at the behest of corporations, to restrict the authority of “we the people” to the initiative. Government officials are taking this action even though the authority for initiative is codified in nearly half the state constitutions in the United States.

In Oregon, a cat-and-mouse game is underway between some of the country’s largest agribusiness corporations and residents of rural counties. People there are proposing local initiatives to ban aerial pesticide spraying and genetically modified crops. In response, corporations affected by those initiatives have lawyered-up, using obscure legal provisions to try to stop the initiatives from ever reaching the ballot.

In Washington State, at the urging of industry, courts have now adopted a rule that allows virtually any proposed citizen-sponsored initiative to be blocked by corporations before ever reaching the ballot and a vote of the people.

In New Hampshire and Maine, some local elected officials have gone even further – refusing to allow duly-qualified citizen initiatives to be voted upon at annual Town Meeting. In at least one New Hampshire town, local elected officials have refused to sign an initiative even after it was legally adopted by the people of the town.

Corporations are working to restrict democratic rights to initiative as communities are advancing structural change – challenging the current system of law we live under, which insulates corporate projects from democratic control. In its place, these communities are moving forward a new system of law based on recognizing the right of communities to decide their own futures, and then elevating that community right above corporate “rights.” This new system is now beginning to forcibly crash into the older, existing one.

The ballot clashes in Ohio, Oregon, and elsewhere are all about the old system not going quietly.

The Old

Here’s how the system works today. Decisions made by the federal government trump the decisions and laws of state governments. Decisions and laws made by both federal and state governments trump the laws of local governments.

So, when the State of Vermont adopts a law requiring the labeling of food products containing genetically modified ingredients, the U.S. Congress can simply override it. It did so in 2016 when our representatives passed a law nullifying state efforts to mandate food labeling.

The more central an issue is to affecting commerce, the more preemptive rules you will find around it. For example, the federal government controls almost all issues dealing with oil and gas pipelines and the rail transportation of fossil fuels. Thus, those issues are lifted out of the hands of local and state governments.

State-level preemption operates in a similar fashion. Almost all states have oil and gas laws. Those laws regulate and control how fossil fuels are extracted. Those state laws have generally been found to abolish not only the authority of localities to determine how oil and gas is extracted, but whether oil and gas is extracted.  Thus, state laws – such as those in Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Ohio – eliminate the authority of local communities to ban oil and gas extraction altogether.

Similarly, state legislatures across the country have adopted a slew of laws prohibiting communities from banning large corporate water withdrawals, dumping of toxic sewage sludge, and GMOs. Some states, including Pennsylvania and New York, have even authorized their state Attorneys General to act as private attorneys for corporations to sue communities who buck those laws.

It all boils down to this: If you have the financial and legal ability to control the uppermost levels of lawmaking and decision making, you don’t have to abide by the rights and wishes of the communities in which you operate.

But it Gets Even Better – Corporate “Rights”

There are rare cases in which people have actually been able to use their state or federal government to adopt laws that benefit the public interest. However, corporations then use the courts to either overturn those laws or severely limit their reach.

Corporations are the dominant economic players in our system. They have pioneered the use of corporate constitutional “rights” to attack any law that infringes upon their ability to engage in commerce or use corporate property. In today’s world, in which almost every meaningful reform affects commerce or property, it’s relatively easy to apply those “rights” to overturn laws that affect certain industries.

Thus, corporate free speech rights have been leveraged to overturn federal laws limiting corporate campaign donations; corporate religious rights have been used to limit healthcare legislation; corporate property rights have been used to overturn environmental regulations; and corporate commerce rights have been used to strike down regulations on coal mining, trucking, pipelines, waste disposal, and landfills.

Thus, when corporations lose at the ballot box, or in legislatures, they can resort to the safe harbor of the judiciary. This branch of government has shown itself more than willing to vindicate corporate “rights” to nullify laws that corporations don’t like. Making matters worse, state legislatures often take those court rulings and write them directly into state law – thus safeguarding those corporate “rights” by providing statutory protection for them.

Each round of this makes it harder to remove those corporate protections, adding more and more layers that must be peeled back in the future.

For “we the people” to get anything to stick, we are forced to successfully navigate every single gauntlet. We not only work to convince legislators to pass our laws, but then hope against hope that we can beat back the corporations as they sue us for violating the rules of preemption and corporate “rights.”

While we have to win at every level to succeed, corporations only need to win at one to put us back on the defensive.

It’s the ultimate rigged game. It works only because the system is so camouflaged to give it the appearance of being open to change, and so few people understand the degree to which it is rigged.

Is it any surprise that we’ve ended up where we are?

The New

Over the past twenty years, people in hundreds of communities across the U.S. have come face-to-face with the machinery of this system and its inevitable results.

Poll after poll and study after study reveal the same thing: People want healthy, safe communities and protections for nature. And yet our system has been engineered to deliver the opposite. Instead of recognizing the power of people to build those communities, it gives power to those interested in exploiting them.

Those trying to stop the spread of GMOs at the community level run up against state and federal laws that override their efforts. Those trying to stop corporate water withdrawals run up against state water resources laws. Those trying to stop the dumping of sewage sludge run up against state nutrient management acts. Those trying to ban fracking run up against state oil and gas acts. Those trying to stop oil and gas pipelines run up against preemptive federal authority lodged in agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Many of those communities try to use traditional nuisance, land use, or zoning laws to stop those corporate projects. In doing so, they labor to find a loophole in the preemption laws, or they hire lawyers who have convinced the communities that concocting some kind of exception to those laws is possible.

They almost always lose. And even in those rare circumstances when they win, like a self-sealing tire, the system develops new laws that permanently seal the leak – so that other communities are unable to use the same arguments.

Many communities have learned from those losses and have begun to drive a new theory of law – one not focused on trying to find loopholes, crawling through exemptions, or finding the “right” judge who might look favorably on their lawmaking.

These communities have begun to understand that the individual threat or issue facing their community – fracking, GMOs, or otherwise – is just a symptom of this system, not the problem itself. That’s because the system we have doesn’t care what we want or need, no matter what the consequences to our communities and nature.

People in communities under threat are confronted with the reality of this existing system. They are concluding that without true decentralization of decision-making authority down to the community level, they’ll never be able to stop fracking or other threats from invading their communities. Further, they are realizing we’ll never be able to move toward anything close to sustainability. They’re arguing that the people of their communities possess a constitutional right of local, community self-government – the authority to govern themselves on issues that the corporate state has removed from their control.

What will it take for communities to actually have control over whether fossil fuels are shipped through them? To decide if pipelines are laid? To vote if GMOs are planted? To determine whether they are forced to become the unwilling hosts of factory farms, toxic dumps, or pollution factories?

It will take the entire system of law turned upside down.

That means that communities must be able to pass laws and make them stick. It means making those communities immune from corporate “rights” and the authority of “higher” governments to define what communities can and cannot do.

It means giving birth to community democracy – a concept that, itself, is actually older than the system we currently have.

The New – A Constitutional Right of Local Community Self-Government

Recognition by the courts of a constitutional right of local community self-government would have far-reaching consequences. A finding that the right exists would force other legal doctrines to give way to that right. This means, for example, that the use of corporate “rights” to overturn local laws would be precluded as running afoul of the right of self-government. So would the authority of the state and federal government to override certain types of local lawmaking.

Consider a rural community facing fracking. Today, under the old (existing) system, let’s say the community adopts a law, either by their elected officials or through an initiative process, to ban fracking for shale gas. The law perhaps establishes a local “bill of rights” that recognizes rights to clean air, pure water, and sustainable energy, and then bans fracking as a violation of those rights.

The law is inevitably challenged by oil and gas corporations affected by the ban. The constitutional right of the people to local community self-government is thus pitted directly against the corporate claimed constitutional “rights” and against the state government’s authority to prevent the community from adopting the law.

With the recognition of a constitutional right of local self-government, however, those corporate “rights” and the authority of the state government must give way to the people’s constitutional right to govern themselves.

Such a system, while recognizing the authority of the state and federal government to set a minimum “floor” for environmental, labor, and other standards, would prevent the state and federal government from prohibiting communities from setting higher standards, or from expanding civil and environmental rights at the local level. It is precisely that “ceiling” preemption where corporations have run amok – using that power to stop communities from prohibiting harmful corporate projects.

The Clash of the Old and the New

Because this new system is so unlike the old, it would be surprising if the corporate defenders of the old system wouldn’t be investing huge sums of money to stop this new system of law from being adopted by communities.

Over the past decade, as over two hundred communities in ten states have driven this new system into being, affected corporations have challenged a handful of those laws. Today, understanding the scope of change envisioned by the community rights movement, those corporations are now reaching into the elections system itself, to stop those laws even before they are adopted.

We need to understand that these corporate challenges are proof that the new system of law envisioned by communities is striking exactly as intended – directly at the very power currently wielded by corporations against people and nature.

We must respond by challenging not only the ability of corporations to stop these initiatives, but by directly challenging the authority of judges and courts to help them do it. If the actions of the corporations violate the people’s rights of self-government, and the corporations are unable to prevent community votes without the courts, then it’s time for more and more people to understand how the system itself stands in direct contrast to the “we the people” myth of American lore.

From there, rather than trying to reform the existing structure, more and more people will begin the real work of building a new one.

Please make a donation to help us support communities doing on-the-ground work to advance Community Rights in 2017. Your donation makes our work with communities to build the Community Rights Movement possible!

DONATE

Feature Photo: Flickr Creative Commons: Black Lives Matter by Ella

In 2015, residents of several rural Ohio counties watched in shock as Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted unilaterally removed citizen-sponsored initiatives from county ballots. The initiatives, which had already qualified for the ballot, would have banned oil and gas drilling and fracking in those communities.

The Ohio Supreme Court sharply rapped Husted’s knuckles for using authority he didn’t have. However, a year later, the people of those same counties watched in disbelief as Husted again blocked their initiatives.  This time, the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed his actions.

It is not surprising that Husted – who as of this writing is running for governor – is the darling of the very oil and gas industry targeted by those local initiatives. Indeed, the industry has long-supported his electoral campaigns.

Democratic Rights Matter

The people of Ohio aren’t the only victims of their own government. Across the country we are seeing government efforts, often at the behest of corporations, to restrict the authority of “we the people” to the initiative. Government officials are taking this action even though the authority for initiative is codified in nearly half the state constitutions in the United States.

In Oregon, a cat-and-mouse game is underway between some of the country’s largest agribusiness corporations and residents of rural counties. People there are proposing local initiatives to ban aerial pesticide spraying and genetically modified crops. In response, corporations affected by those initiatives have lawyered-up, using obscure legal provisions to try to stop the initiatives from ever reaching the ballot.

In Washington State, at the urging of industry, courts have now adopted a rule that allows virtually any proposed citizen-sponsored initiative to be blocked by corporations before ever reaching the ballot and a vote of the people.

In New Hampshire and Maine, some local elected officials have gone even further – refusing to allow duly-qualified citizen initiatives to be voted upon at annual Town Meeting. In at least one New Hampshire town, local elected officials have refused to sign an initiative even after it was legally adopted by the people of the town.

Corporations are working to restrict democratic rights to initiative as communities are advancing structural change – challenging the current system of law we live under, which insulates corporate projects from democratic control. In its place, these communities are moving forward a new system of law based on recognizing the right of communities to decide their own futures, and then elevating that community right above corporate “rights.” This new system is now beginning to forcibly crash into the older, existing one.

The ballot clashes in Ohio, Oregon, and elsewhere are all about the old system not going quietly.

The Old

Here’s how the system works today. Decisions made by the federal government trump the decisions and laws of state governments. Decisions and laws made by both federal and state governments trump the laws of local governments.

So, when the State of Vermont adopts a law requiring the labeling of food products containing genetically modified ingredients, the U.S. Congress can simply override it. It did so in 2016 when our representatives passed a law nullifying state efforts to mandate food labeling.

The more central an issue is to affecting commerce, the more preemptive rules you will find around it. For example, the federal government controls almost all issues dealing with oil and gas pipelines and the rail transportation of fossil fuels. Thus, those issues are lifted out of the hands of local and state governments.

State-level preemption operates in a similar fashion. Almost all states have oil and gas laws. Those laws regulate and control how fossil fuels are extracted. Those state laws have generally been found to abolish not only the authority of localities to determine how oil and gas is extracted, but whether oil and gas is extracted.  Thus, state laws – such as those in Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Ohio – eliminate the authority of local communities to ban oil and gas extraction altogether.

Similarly, state legislatures across the country have adopted a slew of laws prohibiting communities from banning large corporate water withdrawals, dumping of toxic sewage sludge, and GMOs. Some states, including Pennsylvania and New York, have even authorized their state Attorneys General to act as private attorneys for corporations to sue communities who buck those laws.

It all boils down to this: If you have the financial and legal ability to control the uppermost levels of lawmaking and decision making, you don’t have to abide by the rights and wishes of the communities in which you operate.

But it Gets Even Better – Corporate “Rights”

There are rare cases in which people have actually been able to use their state or federal government to adopt laws that benefit the public interest. However, corporations then use the courts to either overturn those laws or severely limit their reach.

Corporations are the dominant economic players in our system. They have pioneered the use of corporate constitutional “rights” to attack any law that infringes upon their ability to engage in commerce or use corporate property. In today’s world, in which almost every meaningful reform affects commerce or property, it’s relatively easy to apply those “rights” to overturn laws that affect certain industries.

Thus, corporate free speech rights have been leveraged to overturn federal laws limiting corporate campaign donations; corporate religious rights have been used to limit healthcare legislation; corporate property rights have been used to overturn environmental regulations; and corporate commerce rights have been used to strike down regulations on coal mining, trucking, pipelines, waste disposal, and landfills.

Thus, when corporations lose at the ballot box, or in legislatures, they can resort to the safe harbor of the judiciary. This branch of government has shown itself more than willing to vindicate corporate “rights” to nullify laws that corporations don’t like. Making matters worse, state legislatures often take those court rulings and write them directly into state law – thus safeguarding those corporate “rights” by providing statutory protection for them.

Each round of this makes it harder to remove those corporate protections, adding more and more layers that must be peeled back in the future.

For “we the people” to get anything to stick, we are forced to successfully navigate every single gauntlet. We not only work to convince legislators to pass our laws, but then hope against hope that we can beat back the corporations as they sue us for violating the rules of preemption and corporate “rights.”

While we have to win at every level to succeed, corporations only need to win at one to put us back on the defensive.

It’s the ultimate rigged game. It works only because the system is so camouflaged to give it the appearance of being open to change, and so few people understand the degree to which it is rigged.

Is it any surprise that we’ve ended up where we are?

The New

Over the past twenty years, people in hundreds of communities across the U.S. have come face-to-face with the machinery of this system and its inevitable results.

Poll after poll and study after study reveal the same thing: People want healthy, safe communities and protections for nature. And yet our system has been engineered to deliver the opposite. Instead of recognizing the power of people to build those communities, it gives power to those interested in exploiting them.

Those trying to stop the spread of GMOs at the community level run up against state and federal laws that override their efforts. Those trying to stop corporate water withdrawals run up against state water resources laws. Those trying to stop the dumping of sewage sludge run up against state nutrient management acts. Those trying to ban fracking run up against state oil and gas acts. Those trying to stop oil and gas pipelines run up against preemptive federal authority lodged in agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Many of those communities try to use traditional nuisance, land use, or zoning laws to stop those corporate projects. In doing so, they labor to find a loophole in the preemption laws, or they hire lawyers who have convinced the communities that concocting some kind of exception to those laws is possible.

They almost always lose. And even in those rare circumstances when they win, like a self-sealing tire, the system develops new laws that permanently seal the leak – so that other communities are unable to use the same arguments.

Many communities have learned from those losses and have begun to drive a new theory of law – one not focused on trying to find loopholes, crawling through exemptions, or finding the “right” judge who might look favorably on their lawmaking.

These communities have begun to understand that the individual threat or issue facing their community – fracking, GMOs, or otherwise – is just a symptom of this system, not the problem itself. That’s because the system we have doesn’t care what we want or need, no matter what the consequences to our communities and nature.

People in communities under threat are confronted with the reality of this existing system. They are concluding that without true decentralization of decision-making authority down to the community level, they’ll never be able to stop fracking or other threats from invading their communities. Further, they are realizing we’ll never be able to move toward anything close to sustainability. They’re arguing that the people of their communities possess a constitutional right of local, community self-government – the authority to govern themselves on issues that the corporate state has removed from their control.

What will it take for communities to actually have control over whether fossil fuels are shipped through them? To decide if pipelines are laid? To vote if GMOs are planted? To determine whether they are forced to become the unwilling hosts of factory farms, toxic dumps, or pollution factories?

It will take the entire system of law turned upside down.

That means that communities must be able to pass laws and make them stick. It means making those communities immune from corporate “rights” and the authority of “higher” governments to define what communities can and cannot do.

It means giving birth to community democracy – a concept that, itself, is actually older than the system we currently have.

The New – A Constitutional Right of Local Community Self-Government

Recognition by the courts of a constitutional right of local community self-government would have far-reaching consequences. A finding that the right exists would force other legal doctrines to give way to that right. This means, for example, that the use of corporate “rights” to overturn local laws would be precluded as running afoul of the right of self-government. So would the authority of the state and federal government to override certain types of local lawmaking.

Consider a rural community facing fracking. Today, under the old (existing) system, let’s say the community adopts a law, either by their elected officials or through an initiative process, to ban fracking for shale gas. The law perhaps establishes a local “bill of rights” that recognizes rights to clean air, pure water, and sustainable energy, and then bans fracking as a violation of those rights.

The law is inevitably challenged by oil and gas corporations affected by the ban. The constitutional right of the people to local community self-government is thus pitted directly against the corporate claimed constitutional “rights” and against the state government’s authority to prevent the community from adopting the law.

With the recognition of a constitutional right of local self-government, however, those corporate “rights” and the authority of the state government must give way to the people’s constitutional right to govern themselves.

Such a system, while recognizing the authority of the state and federal government to set a minimum “floor” for environmental, labor, and other standards, would prevent the state and federal government from prohibiting communities from setting higher standards, or from expanding civil and environmental rights at the local level. It is precisely that “ceiling” preemption where corporations have run amok – using that power to stop communities from prohibiting harmful corporate projects.

The Clash of the Old and the New

Because this new system is so unlike the old, it would be surprising if the corporate defenders of the old system wouldn’t be investing huge sums of money to stop this new system of law from being adopted by communities.

Over the past decade, as over two hundred communities in ten states have driven this new system into being, affected corporations have challenged a handful of those laws. Today, understanding the scope of change envisioned by the community rights movement, those corporations are now reaching into the elections system itself, to stop those laws even before they are adopted.

We need to understand that these corporate challenges are proof that the new system of law envisioned by communities is striking exactly as intended – directly at the very power currently wielded by corporations against people and nature.

We must respond by challenging not only the ability of corporations to stop these initiatives, but by directly challenging the authority of judges and courts to help them do it. If the actions of the corporations violate the people’s rights of self-government, and the corporations are unable to prevent community votes without the courts, then it’s time for more and more people to understand how the system itself stands in direct contrast to the “we the people” myth of American lore.

From there, rather than trying to reform the existing structure, more and more people will begin the real work of building a new one.

Please make a donation to help us support communities doing on-the-ground work to advance Community Rights in 2017. Your donation makes our work with communities to build the Community Rights Movement possible!

DONATE

Feature Photo: Flickr Creative Commons: Black Lives Matter by Ella

In 2015, residents of several rural Ohio counties watched in shock as Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted unilaterally removed citizen-sponsored initiatives from county ballots. The initiatives, which had already qualified for the ballot, would have banned oil and gas drilling and fracking in those communities.

The Ohio Supreme Court sharply rapped Husted’s knuckles for using authority he didn’t have. However, a year later, the people of those same counties watched in disbelief as Husted again blocked their initiatives.  This time, the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed his actions.

It is not surprising that Husted – who as of this writing is running for governor – is the darling of the very oil and gas industry targeted by those local initiatives. Indeed, the industry has long-supported his electoral campaigns.

Democratic Rights Matter

The people of Ohio aren’t the only victims of their own government. Across the country we are seeing government efforts, often at the behest of corporations, to restrict the authority of “we the people” to the initiative. Government officials are taking this action even though the authority for initiative is codified in nearly half the state constitutions in the United States.

In Oregon, a cat-and-mouse game is underway between some of the country’s largest agribusiness corporations and residents of rural counties. People there are proposing local initiatives to ban aerial pesticide spraying and genetically modified crops. In response, corporations affected by those initiatives have lawyered-up, using obscure legal provisions to try to stop the initiatives from ever reaching the ballot.

In Washington State, at the urging of industry, courts have now adopted a rule that allows virtually any proposed citizen-sponsored initiative to be blocked by corporations before ever reaching the ballot and a vote of the people.

In New Hampshire and Maine, some local elected officials have gone even further – refusing to allow duly-qualified citizen initiatives to be voted upon at annual Town Meeting. In at least one New Hampshire town, local elected officials have refused to sign an initiative even after it was legally adopted by the people of the town.

Corporations are working to restrict democratic rights to initiative as communities are advancing structural change – challenging the current system of law we live under, which insulates corporate projects from democratic control. In its place, these communities are moving forward a new system of law based on recognizing the right of communities to decide their own futures, and then elevating that community right above corporate “rights.” This new system is now beginning to forcibly crash into the older, existing one.

The ballot clashes in Ohio, Oregon, and elsewhere are all about the old system not going quietly.

The Old

Here’s how the system works today. Decisions made by the federal government trump the decisions and laws of state governments. Decisions and laws made by both federal and state governments trump the laws of local governments.

So, when the State of Vermont adopts a law requiring the labeling of food products containing genetically modified ingredients, the U.S. Congress can simply override it. It did so in 2016 when our representatives passed a law nullifying state efforts to mandate food labeling.

The more central an issue is to affecting commerce, the more preemptive rules you will find around it. For example, the federal government controls almost all issues dealing with oil and gas pipelines and the rail transportation of fossil fuels. Thus, those issues are lifted out of the hands of local and state governments.

State-level preemption operates in a similar fashion. Almost all states have oil and gas laws. Those laws regulate and control how fossil fuels are extracted. Those state laws have generally been found to abolish not only the authority of localities to determine how oil and gas is extracted, but whether oil and gas is extracted.  Thus, state laws – such as those in Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Ohio – eliminate the authority of local communities to ban oil and gas extraction altogether.

Similarly, state legislatures across the country have adopted a slew of laws prohibiting communities from banning large corporate water withdrawals, dumping of toxic sewage sludge, and GMOs. Some states, including Pennsylvania and New York, have even authorized their state Attorneys General to act as private attorneys for corporations to sue communities who buck those laws.

It all boils down to this: If you have the financial and legal ability to control the uppermost levels of lawmaking and decision making, you don’t have to abide by the rights and wishes of the communities in which you operate.

But it Gets Even Better – Corporate “Rights”

There are rare cases in which people have actually been able to use their state or federal government to adopt laws that benefit the public interest. However, corporations then use the courts to either overturn those laws or severely limit their reach.

Corporations are the dominant economic players in our system. They have pioneered the use of corporate constitutional “rights” to attack any law that infringes upon their ability to engage in commerce or use corporate property. In today’s world, in which almost every meaningful reform affects commerce or property, it’s relatively easy to apply those “rights” to overturn laws that affect certain industries.

Thus, corporate free speech rights have been leveraged to overturn federal laws limiting corporate campaign donations; corporate religious rights have been used to limit healthcare legislation; corporate property rights have been used to overturn environmental regulations; and corporate commerce rights have been used to strike down regulations on coal mining, trucking, pipelines, waste disposal, and landfills.

Thus, when corporations lose at the ballot box, or in legislatures, they can resort to the safe harbor of the judiciary. This branch of government has shown itself more than willing to vindicate corporate “rights” to nullify laws that corporations don’t like. Making matters worse, state legislatures often take those court rulings and write them directly into state law – thus safeguarding those corporate “rights” by providing statutory protection for them.

Each round of this makes it harder to remove those corporate protections, adding more and more layers that must be peeled back in the future.

For “we the people” to get anything to stick, we are forced to successfully navigate every single gauntlet. We not only work to convince legislators to pass our laws, but then hope against hope that we can beat back the corporations as they sue us for violating the rules of preemption and corporate “rights.”

While we have to win at every level to succeed, corporations only need to win at one to put us back on the defensive.

It’s the ultimate rigged game. It works only because the system is so camouflaged to give it the appearance of being open to change, and so few people understand the degree to which it is rigged.

Is it any surprise that we’ve ended up where we are?

The New

Over the past twenty years, people in hundreds of communities across the U.S. have come face-to-face with the machinery of this system and its inevitable results.

Poll after poll and study after study reveal the same thing: People want healthy, safe communities and protections for nature. And yet our system has been engineered to deliver the opposite. Instead of recognizing the power of people to build those communities, it gives power to those interested in exploiting them.

Those trying to stop the spread of GMOs at the community level run up against state and federal laws that override their efforts. Those trying to stop corporate water withdrawals run up against state water resources laws. Those trying to stop the dumping of sewage sludge run up against state nutrient management acts. Those trying to ban fracking run up against state oil and gas acts. Those trying to stop oil and gas pipelines run up against preemptive federal authority lodged in agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Many of those communities try to use traditional nuisance, land use, or zoning laws to stop those corporate projects. In doing so, they labor to find a loophole in the preemption laws, or they hire lawyers who have convinced the communities that concocting some kind of exception to those laws is possible.

They almost always lose. And even in those rare circumstances when they win, like a self-sealing tire, the system develops new laws that permanently seal the leak – so that other communities are unable to use the same arguments.

Many communities have learned from those losses and have begun to drive a new theory of law – one not focused on trying to find loopholes, crawling through exemptions, or finding the “right” judge who might look favorably on their lawmaking.

These communities have begun to understand that the individual threat or issue facing their community – fracking, GMOs, or otherwise – is just a symptom of this system, not the problem itself. That’s because the system we have doesn’t care what we want or need, no matter what the consequences to our communities and nature.

People in communities under threat are confronted with the reality of this existing system. They are concluding that without true decentralization of decision-making authority down to the community level, they’ll never be able to stop fracking or other threats from invading their communities. Further, they are realizing we’ll never be able to move toward anything close to sustainability. They’re arguing that the people of their communities possess a constitutional right of local, community self-government – the authority to govern themselves on issues that the corporate state has removed from their control.

What will it take for communities to actually have control over whether fossil fuels are shipped through them? To decide if pipelines are laid? To vote if GMOs are planted? To determine whether they are forced to become the unwilling hosts of factory farms, toxic dumps, or pollution factories?

It will take the entire system of law turned upside down.

That means that communities must be able to pass laws and make them stick. It means making those communities immune from corporate “rights” and the authority of “higher” governments to define what communities can and cannot do.

It means giving birth to community democracy – a concept that, itself, is actually older than the system we currently have.

The New – A Constitutional Right of Local Community Self-Government

Recognition by the courts of a constitutional right of local community self-government would have far-reaching consequences. A finding that the right exists would force other legal doctrines to give way to that right. This means, for example, that the use of corporate “rights” to overturn local laws would be precluded as running afoul of the right of self-government. So would the authority of the state and federal government to override certain types of local lawmaking.

Consider a rural community facing fracking. Today, under the old (existing) system, let’s say the community adopts a law, either by their elected officials or through an initiative process, to ban fracking for shale gas. The law perhaps establishes a local “bill of rights” that recognizes rights to clean air, pure water, and sustainable energy, and then bans fracking as a violation of those rights.

The law is inevitably challenged by oil and gas corporations affected by the ban. The constitutional right of the people to local community self-government is thus pitted directly against the corporate claimed constitutional “rights” and against the state government’s authority to prevent the community from adopting the law.

With the recognition of a constitutional right of local self-government, however, those corporate “rights” and the authority of the state government must give way to the people’s constitutional right to govern themselves.

Such a system, while recognizing the authority of the state and federal government to set a minimum “floor” for environmental, labor, and other standards, would prevent the state and federal government from prohibiting communities from setting higher standards, or from expanding civil and environmental rights at the local level. It is precisely that “ceiling” preemption where corporations have run amok – using that power to stop communities from prohibiting harmful corporate projects.

The Clash of the Old and the New

Because this new system is so unlike the old, it would be surprising if the corporate defenders of the old system wouldn’t be investing huge sums of money to stop this new system of law from being adopted by communities.

Over the past decade, as over two hundred communities in ten states have driven this new system into being, affected corporations have challenged a handful of those laws. Today, understanding the scope of change envisioned by the community rights movement, those corporations are now reaching into the elections system itself, to stop those laws even before they are adopted.

We need to understand that these corporate challenges are proof that the new system of law envisioned by communities is striking exactly as intended – directly at the very power currently wielded by corporations against people and nature.

We must respond by challenging not only the ability of corporations to stop these initiatives, but by directly challenging the authority of judges and courts to help them do it. If the actions of the corporations violate the people’s rights of self-government, and the corporations are unable to prevent community votes without the courts, then it’s time for more and more people to understand how the system itself stands in direct contrast to the “we the people” myth of American lore.

From there, rather than trying to reform the existing structure, more and more people will begin the real work of building a new one.

Please make a donation to help us support communities doing on-the-ground work to advance Community Rights in 2017. Your donation makes our work with communities to build the Community Rights Movement possible!

DONATE

Feature Photo: Flickr Creative Commons: Black Lives Matter by Ella

In 2015, residents of several rural Ohio counties watched in shock as Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted unilaterally removed citizen-sponsored initiatives from county ballots. The initiatives, which had already qualified for the ballot, would have banned oil and gas drilling and fracking in those communities.

The Ohio Supreme Court sharply rapped Husted’s knuckles for using authority he didn’t have. However, a year later, the people of those same counties watched in disbelief as Husted again blocked their initiatives.  This time, the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed his actions.

It is not surprising that Husted – who as of this writing is running for governor – is the darling of the very oil and gas industry targeted by those local initiatives. Indeed, the industry has long-supported his electoral campaigns.

Democratic Rights Matter

The people of Ohio aren’t the only victims of their own government. Across the country we are seeing government efforts, often at the behest of corporations, to restrict the authority of “we the people” to the initiative. Government officials are taking this action even though the authority for initiative is codified in nearly half the state constitutions in the United States.

In Oregon, a cat-and-mouse game is underway between some of the country’s largest agribusiness corporations and residents of rural counties. People there are proposing local initiatives to ban aerial pesticide spraying and genetically modified crops. In response, corporations affected by those initiatives have lawyered-up, using obscure legal provisions to try to stop the initiatives from ever reaching the ballot.

In Washington State, at the urging of industry, courts have now adopted a rule that allows virtually any proposed citizen-sponsored initiative to be blocked by corporations before ever reaching the ballot and a vote of the people.

In New Hampshire and Maine, some local elected officials have gone even further – refusing to allow duly-qualified citizen initiatives to be voted upon at annual Town Meeting. In at least one New Hampshire town, local elected officials have refused to sign an initiative even after it was legally adopted by the people of the town.

Corporations are working to restrict democratic rights to initiative as communities are advancing structural change – challenging the current system of law we live under, which insulates corporate projects from democratic control. In its place, these communities are moving forward a new system of law based on recognizing the right of communities to decide their own futures, and then elevating that community right above corporate “rights.” This new system is now beginning to forcibly crash into the older, existing one.

The ballot clashes in Ohio, Oregon, and elsewhere are all about the old system not going quietly.

The Old

Here’s how the system works today. Decisions made by the federal government trump the decisions and laws of state governments. Decisions and laws made by both federal and state governments trump the laws of local governments.

So, when the State of Vermont adopts a law requiring the labeling of food products containing genetically modified ingredients, the U.S. Congress can simply override it. It did so in 2016 when our representatives passed a law nullifying state efforts to mandate food labeling.

The more central an issue is to affecting commerce, the more preemptive rules you will find around it. For example, the federal government controls almost all issues dealing with oil and gas pipelines and the rail transportation of fossil fuels. Thus, those issues are lifted out of the hands of local and state governments.

State-level preemption operates in a similar fashion. Almost all states have oil and gas laws. Those laws regulate and control how fossil fuels are extracted. Those state laws have generally been found to abolish not only the authority of localities to determine how oil and gas is extracted, but whether oil and gas is extracted.  Thus, state laws – such as those in Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Ohio – eliminate the authority of local communities to ban oil and gas extraction altogether.

Similarly, state legislatures across the country have adopted a slew of laws prohibiting communities from banning large corporate water withdrawals, dumping of toxic sewage sludge, and GMOs. Some states, including Pennsylvania and New York, have even authorized their state Attorneys General to act as private attorneys for corporations to sue communities who buck those laws.

It all boils down to this: If you have the financial and legal ability to control the uppermost levels of lawmaking and decision making, you don’t have to abide by the rights and wishes of the communities in which you operate.

But it Gets Even Better – Corporate “Rights”

There are rare cases in which people have actually been able to use their state or federal government to adopt laws that benefit the public interest. However, corporations then use the courts to either overturn those laws or severely limit their reach.

Corporations are the dominant economic players in our system. They have pioneered the use of corporate constitutional “rights” to attack any law that infringes upon their ability to engage in commerce or use corporate property. In today’s world, in which almost every meaningful reform affects commerce or property, it’s relatively easy to apply those “rights” to overturn laws that affect certain industries.

Thus, corporate free speech rights have been leveraged to overturn federal laws limiting corporate campaign donations; corporate religious rights have been used to limit healthcare legislation; corporate property rights have been used to overturn environmental regulations; and corporate commerce rights have been used to strike down regulations on coal mining, trucking, pipelines, waste disposal, and landfills.

Thus, when corporations lose at the ballot box, or in legislatures, they can resort to the safe harbor of the judiciary. This branch of government has shown itself more than willing to vindicate corporate “rights” to nullify laws that corporations don’t like. Making matters worse, state legislatures often take those court rulings and write them directly into state law – thus safeguarding those corporate “rights” by providing statutory protection for them.

Each round of this makes it harder to remove those corporate protections, adding more and more layers that must be peeled back in the future.

For “we the people” to get anything to stick, we are forced to successfully navigate every single gauntlet. We not only work to convince legislators to pass our laws, but then hope against hope that we can beat back the corporations as they sue us for violating the rules of preemption and corporate “rights.”

While we have to win at every level to succeed, corporations only need to win at one to put us back on the defensive.

It’s the ultimate rigged game. It works only because the system is so camouflaged to give it the appearance of being open to change, and so few people understand the degree to which it is rigged.

Is it any surprise that we’ve ended up where we are?

The New

Over the past twenty years, people in hundreds of communities across the U.S. have come face-to-face with the machinery of this system and its inevitable results.

Poll after poll and study after study reveal the same thing: People want healthy, safe communities and protections for nature. And yet our system has been engineered to deliver the opposite. Instead of recognizing the power of people to build those communities, it gives power to those interested in exploiting them.

Those trying to stop the spread of GMOs at the community level run up against state and federal laws that override their efforts. Those trying to stop corporate water withdrawals run up against state water resources laws. Those trying to stop the dumping of sewage sludge run up against state nutrient management acts. Those trying to ban fracking run up against state oil and gas acts. Those trying to stop oil and gas pipelines run up against preemptive federal authority lodged in agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Many of those communities try to use traditional nuisance, land use, or zoning laws to stop those corporate projects. In doing so, they labor to find a loophole in the preemption laws, or they hire lawyers who have convinced the communities that concocting some kind of exception to those laws is possible.

They almost always lose. And even in those rare circumstances when they win, like a self-sealing tire, the system develops new laws that permanently seal the leak – so that other communities are unable to use the same arguments.

Many communities have learned from those losses and have begun to drive a new theory of law – one not focused on trying to find loopholes, crawling through exemptions, or finding the “right” judge who might look favorably on their lawmaking.

These communities have begun to understand that the individual threat or issue facing their community – fracking, GMOs, or otherwise – is just a symptom of this system, not the problem itself. That’s because the system we have doesn’t care what we want or need, no matter what the consequences to our communities and nature.

People in communities under threat are confronted with the reality of this existing system. They are concluding that without true decentralization of decision-making authority down to the community level, they’ll never be able to stop fracking or other threats from invading their communities. Further, they are realizing we’ll never be able to move toward anything close to sustainability. They’re arguing that the people of their communities possess a constitutional right of local, community self-government – the authority to govern themselves on issues that the corporate state has removed from their control.

What will it take for communities to actually have control over whether fossil fuels are shipped through them? To decide if pipelines are laid? To vote if GMOs are planted? To determine whether they are forced to become the unwilling hosts of factory farms, toxic dumps, or pollution factories?

It will take the entire system of law turned upside down.

That means that communities must be able to pass laws and make them stick. It means making those communities immune from corporate “rights” and the authority of “higher” governments to define what communities can and cannot do.

It means giving birth to community democracy – a concept that, itself, is actually older than the system we currently have.

The New – A Constitutional Right of Local Community Self-Government

Recognition by the courts of a constitutional right of local community self-government would have far-reaching consequences. A finding that the right exists would force other legal doctrines to give way to that right. This means, for example, that the use of corporate “rights” to overturn local laws would be precluded as running afoul of the right of self-government. So would the authority of the state and federal government to override certain types of local lawmaking.

Consider a rural community facing fracking. Today, under the old (existing) system, let’s say the community adopts a law, either by their elected officials or through an initiative process, to ban fracking for shale gas. The law perhaps establishes a local “bill of rights” that recognizes rights to clean air, pure water, and sustainable energy, and then bans fracking as a violation of those rights.

The law is inevitably challenged by oil and gas corporations affected by the ban. The constitutional right of the people to local community self-government is thus pitted directly against the corporate claimed constitutional “rights” and against the state government’s authority to prevent the community from adopting the law.

With the recognition of a constitutional right of local self-government, however, those corporate “rights” and the authority of the state government must give way to the people’s constitutional right to govern themselves.

Such a system, while recognizing the authority of the state and federal government to set a minimum “floor” for environmental, labor, and other standards, would prevent the state and federal government from prohibiting communities from setting higher standards, or from expanding civil and environmental rights at the local level. It is precisely that “ceiling” preemption where corporations have run amok – using that power to stop communities from prohibiting harmful corporate projects.

The Clash of the Old and the New

Because this new system is so unlike the old, it would be surprising if the corporate defenders of the old system wouldn’t be investing huge sums of money to stop this new system of law from being adopted by communities.

Over the past decade, as over two hundred communities in ten states have driven this new system into being, affected corporations have challenged a handful of those laws. Today, understanding the scope of change envisioned by the community rights movement, those corporations are now reaching into the elections system itself, to stop those laws even before they are adopted.

We need to understand that these corporate challenges are proof that the new system of law envisioned by communities is striking exactly as intended – directly at the very power currently wielded by corporations against people and nature.

We must respond by challenging not only the ability of corporations to stop these initiatives, but by directly challenging the authority of judges and courts to help them do it. If the actions of the corporations violate the people’s rights of self-government, and the corporations are unable to prevent community votes without the courts, then it’s time for more and more people to understand how the system itself stands in direct contrast to the “we the people” myth of American lore.

From there, rather than trying to reform the existing structure, more and more people will begin the real work of building a new one.

Please make a donation to help us support communities doing on-the-ground work to advance Community Rights in 2017. Your donation makes our work with communities to build the Community Rights Movement possible!

DONATE

Feature Photo: Flickr Creative Commons: Black Lives Matter by Ella

In 2015, residents of several rural Ohio counties watched in shock as Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted unilaterally removed citizen-sponsored initiatives from county ballots. The initiatives, which had already qualified for the ballot, would have banned oil and gas drilling and fracking in those communities.

The Ohio Supreme Court sharply rapped Husted’s knuckles for using authority he didn’t have. However, a year later, the people of those same counties watched in disbelief as Husted again blocked their initiatives.  This time, the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed his actions.

It is not surprising that Husted – who as of this writing is running for governor – is the darling of the very oil and gas industry targeted by those local initiatives. Indeed, the industry has long-supported his electoral campaigns.

Democratic Rights Matter

The people of Ohio aren’t the only victims of their own government. Across the country we are seeing government efforts, often at the behest of corporations, to restrict the authority of “we the people” to the initiative. Government officials are taking this action even though the authority for initiative is codified in nearly half the state constitutions in the United States.

In Oregon, a cat-and-mouse game is underway between some of the country’s largest agribusiness corporations and residents of rural counties. People there are proposing local initiatives to ban aerial pesticide spraying and genetically modified crops. In response, corporations affected by those initiatives have lawyered-up, using obscure legal provisions to try to stop the initiatives from ever reaching the ballot.

In Washington State, at the urging of industry, courts have now adopted a rule that allows virtually any proposed citizen-sponsored initiative to be blocked by corporations before ever reaching the ballot and a vote of the people.

In New Hampshire and Maine, some local elected officials have gone even further – refusing to allow duly-qualified citizen initiatives to be voted upon at annual Town Meeting. In at least one New Hampshire town, local elected officials have refused to sign an initiative even after it was legally adopted by the people of the town.

Corporations are working to restrict democratic rights to initiative as communities are advancing structural change – challenging the current system of law we live under, which insulates corporate projects from democratic control. In its place, these communities are moving forward a new system of law based on recognizing the right of communities to decide their own futures, and then elevating that community right above corporate “rights.” This new system is now beginning to forcibly crash into the older, existing one.

The ballot clashes in Ohio, Oregon, and elsewhere are all about the old system not going quietly.

The Old

Here’s how the system works today. Decisions made by the federal government trump the decisions and laws of state governments. Decisions and laws made by both federal and state governments trump the laws of local governments.

So, when the State of Vermont adopts a law requiring the labeling of food products containing genetically modified ingredients, the U.S. Congress can simply override it. It did so in 2016 when our representatives passed a law nullifying state efforts to mandate food labeling.

The more central an issue is to affecting commerce, the more preemptive rules you will find around it. For example, the federal government controls almost all issues dealing with oil and gas pipelines and the rail transportation of fossil fuels. Thus, those issues are lifted out of the hands of local and state governments.

State-level preemption operates in a similar fashion. Almost all states have oil and gas laws. Those laws regulate and control how fossil fuels are extracted. Those state laws have generally been found to abolish not only the authority of localities to determine how oil and gas is extracted, but whether oil and gas is extracted.  Thus, state laws – such as those in Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Ohio – eliminate the authority of local communities to ban oil and gas extraction altogether.

Similarly, state legislatures across the country have adopted a slew of laws prohibiting communities from banning large corporate water withdrawals, dumping of toxic sewage sludge, and GMOs. Some states, including Pennsylvania and New York, have even authorized their state Attorneys General to act as private attorneys for corporations to sue communities who buck those laws.

It all boils down to this: If you have the financial and legal ability to control the uppermost levels of lawmaking and decision making, you don’t have to abide by the rights and wishes of the communities in which you operate.

But it Gets Even Better – Corporate “Rights”

There are rare cases in which people have actually been able to use their state or federal government to adopt laws that benefit the public interest. However, corporations then use the courts to either overturn those laws or severely limit their reach.

Corporations are the dominant economic players in our system. They have pioneered the use of corporate constitutional “rights” to attack any law that infringes upon their ability to engage in commerce or use corporate property. In today’s world, in which almost every meaningful reform affects commerce or property, it’s relatively easy to apply those “rights” to overturn laws that affect certain industries.

Thus, corporate free speech rights have been leveraged to overturn federal laws limiting corporate campaign donations; corporate religious rights have been used to limit healthcare legislation; corporate property rights have been used to overturn environmental regulations; and corporate commerce rights have been used to strike down regulations on coal mining, trucking, pipelines, waste disposal, and landfills.

Thus, when corporations lose at the ballot box, or in legislatures, they can resort to the safe harbor of the judiciary. This branch of government has shown itself more than willing to vindicate corporate “rights” to nullify laws that corporations don’t like. Making matters worse, state legislatures often take those court rulings and write them directly into state law – thus safeguarding those corporate “rights” by providing statutory protection for them.

Each round of this makes it harder to remove those corporate protections, adding more and more layers that must be peeled back in the future.

For “we the people” to get anything to stick, we are forced to successfully navigate every single gauntlet. We not only work to convince legislators to pass our laws, but then hope against hope that we can beat back the corporations as they sue us for violating the rules of preemption and corporate “rights.”

While we have to win at every level to succeed, corporations only need to win at one to put us back on the defensive.

It’s the ultimate rigged game. It works only because the system is so camouflaged to give it the appearance of being open to change, and so few people understand the degree to which it is rigged.

Is it any surprise that we’ve ended up where we are?

The New

Over the past twenty years, people in hundreds of communities across the U.S. have come face-to-face with the machinery of this system and its inevitable results.

Poll after poll and study after study reveal the same thing: People want healthy, safe communities and protections for nature. And yet our system has been engineered to deliver the opposite. Instead of recognizing the power of people to build those communities, it gives power to those interested in exploiting them.

Those trying to stop the spread of GMOs at the community level run up against state and federal laws that override their efforts. Those trying to stop corporate water withdrawals run up against state water resources laws. Those trying to stop the dumping of sewage sludge run up against state nutrient management acts. Those trying to ban fracking run up against state oil and gas acts. Those trying to stop oil and gas pipelines run up against preemptive federal authority lodged in agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Many of those communities try to use traditional nuisance, land use, or zoning laws to stop those corporate projects. In doing so, they labor to find a loophole in the preemption laws, or they hire lawyers who have convinced the communities that concocting some kind of exception to those laws is possible.

They almost always lose. And even in those rare circumstances when they win, like a self-sealing tire, the system develops new laws that permanently seal the leak – so that other communities are unable to use the same arguments.

Many communities have learned from those losses and have begun to drive a new theory of law – one not focused on trying to find loopholes, crawling through exemptions, or finding the “right” judge who might look favorably on their lawmaking.

These communities have begun to understand that the individual threat or issue facing their community – fracking, GMOs, or otherwise – is just a symptom of this system, not the problem itself. That’s because the system we have doesn’t care what we want or need, no matter what the consequences to our communities and nature.

People in communities under threat are confronted with the reality of this existing system. They are concluding that without true decentralization of decision-making authority down to the community level, they’ll never be able to stop fracking or other threats from invading their communities. Further, they are realizing we’ll never be able to move toward anything close to sustainability. They’re arguing that the people of their communities possess a constitutional right of local, community self-government – the authority to govern themselves on issues that the corporate state has removed from their control.

What will it take for communities to actually have control over whether fossil fuels are shipped through them? To decide if pipelines are laid? To vote if GMOs are planted? To determine whether they are forced to become the unwilling hosts of factory farms, toxic dumps, or pollution factories?

It will take the entire system of law turned upside down.

That means that communities must be able to pass laws and make them stick. It means making those communities immune from corporate “rights” and the authority of “higher” governments to define what communities can and cannot do.

It means giving birth to community democracy – a concept that, itself, is actually older than the system we currently have.

The New – A Constitutional Right of Local Community Self-Government

Recognition by the courts of a constitutional right of local community self-government would have far-reaching consequences. A finding that the right exists would force other legal doctrines to give way to that right. This means, for example, that the use of corporate “rights” to overturn local laws would be precluded as running afoul of the right of self-government. So would the authority of the state and federal government to override certain types of local lawmaking.

Consider a rural community facing fracking. Today, under the old (existing) system, let’s say the community adopts a law, either by their elected officials or through an initiative process, to ban fracking for shale gas. The law perhaps establishes a local “bill of rights” that recognizes rights to clean air, pure water, and sustainable energy, and then bans fracking as a violation of those rights.

The law is inevitably challenged by oil and gas corporations affected by the ban. The constitutional right of the people to local community self-government is thus pitted directly against the corporate claimed constitutional “rights” and against the state government’s authority to prevent the community from adopting the law.

With the recognition of a constitutional right of local self-government, however, those corporate “rights” and the authority of the state government must give way to the people’s constitutional right to govern themselves.

Such a system, while recognizing the authority of the state and federal government to set a minimum “floor” for environmental, labor, and other standards, would prevent the state and federal government from prohibiting communities from setting higher standards, or from expanding civil and environmental rights at the local level. It is precisely that “ceiling” preemption where corporations have run amok – using that power to stop communities from prohibiting harmful corporate projects.

The Clash of the Old and the New

Because this new system is so unlike the old, it would be surprising if the corporate defenders of the old system wouldn’t be investing huge sums of money to stop this new system of law from being adopted by communities.

Over the past decade, as over two hundred communities in ten states have driven this new system into being, affected corporations have challenged a handful of those laws. Today, understanding the scope of change envisioned by the community rights movement, those corporations are now reaching into the elections system itself, to stop those laws even before they are adopted.

We need to understand that these corporate challenges are proof that the new system of law envisioned by communities is striking exactly as intended – directly at the very power currently wielded by corporations against people and nature.

We must respond by challenging not only the ability of corporations to stop these initiatives, but by directly challenging the authority of judges and courts to help them do it. If the actions of the corporations violate the people’s rights of self-government, and the corporations are unable to prevent community votes without the courts, then it’s time for more and more people to understand how the system itself stands in direct contrast to the “we the people” myth of American lore.

From there, rather than trying to reform the existing structure, more and more people will begin the real work of building a new one.

Please make a donation to help us support communities doing on-the-ground work to advance Community Rights in 2017. Your donation makes our work with communities to build the Community Rights Movement possible!

DONATE

Feature Photo: Flickr Creative Commons: Black Lives Matter by Ella

In 2015, residents of several rural Ohio counties watched in shock as Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted unilaterally removed citizen-sponsored initiatives from county ballots. The initiatives, which had already qualified for the ballot, would have banned oil and gas drilling and fracking in those communities.

The Ohio Supreme Court sharply rapped Husted’s knuckles for using authority he didn’t have. However, a year later, the people of those same counties watched in disbelief as Husted again blocked their initiatives.  This time, the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed his actions.

It is not surprising that Husted – who as of this writing is running for governor – is the darling of the very oil and gas industry targeted by those local initiatives. Indeed, the industry has long-supported his electoral campaigns.

Democratic Rights Matter

The people of Ohio aren’t the only victims of their own government. Across the country we are seeing government efforts, often at the behest of corporations, to restrict the authority of “we the people” to the initiative. Government officials are taking this action even though the authority for initiative is codified in nearly half the state constitutions in the United States.

In Oregon, a cat-and-mouse game is underway between some of the country’s largest agribusiness corporations and residents of rural counties. People there are proposing local initiatives to ban aerial pesticide spraying and genetically modified crops. In response, corporations affected by those initiatives have lawyered-up, using obscure legal provisions to try to stop the initiatives from ever reaching the ballot.

In Washington State, at the urging of industry, courts have now adopted a rule that allows virtually any proposed citizen-sponsored initiative to be blocked by corporations before ever reaching the ballot and a vote of the people.

In New Hampshire and Maine, some local elected officials have gone even further – refusing to allow duly-qualified citizen initiatives to be voted upon at annual Town Meeting. In at least one New Hampshire town, local elected officials have refused to sign an initiative even after it was legally adopted by the people of the town.

Corporations are working to restrict democratic rights to initiative as communities are advancing structural change – challenging the current system of law we live under, which insulates corporate projects from democratic control. In its place, these communities are moving forward a new system of law based on recognizing the right of communities to decide their own futures, and then elevating that community right above corporate “rights.” This new system is now beginning to forcibly crash into the older, existing one.

The ballot clashes in Ohio, Oregon, and elsewhere are all about the old system not going quietly.

The Old

Here’s how the system works today. Decisions made by the federal government trump the decisions and laws of state governments. Decisions and laws made by both federal and state governments trump the laws of local governments.

So, when the State of Vermont adopts a law requiring the labeling of food products containing genetically modified ingredients, the U.S. Congress can simply override it. It did so in 2016 when our representatives passed a law nullifying state efforts to mandate food labeling.

The more central an issue is to affecting commerce, the more preemptive rules you will find around it. For example, the federal government controls almost all issues dealing with oil and gas pipelines and the rail transportation of fossil fuels. Thus, those issues are lifted out of the hands of local and state governments.

State-level preemption operates in a similar fashion. Almost all states have oil and gas laws. Those laws regulate and control how fossil fuels are extracted. Those state laws have generally been found to abolish not only the authority of localities to determine how oil and gas is extracted, but whether oil and gas is extracted.  Thus, state laws – such as those in Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Ohio – eliminate the authority of local communities to ban oil and gas extraction altogether.

Similarly, state legislatures across the country have adopted a slew of laws prohibiting communities from banning large corporate water withdrawals, dumping of toxic sewage sludge, and GMOs. Some states, including Pennsylvania and New York, have even authorized their state Attorneys General to act as private attorneys for corporations to sue communities who buck those laws.

It all boils down to this: If you have the financial and legal ability to control the uppermost levels of lawmaking and decision making, you don’t have to abide by the rights and wishes of the communities in which you operate.

But it Gets Even Better – Corporate “Rights”

There are rare cases in which people have actually been able to use their state or federal government to adopt laws that benefit the public interest. However, corporations then use the courts to either overturn those laws or severely limit their reach.

Corporations are the dominant economic players in our system. They have pioneered the use of corporate constitutional “rights” to attack any law that infringes upon their ability to engage in commerce or use corporate property. In today’s world, in which almost every meaningful reform affects commerce or property, it’s relatively easy to apply those “rights” to overturn laws that affect certain industries.

Thus, corporate free speech rights have been leveraged to overturn federal laws limiting corporate campaign donations; corporate religious rights have been used to limit healthcare legislation; corporate property rights have been used to overturn environmental regulations; and corporate commerce rights have been used to strike down regulations on coal mining, trucking, pipelines, waste disposal, and landfills.

Thus, when corporations lose at the ballot box, or in legislatures, they can resort to the safe harbor of the judiciary. This branch of government has shown itself more than willing to vindicate corporate “rights” to nullify laws that corporations don’t like. Making matters worse, state legislatures often take those court rulings and write them directly into state law – thus safeguarding those corporate “rights” by providing statutory protection for them.

Each round of this makes it harder to remove those corporate protections, adding more and more layers that must be peeled back in the future.

For “we the people” to get anything to stick, we are forced to successfully navigate every single gauntlet. We not only work to convince legislators to pass our laws, but then hope against hope that we can beat back the corporations as they sue us for violating the rules of preemption and corporate “rights.”

While we have to win at every level to succeed, corporations only need to win at one to put us back on the defensive.

It’s the ultimate rigged game. It works only because the system is so camouflaged to give it the appearance of being open to change, and so few people understand the degree to which it is rigged.

Is it any surprise that we’ve ended up where we are?

The New

Over the past twenty years, people in hundreds of communities across the U.S. have come face-to-face with the machinery of this system and its inevitable results.

Poll after poll and study after study reveal the same thing: People want healthy, safe communities and protections for nature. And yet our system has been engineered to deliver the opposite. Instead of recognizing the power of people to build those communities, it gives power to those interested in exploiting them.

Those trying to stop the spread of GMOs at the community level run up against state and federal laws that override their efforts. Those trying to stop corporate water withdrawals run up against state water resources laws. Those trying to stop the dumping of sewage sludge run up against state nutrient management acts. Those trying to ban fracking run up against state oil and gas acts. Those trying to stop oil and gas pipelines run up against preemptive federal authority lodged in agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Many of those communities try to use traditional nuisance, land use, or zoning laws to stop those corporate projects. In doing so, they labor to find a loophole in the preemption laws, or they hire lawyers who have convinced the communities that concocting some kind of exception to those laws is possible.

They almost always lose. And even in those rare circumstances when they win, like a self-sealing tire, the system develops new laws that permanently seal the leak – so that other communities are unable to use the same arguments.

Many communities have learned from those losses and have begun to drive a new theory of law – one not focused on trying to find loopholes, crawling through exemptions, or finding the “right” judge who might look favorably on their lawmaking.

These communities have begun to understand that the individual threat or issue facing their community – fracking, GMOs, or otherwise – is just a symptom of this system, not the problem itself. That’s because the system we have doesn’t care what we want or need, no matter what the consequences to our communities and nature.

People in communities under threat are confronted with the reality of this existing system. They are concluding that without true decentralization of decision-making authority down to the community level, they’ll never be able to stop fracking or other threats from invading their communities. Further, they are realizing we’ll never be able to move toward anything close to sustainability. They’re arguing that the people of their communities possess a constitutional right of local, community self-government – the authority to govern themselves on issues that the corporate state has removed from their control.

What will it take for communities to actually have control over whether fossil fuels are shipped through them? To decide if pipelines are laid? To vote if GMOs are planted? To determine whether they are forced to become the unwilling hosts of factory farms, toxic dumps, or pollution factories?

It will take the entire system of law turned upside down.

That means that communities must be able to pass laws and make them stick. It means making those communities immune from corporate “rights” and the authority of “higher” governments to define what communities can and cannot do.

It means giving birth to community democracy – a concept that, itself, is actually older than the system we currently have.

The New – A Constitutional Right of Local Community Self-Government

Recognition by the courts of a constitutional right of local community self-government would have far-reaching consequences. A finding that the right exists would force other legal doctrines to give way to that right. This means, for example, that the use of corporate “rights” to overturn local laws would be precluded as running afoul of the right of self-government. So would the authority of the state and federal government to override certain types of local lawmaking.

Consider a rural community facing fracking. Today, under the old (existing) system, let’s say the community adopts a law, either by their elected officials or through an initiative process, to ban fracking for shale gas. The law perhaps establishes a local “bill of rights” that recognizes rights to clean air, pure water, and sustainable energy, and then bans fracking as a violation of those rights.

The law is inevitably challenged by oil and gas corporations affected by the ban. The constitutional right of the people to local community self-government is thus pitted directly against the corporate claimed constitutional “rights” and against the state government’s authority to prevent the community from adopting the law.

With the recognition of a constitutional right of local self-government, however, those corporate “rights” and the authority of the state government must give way to the people’s constitutional right to govern themselves.

Such a system, while recognizing the authority of the state and federal government to set a minimum “floor” for environmental, labor, and other standards, would prevent the state and federal government from prohibiting communities from setting higher standards, or from expanding civil and environmental rights at the local level. It is precisely that “ceiling” preemption where corporations have run amok – using that power to stop communities from prohibiting harmful corporate projects.

The Clash of the Old and the New

Because this new system is so unlike the old, it would be surprising if the corporate defenders of the old system wouldn’t be investing huge sums of money to stop this new system of law from being adopted by communities.

Over the past decade, as over two hundred communities in ten states have driven this new system into being, affected corporations have challenged a handful of those laws. Today, understanding the scope of change envisioned by the community rights movement, those corporations are now reaching into the elections system itself, to stop those laws even before they are adopted.

We need to understand that these corporate challenges are proof that the new system of law envisioned by communities is striking exactly as intended – directly at the very power currently wielded by corporations against people and nature.

We must respond by challenging not only the ability of corporations to stop these initiatives, but by directly challenging the authority of judges and courts to help them do it. If the actions of the corporations violate the people’s rights of self-government, and the corporations are unable to prevent community votes without the courts, then it’s time for more and more people to understand how the system itself stands in direct contrast to the “we the people” myth of American lore.

From there, rather than trying to reform the existing structure, more and more people will begin the real work of building a new one.

Please make a donation to help us support communities doing on-the-ground work to advance Community Rights in 2017. Your donation makes our work with communities to build the Community Rights Movement possible!

DONATE

Feature Photo: Flickr Creative Commons: Black Lives Matter by Ella

In 2015, residents of several rural Ohio counties watched in shock as Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted unilaterally removed citizen-sponsored initiatives from county ballots. The initiatives, which had already qualified for the ballot, would have banned oil and gas drilling and fracking in those communities.

The Ohio Supreme Court sharply rapped Husted’s knuckles for using authority he didn’t have. However, a year later, the people of those same counties watched in disbelief as Husted again blocked their initiatives.  This time, the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed his actions.

It is not surprising that Husted – who as of this writing is running for governor – is the darling of the very oil and gas industry targeted by those local initiatives. Indeed, the industry has long-supported his electoral campaigns.

Democratic Rights Matter

The people of Ohio aren’t the only victims of their own government. Across the country we are seeing government efforts, often at the behest of corporations, to restrict the authority of “we the people” to the initiative. Government officials are taking this action even though the authority for initiative is codified in nearly half the state constitutions in the United States.

In Oregon, a cat-and-mouse game is underway between some of the country’s largest agribusiness corporations and residents of rural counties. People there are proposing local initiatives to ban aerial pesticide spraying and genetically modified crops. In response, corporations affected by those initiatives have lawyered-up, using obscure legal provisions to try to stop the initiatives from ever reaching the ballot.

In Washington State, at the urging of industry, courts have now adopted a rule that allows virtually any proposed citizen-sponsored initiative to be blocked by corporations before ever reaching the ballot and a vote of the people.

In New Hampshire and Maine, some local elected officials have gone even further – refusing to allow duly-qualified citizen initiatives to be voted upon at annual Town Meeting. In at least one New Hampshire town, local elected officials have refused to sign an initiative even after it was legally adopted by the people of the town.

Corporations are working to restrict democratic rights to initiative as communities are advancing structural change – challenging the current system of law we live under, which insulates corporate projects from democratic control. In its place, these communities are moving forward a new system of law based on recognizing the right of communities to decide their own futures, and then elevating that community right above corporate “rights.” This new system is now beginning to forcibly crash into the older, existing one.

The ballot clashes in Ohio, Oregon, and elsewhere are all about the old system not going quietly.

The Old

Here’s how the system works today. Decisions made by the federal government trump the decisions and laws of state governments. Decisions and laws made by both federal and state governments trump the laws of local governments.

So, when the State of Vermont adopts a law requiring the labeling of food products containing genetically modified ingredients, the U.S. Congress can simply override it. It did so in 2016 when our representatives passed a law nullifying state efforts to mandate food labeling.

The more central an issue is to affecting commerce, the more preemptive rules you will find around it. For example, the federal government controls almost all issues dealing with oil and gas pipelines and the rail transportation of fossil fuels. Thus, those issues are lifted out of the hands of local and state governments.

State-level preemption operates in a similar fashion. Almost all states have oil and gas laws. Those laws regulate and control how fossil fuels are extracted. Those state laws have generally been found to abolish not only the authority of localities to determine how oil and gas is extracted, but whether oil and gas is extracted.  Thus, state laws – such as those in Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Ohio – eliminate the authority of local communities to ban oil and gas extraction altogether.

Similarly, state legislatures across the country have adopted a slew of laws prohibiting communities from banning large corporate water withdrawals, dumping of toxic sewage sludge, and GMOs. Some states, including Pennsylvania and New York, have even authorized their state Attorneys General to act as private attorneys for corporations to sue communities who buck those laws.

It all boils down to this: If you have the financial and legal ability to control the uppermost levels of lawmaking and decision making, you don’t have to abide by the rights and wishes of the communities in which you operate.

But it Gets Even Better – Corporate “Rights”

There are rare cases in which people have actually been able to use their state or federal government to adopt laws that benefit the public interest. However, corporations then use the courts to either overturn those laws or severely limit their reach.

Corporations are the dominant economic players in our system. They have pioneered the use of corporate constitutional “rights” to attack any law that infringes upon their ability to engage in commerce or use corporate property. In today’s world, in which almost every meaningful reform affects commerce or property, it’s relatively easy to apply those “rights” to overturn laws that affect certain industries.

Thus, corporate free speech rights have been leveraged to overturn federal laws limiting corporate campaign donations; corporate religious rights have been used to limit healthcare legislation; corporate property rights have been used to overturn environmental regulations; and corporate commerce rights have been used to strike down regulations on coal mining, trucking, pipelines, waste disposal, and landfills.

Thus, when corporations lose at the ballot box, or in legislatures, they can resort to the safe harbor of the judiciary. This branch of government has shown itself more than willing to vindicate corporate “rights” to nullify laws that corporations don’t like. Making matters worse, state legislatures often take those court rulings and write them directly into state law – thus safeguarding those corporate “rights” by providing statutory protection for them.

Each round of this makes it harder to remove those corporate protections, adding more and more layers that must be peeled back in the future.

For “we the people” to get anything to stick, we are forced to successfully navigate every single gauntlet. We not only work to convince legislators to pass our laws, but then hope against hope that we can beat back the corporations as they sue us for violating the rules of preemption and corporate “rights.”

While we have to win at every level to succeed, corporations only need to win at one to put us back on the defensive.

It’s the ultimate rigged game. It works only because the system is so camouflaged to give it the appearance of being open to change, and so few people understand the degree to which it is rigged.

Is it any surprise that we’ve ended up where we are?

The New

Over the past twenty years, people in hundreds of communities across the U.S. have come face-to-face with the machinery of this system and its inevitable results.

Poll after poll and study after study reveal the same thing: People want healthy, safe communities and protections for nature. And yet our system has been engineered to deliver the opposite. Instead of recognizing the power of people to build those communities, it gives power to those interested in exploiting them.

Those trying to stop the spread of GMOs at the community level run up against state and federal laws that override their efforts. Those trying to stop corporate water withdrawals run up against state water resources laws. Those trying to stop the dumping of sewage sludge run up against state nutrient management acts. Those trying to ban fracking run up against state oil and gas acts. Those trying to stop oil and gas pipelines run up against preemptive federal authority lodged in agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Many of those communities try to use traditional nuisance, land use, or zoning laws to stop those corporate projects. In doing so, they labor to find a loophole in the preemption laws, or they hire lawyers who have convinced the communities that concocting some kind of exception to those laws is possible.

They almost always lose. And even in those rare circumstances when they win, like a self-sealing tire, the system develops new laws that permanently seal the leak – so that other communities are unable to use the same arguments.

Many communities have learned from those losses and have begun to drive a new theory of law – one not focused on trying to find loopholes, crawling through exemptions, or finding the “right” judge who might look favorably on their lawmaking.

These communities have begun to understand that the individual threat or issue facing their community – fracking, GMOs, or otherwise – is just a symptom of this system, not the problem itself. That’s because the system we have doesn’t care what we want or need, no matter what the consequences to our communities and nature.

People in communities under threat are confronted with the reality of this existing system. They are concluding that without true decentralization of decision-making authority down to the community level, they’ll never be able to stop fracking or other threats from invading their communities. Further, they are realizing we’ll never be able to move toward anything close to sustainability. They’re arguing that the people of their communities possess a constitutional right of local, community self-government – the authority to govern themselves on issues that the corporate state has removed from their control.

What will it take for communities to actually have control over whether fossil fuels are shipped through them? To decide if pipelines are laid? To vote if GMOs are planted? To determine whether they are forced to become the unwilling hosts of factory farms, toxic dumps, or pollution factories?

It will take the entire system of law turned upside down.

That means that communities must be able to pass laws and make them stick. It means making those communities immune from corporate “rights” and the authority of “higher” governments to define what communities can and cannot do.

It means giving birth to community democracy – a concept that, itself, is actually older than the system we currently have.

The New – A Constitutional Right of Local Community Self-Government

Recognition by the courts of a constitutional right of local community self-government would have far-reaching consequences. A finding that the right exists would force other legal doctrines to give way to that right. This means, for example, that the use of corporate “rights” to overturn local laws would be precluded as running afoul of the right of self-government. So would the authority of the state and federal government to override certain types of local lawmaking.

Consider a rural community facing fracking. Today, under the old (existing) system, let’s say the community adopts a law, either by their elected officials or through an initiative process, to ban fracking for shale gas. The law perhaps establishes a local “bill of rights” that recognizes rights to clean air, pure water, and sustainable energy, and then bans fracking as a violation of those rights.

The law is inevitably challenged by oil and gas corporations affected by the ban. The constitutional right of the people to local community self-government is thus pitted directly against the corporate claimed constitutional “rights” and against the state government’s authority to prevent the community from adopting the law.

With the recognition of a constitutional right of local self-government, however, those corporate “rights” and the authority of the state government must give way to the people’s constitutional right to govern themselves.

Such a system, while recognizing the authority of the state and federal government to set a minimum “floor” for environmental, labor, and other standards, would prevent the state and federal government from prohibiting communities from setting higher standards, or from expanding civil and environmental rights at the local level. It is precisely that “ceiling” preemption where corporations have run amok – using that power to stop communities from prohibiting harmful corporate projects.

The Clash of the Old and the New

Because this new system is so unlike the old, it would be surprising if the corporate defenders of the old system wouldn’t be investing huge sums of money to stop this new system of law from being adopted by communities.

Over the past decade, as over two hundred communities in ten states have driven this new system into being, affected corporations have challenged a handful of those laws. Today, understanding the scope of change envisioned by the community rights movement, those corporations are now reaching into the elections system itself, to stop those laws even before they are adopted.

We need to understand that these corporate challenges are proof that the new system of law envisioned by communities is striking exactly as intended – directly at the very power currently wielded by corporations against people and nature.

We must respond by challenging not only the ability of corporations to stop these initiatives, but by directly challenging the authority of judges and courts to help them do it. If the actions of the corporations violate the people’s rights of self-government, and the corporations are unable to prevent community votes without the courts, then it’s time for more and more people to understand how the system itself stands in direct contrast to the “we the people” myth of American lore.

From there, rather than trying to reform the existing structure, more and more people will begin the real work of building a new one.

Please make a donation to help us support communities doing on-the-ground work to advance Community Rights in 2017. Your donation makes our work with communities to build the Community Rights Movement possible!

DONATE

Feature Photo: Flickr Creative Commons: Black Lives Matter by Ella

In 2015, residents of several rural Ohio counties watched in shock as Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted unilaterally removed citizen-sponsored initiatives from county ballots. The initiatives, which had already qualified for the ballot, would have banned oil and gas drilling and fracking in those communities.

The Ohio Supreme Court sharply rapped Husted’s knuckles for using authority he didn’t have. However, a year later, the people of those same counties watched in disbelief as Husted again blocked their initiatives.  This time, the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed his actions.

It is not surprising that Husted – who as of this writing is running for governor – is the darling of the very oil and gas industry targeted by those local initiatives. Indeed, the industry has long-supported his electoral campaigns.

Democratic Rights Matter

The people of Ohio aren’t the only victims of their own government. Across the country we are seeing government efforts, often at the behest of corporations, to restrict the authority of “we the people” to the initiative. Government officials are taking this action even though the authority for initiative is codified in nearly half the state constitutions in the United States.

In Oregon, a cat-and-mouse game is underway between some of the country’s largest agribusiness corporations and residents of rural counties. People there are proposing local initiatives to ban aerial pesticide spraying and genetically modified crops. In response, corporations affected by those initiatives have lawyered-up, using obscure legal provisions to try to stop the initiatives from ever reaching the ballot.

In Washington State, at the urging of industry, courts have now adopted a rule that allows virtually any proposed citizen-sponsored initiative to be blocked by corporations before ever reaching the ballot and a vote of the people.

In New Hampshire and Maine, some local elected officials have gone even further – refusing to allow duly-qualified citizen initiatives to be voted upon at annual Town Meeting. In at least one New Hampshire town, local elected officials have refused to sign an initiative even after it was legally adopted by the people of the town.

Corporations are working to restrict democratic rights to initiative as communities are advancing structural change – challenging the current system of law we live under, which insulates corporate projects from democratic control. In its place, these communities are moving forward a new system of law based on recognizing the right of communities to decide their own futures, and then elevating that community right above corporate “rights.” This new system is now beginning to forcibly crash into the older, existing one.

The ballot clashes in Ohio, Oregon, and elsewhere are all about the old system not going quietly.

The Old

Here’s how the system works today. Decisions made by the federal government trump the decisions and laws of state governments. Decisions and laws made by both federal and state governments trump the laws of local governments.

So, when the State of Vermont adopts a law requiring the labeling of food products containing genetically modified ingredients, the U.S. Congress can simply override it. It did so in 2016 when our representatives passed a law nullifying state efforts to mandate food labeling.

The more central an issue is to affecting commerce, the more preemptive rules you will find around it. For example, the federal government controls almost all issues dealing with oil and gas pipelines and the rail transportation of fossil fuels. Thus, those issues are lifted out of the hands of local and state governments.

State-level preemption operates in a similar fashion. Almost all states have oil and gas laws. Those laws regulate and control how fossil fuels are extracted. Those state laws have generally been found to abolish not only the authority of localities to determine how oil and gas is extracted, but whether oil and gas is extracted.  Thus, state laws – such as those in Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Ohio – eliminate the authority of local communities to ban oil and gas extraction altogether.

Similarly, state legislatures across the country have adopted a slew of laws prohibiting communities from banning large corporate water withdrawals, dumping of toxic sewage sludge, and GMOs. Some states, including Pennsylvania and New York, have even authorized their state Attorneys General to act as private attorneys for corporations to sue communities who buck those laws.

It all boils down to this: If you have the financial and legal ability to control the uppermost levels of lawmaking and decision making, you don’t have to abide by the rights and wishes of the communities in which you operate.

But it Gets Even Better – Corporate “Rights”

There are rare cases in which people have actually been able to use their state or federal government to adopt laws that benefit the public interest. However, corporations then use the courts to either overturn those laws or severely limit their reach.

Corporations are the dominant economic players in our system. They have pioneered the use of corporate constitutional “rights” to attack any law that infringes upon their ability to engage in commerce or use corporate property. In today’s world, in which almost every meaningful reform affects commerce or property, it’s relatively easy to apply those “rights” to overturn laws that affect certain industries.

Thus, corporate free speech rights have been leveraged to overturn federal laws limiting corporate campaign donations; corporate religious rights have been used to limit healthcare legislation; corporate property rights have been used to overturn environmental regulations; and corporate commerce rights have been used to strike down regulations on coal mining, trucking, pipelines, waste disposal, and landfills.

Thus, when corporations lose at the ballot box, or in legislatures, they can resort to the safe harbor of the judiciary. This branch of government has shown itself more than willing to vindicate corporate “rights” to nullify laws that corporations don’t like. Making matters worse, state legislatures often take those court rulings and write them directly into state law – thus safeguarding those corporate “rights” by providing statutory protection for them.

Each round of this makes it harder to remove those corporate protections, adding more and more layers that must be peeled back in the future.

For “we the people” to get anything to stick, we are forced to successfully navigate every single gauntlet. We not only work to convince legislators to pass our laws, but then hope against hope that we can beat back the corporations as they sue us for violating the rules of preemption and corporate “rights.”

While we have to win at every level to succeed, corporations only need to win at one to put us back on the defensive.

It’s the ultimate rigged game. It works only because the system is so camouflaged to give it the appearance of being open to change, and so few people understand the degree to which it is rigged.

Is it any surprise that we’ve ended up where we are?

The New

Over the past twenty years, people in hundreds of communities across the U.S. have come face-to-face with the machinery of this system and its inevitable results.

Poll after poll and study after study reveal the same thing: People want healthy, safe communities and protections for nature. And yet our system has been engineered to deliver the opposite. Instead of recognizing the power of people to build those communities, it gives power to those interested in exploiting them.

Those trying to stop the spread of GMOs at the community level run up against state and federal laws that override their efforts. Those trying to stop corporate water withdrawals run up against state water resources laws. Those trying to stop the dumping of sewage sludge run up against state nutrient management acts. Those trying to ban fracking run up against state oil and gas acts. Those trying to stop oil and gas pipelines run up against preemptive federal authority lodged in agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Many of those communities try to use traditional nuisance, land use, or zoning laws to stop those corporate projects. In doing so, they labor to find a loophole in the preemption laws, or they hire lawyers who have convinced the communities that concocting some kind of exception to those laws is possible.

They almost always lose. And even in those rare circumstances when they win, like a self-sealing tire, the system develops new laws that permanently seal the leak – so that other communities are unable to use the same arguments.

Many communities have learned from those losses and have begun to drive a new theory of law – one not focused on trying to find loopholes, crawling through exemptions, or finding the “right” judge who might look favorably on their lawmaking.

These communities have begun to understand that the individual threat or issue facing their community – fracking, GMOs, or otherwise – is just a symptom of this system, not the problem itself. That’s because the system we have doesn’t care what we want or need, no matter what the consequences to our communities and nature.

People in communities under threat are confronted with the reality of this existing system. They are concluding that without true decentralization of decision-making authority down to the community level, they’ll never be able to stop fracking or other threats from invading their communities. Further, they are realizing we’ll never be able to move toward anything close to sustainability. They’re arguing that the people of their communities possess a constitutional right of local, community self-government – the authority to govern themselves on issues that the corporate state has removed from their control.

What will it take for communities to actually have control over whether fossil fuels are shipped through them? To decide if pipelines are laid? To vote if GMOs are planted? To determine whether they are forced to become the unwilling hosts of factory farms, toxic dumps, or pollution factories?

It will take the entire system of law turned upside down.

That means that communities must be able to pass laws and make them stick. It means making those communities immune from corporate “rights” and the authority of “higher” governments to define what communities can and cannot do.

It means giving birth to community democracy – a concept that, itself, is actually older than the system we currently have.

The New – A Constitutional Right of Local Community Self-Government

Recognition by the courts of a constitutional right of local community self-government would have far-reaching consequences. A finding that the right exists would force other legal doctrines to give way to that right. This means, for example, that the use of corporate “rights” to overturn local laws would be precluded as running afoul of the right of self-government. So would the authority of the state and federal government to override certain types of local lawmaking.

Consider a rural community facing fracking. Today, under the old (existing) system, let’s say the community adopts a law, either by their elected officials or through an initiative process, to ban fracking for shale gas. The law perhaps establishes a local “bill of rights” that recognizes rights to clean air, pure water, and sustainable energy, and then bans fracking as a violation of those rights.

The law is inevitably challenged by oil and gas corporations affected by the ban. The constitutional right of the people to local community self-government is thus pitted directly against the corporate claimed constitutional “rights” and against the state government’s authority to prevent the community from adopting the law.

With the recognition of a constitutional right of local self-government, however, those corporate “rights” and the authority of the state government must give way to the people’s constitutional right to govern themselves.

Such a system, while recognizing the authority of the state and federal government to set a minimum “floor” for environmental, labor, and other standards, would prevent the state and federal government from prohibiting communities from setting higher standards, or from expanding civil and environmental rights at the local level. It is precisely that “ceiling” preemption where corporations have run amok – using that power to stop communities from prohibiting harmful corporate projects.

The Clash of the Old and the New

Because this new system is so unlike the old, it would be surprising if the corporate defenders of the old system wouldn’t be investing huge sums of money to stop this new system of law from being adopted by communities.

Over the past decade, as over two hundred communities in ten states have driven this new system into being, affected corporations have challenged a handful of those laws. Today, understanding the scope of change envisioned by the community rights movement, those corporations are now reaching into the elections system itself, to stop those laws even before they are adopted.

We need to understand that these corporate challenges are proof that the new system of law envisioned by communities is striking exactly as intended – directly at the very power currently wielded by corporations against people and nature.

We must respond by challenging not only the ability of corporations to stop these initiatives, but by directly challenging the authority of judges and courts to help them do it. If the actions of the corporations violate the people’s rights of self-government, and the corporations are unable to prevent community votes without the courts, then it’s time for more and more people to understand how the system itself stands in direct contrast to the “we the people” myth of American lore.

From there, rather than trying to reform the existing structure, more and more people will begin the real work of building a new one.

Please make a donation to help us support communities doing on-the-ground work to advance Community Rights in 2017. Your donation makes our work with communities to build the Community Rights Movement possible!

DONATE

Feature Photo: Flickr Creative Commons: Black Lives Matter by Ella

In 2015, residents of several rural Ohio counties watched in shock as Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted unilaterally removed citizen-sponsored initiatives from county ballots. The initiatives, which had already qualified for the ballot, would have banned oil and gas drilling and fracking in those communities.

The Ohio Supreme Court sharply rapped Husted’s knuckles for using authority he didn’t have. However, a year later, the people of those same counties watched in disbelief as Husted again blocked their initiatives.  This time, the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed his actions.

It is not surprising that Husted – who as of this writing is running for governor – is the darling of the very oil and gas industry targeted by those local initiatives. Indeed, the industry has long-supported his electoral campaigns.

Democratic Rights Matter

The people of Ohio aren’t the only victims of their own government. Across the country we are seeing government efforts, often at the behest of corporations, to restrict the authority of “we the people” to the initiative. Government officials are taking this action even though the authority for initiative is codified in nearly half the state constitutions in the United States.

In Oregon, a cat-and-mouse game is underway between some of the country’s largest agribusiness corporations and residents of rural counties. People there are proposing local initiatives to ban aerial pesticide spraying and genetically modified crops. In response, corporations affected by those initiatives have lawyered-up, using obscure legal provisions to try to stop the initiatives from ever reaching the ballot.

In Washington State, at the urging of industry, courts have now adopted a rule that allows virtually any proposed citizen-sponsored initiative to be blocked by corporations before ever reaching the ballot and a vote of the people.

In New Hampshire and Maine, some local elected officials have gone even further – refusing to allow duly-qualified citizen initiatives to be voted upon at annual Town Meeting. In at least one New Hampshire town, local elected officials have refused to sign an initiative even after it was legally adopted by the people of the town.

Corporations are working to restrict democratic rights to initiative as communities are advancing structural change – challenging the current system of law we live under, which insulates corporate projects from democratic control. In its place, these communities are moving forward a new system of law based on recognizing the right of communities to decide their own futures, and then elevating that community right above corporate “rights.” This new system is now beginning to forcibly crash into the older, existing one.

The ballot clashes in Ohio, Oregon, and elsewhere are all about the old system not going quietly.

The Old

Here’s how the system works today. Decisions made by the federal government trump the decisions and laws of state governments. Decisions and laws made by both federal and state governments trump the laws of local governments.

So, when the State of Vermont adopts a law requiring the labeling of food products containing genetically modified ingredients, the U.S. Congress can simply override it. It did so in 2016 when our representatives passed a law nullifying state efforts to mandate food labeling.

The more central an issue is to affecting commerce, the more preemptive rules you will find around it. For example, the federal government controls almost all issues dealing with oil and gas pipelines and the rail transportation of fossil fuels. Thus, those issues are lifted out of the hands of local and state governments.

State-level preemption operates in a similar fashion. Almost all states have oil and gas laws. Those laws regulate and control how fossil fuels are extracted. Those state laws have generally been found to abolish not only the authority of localities to determine how oil and gas is extracted, but whether oil and gas is extracted.  Thus, state laws – such as those in Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Ohio – eliminate the authority of local communities to ban oil and gas extraction altogether.

Similarly, state legislatures across the country have adopted a slew of laws prohibiting communities from banning large corporate water withdrawals, dumping of toxic sewage sludge, and GMOs. Some states, including Pennsylvania and New York, have even authorized their state Attorneys General to act as private attorneys for corporations to sue communities who buck those laws.

It all boils down to this: If you have the financial and legal ability to control the uppermost levels of lawmaking and decision making, you don’t have to abide by the rights and wishes of the communities in which you operate.

But it Gets Even Better – Corporate “Rights”

There are rare cases in which people have actually been able to use their state or federal government to adopt laws that benefit the public interest. However, corporations then use the courts to either overturn those laws or severely limit their reach.

Corporations are the dominant economic players in our system. They have pioneered the use of corporate constitutional “rights” to attack any law that infringes upon their ability to engage in commerce or use corporate property. In today’s world, in which almost every meaningful reform affects commerce or property, it’s relatively easy to apply those “rights” to overturn laws that affect certain industries.

Thus, corporate free speech rights have been leveraged to overturn federal laws limiting corporate campaign donations; corporate religious rights have been used to limit healthcare legislation; corporate property rights have been used to overturn environmental regulations; and corporate commerce rights have been used to strike down regulations on coal mining, trucking, pipelines, waste disposal, and landfills.

Thus, when corporations lose at the ballot box, or in legislatures, they can resort to the safe harbor of the judiciary. This branch of government has shown itself more than willing to vindicate corporate “rights” to nullify laws that corporations don’t like. Making matters worse, state legislatures often take those court rulings and write them directly into state law – thus safeguarding those corporate “rights” by providing statutory protection for them.

Each round of this makes it harder to remove those corporate protections, adding more and more layers that must be peeled back in the future.

For “we the people” to get anything to stick, we are forced to successfully navigate every single gauntlet. We not only work to convince legislators to pass our laws, but then hope against hope that we can beat back the corporations as they sue us for violating the rules of preemption and corporate “rights.”

While we have to win at every level to succeed, corporations only need to win at one to put us back on the defensive.

It’s the ultimate rigged game. It works only because the system is so camouflaged to give it the appearance of being open to change, and so few people understand the degree to which it is rigged.

Is it any surprise that we’ve ended up where we are?

The New

Over the past twenty years, people in hundreds of communities across the U.S. have come face-to-face with the machinery of this system and its inevitable results.

Poll after poll and study after study reveal the same thing: People want healthy, safe communities and protections for nature. And yet our system has been engineered to deliver the opposite. Instead of recognizing the power of people to build those communities, it gives power to those interested in exploiting them.

Those trying to stop the spread of GMOs at the community level run up against state and federal laws that override their efforts. Those trying to stop corporate water withdrawals run up against state water resources laws. Those trying to stop the dumping of sewage sludge run up against state nutrient management acts. Those trying to ban fracking run up against state oil and gas acts. Those trying to stop oil and gas pipelines run up against preemptive federal authority lodged in agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Many of those communities try to use traditional nuisance, land use, or zoning laws to stop those corporate projects. In doing so, they labor to find a loophole in the preemption laws, or they hire lawyers who have convinced the communities that concocting some kind of exception to those laws is possible.

They almost always lose. And even in those rare circumstances when they win, like a self-sealing tire, the system develops new laws that permanently seal the leak – so that other communities are unable to use the same arguments.

Many communities have learned from those losses and have begun to drive a new theory of law – one not focused on trying to find loopholes, crawling through exemptions, or finding the “right” judge who might look favorably on their lawmaking.

These communities have begun to understand that the individual threat or issue facing their community – fracking, GMOs, or otherwise – is just a symptom of this system, not the problem itself. That’s because the system we have doesn’t care what we want or need, no matter what the consequences to our communities and nature.

People in communities under threat are confronted with the reality of this existing system. They are concluding that without true decentralization of decision-making authority down to the community level, they’ll never be able to stop fracking or other threats from invading their communities. Further, they are realizing we’ll never be able to move toward anything close to sustainability. They’re arguing that the people of their communities possess a constitutional right of local, community self-government – the authority to govern themselves on issues that the corporate state has removed from their control.

What will it take for communities to actually have control over whether fossil fuels are shipped through them? To decide if pipelines are laid? To vote if GMOs are planted? To determine whether they are forced to become the unwilling hosts of factory farms, toxic dumps, or pollution factories?

It will take the entire system of law turned upside down.

That means that communities must be able to pass laws and make them stick. It means making those communities immune from corporate “rights” and the authority of “higher” governments to define what communities can and cannot do.

It means giving birth to community democracy – a concept that, itself, is actually older than the system we currently have.

The New – A Constitutional Right of Local Community Self-Government

Recognition by the courts of a constitutional right of local community self-government would have far-reaching consequences. A finding that the right exists would force other legal doctrines to give way to that right. This means, for example, that the use of corporate “rights” to overturn local laws would be precluded as running afoul of the right of self-government. So would the authority of the state and federal government to override certain types of local lawmaking.

Consider a rural community facing fracking. Today, under the old (existing) system, let’s say the community adopts a law, either by their elected officials or through an initiative process, to ban fracking for shale gas. The law perhaps establishes a local “bill of rights” that recognizes rights to clean air, pure water, and sustainable energy, and then bans fracking as a violation of those rights.

The law is inevitably challenged by oil and gas corporations affected by the ban. The constitutional right of the people to local community self-government is thus pitted directly against the corporate claimed constitutional “rights” and against the state government’s authority to prevent the community from adopting the law.

With the recognition of a constitutional right of local self-government, however, those corporate “rights” and the authority of the state government must give way to the people’s constitutional right to govern themselves.

Such a system, while recognizing the authority of the state and federal government to set a minimum “floor” for environmental, labor, and other standards, would prevent the state and federal government from prohibiting communities from setting higher standards, or from expanding civil and environmental rights at the local level. It is precisely that “ceiling” preemption where corporations have run amok – using that power to stop communities from prohibiting harmful corporate projects.

The Clash of the Old and the New

Because this new system is so unlike the old, it would be surprising if the corporate defenders of the old system wouldn’t be investing huge sums of money to stop this new system of law from being adopted by communities.

Over the past decade, as over two hundred communities in ten states have driven this new system into being, affected corporations have challenged a handful of those laws. Today, understanding the scope of change envisioned by the community rights movement, those corporations are now reaching into the elections system itself, to stop those laws even before they are adopted.

We need to understand that these corporate challenges are proof that the new system of law envisioned by communities is striking exactly as intended – directly at the very power currently wielded by corporations against people and nature.

We must respond by challenging not only the ability of corporations to stop these initiatives, but by directly challenging the authority of judges and courts to help them do it. If the actions of the corporations violate the people’s rights of self-government, and the corporations are unable to prevent community votes without the courts, then it’s time for more and more people to understand how the system itself stands in direct contrast to the “we the people” myth of American lore.

From there, rather than trying to reform the existing structure, more and more people will begin the real work of building a new one.

Please make a donation to help us support communities doing on-the-ground work to advance Community Rights in 2017. Your donation makes our work with communities to build the Community Rights Movement possible!

DONATE

Feature Photo: Flickr Creative Commons: Black Lives Matter by Ella

In 2015, residents of several rural Ohio counties watched in shock as Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted unilaterally removed citizen-sponsored initiatives from county ballots. The initiatives, which had already qualified for the ballot, would have banned oil and gas drilling and fracking in those communities.

The Ohio Supreme Court sharply rapped Husted’s knuckles for using authority he didn’t have. However, a year later, the people of those same counties watched in disbelief as Husted again blocked their initiatives.  This time, the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed his actions.

It is not surprising that Husted – who as of this writing is running for governor – is the darling of the very oil and gas industry targeted by those local initiatives. Indeed, the industry has long-supported his electoral campaigns.

Democratic Rights Matter

The people of Ohio aren’t the only victims of their own government. Across the country we are seeing government efforts, often at the behest of corporations, to restrict the authority of “we the people” to the initiative. Government officials are taking this action even though the authority for initiative is codified in nearly half the state constitutions in the United States.

In Oregon, a cat-and-mouse game is underway between some of the country’s largest agribusiness corporations and residents of rural counties. People there are proposing local initiatives to ban aerial pesticide spraying and genetically modified crops. In response, corporations affected by those initiatives have lawyered-up, using obscure legal provisions to try to stop the initiatives from ever reaching the ballot.

In Washington State, at the urging of industry, courts have now adopted a rule that allows virtually any proposed citizen-sponsored initiative to be blocked by corporations before ever reaching the ballot and a vote of the people.

In New Hampshire and Maine, some local elected officials have gone even further – refusing to allow duly-qualified citizen initiatives to be voted upon at annual Town Meeting. In at least one New Hampshire town, local elected officials have refused to sign an initiative even after it was legally adopted by the people of the town.

Corporations are working to restrict democratic rights to initiative as communities are advancing structural change – challenging the current system of law we live under, which insulates corporate projects from democratic control. In its place, these communities are moving forward a new system of law based on recognizing the right of communities to decide their own futures, and then elevating that community right above corporate “rights.” This new system is now beginning to forcibly crash into the older, existing one.

The ballot clashes in Ohio, Oregon, and elsewhere are all about the old system not going quietly.

The Old

Here’s how the system works today. Decisions made by the federal government trump the decisions and laws of state governments. Decisions and laws made by both federal and state governments trump the laws of local governments.

So, when the State of Vermont adopts a law requiring the labeling of food products containing genetically modified ingredients, the U.S. Congress can simply override it. It did so in 2016 when our representatives passed a law nullifying state efforts to mandate food labeling.

The more central an issue is to affecting commerce, the more preemptive rules you will find around it. For example, the federal government controls almost all issues dealing with oil and gas pipelines and the rail transportation of fossil fuels. Thus, those issues are lifted out of the hands of local and state governments.

State-level preemption operates in a similar fashion. Almost all states have oil and gas laws. Those laws regulate and control how fossil fuels are extracted. Those state laws have generally been found to abolish not only the authority of localities to determine how oil and gas is extracted, but whether oil and gas is extracted.  Thus, state laws – such as those in Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Ohio – eliminate the authority of local communities to ban oil and gas extraction altogether.

Similarly, state legislatures across the country have adopted a slew of laws prohibiting communities from banning large corporate water withdrawals, dumping of toxic sewage sludge, and GMOs. Some states, including Pennsylvania and New York, have even authorized their state Attorneys General to act as private attorneys for corporations to sue communities who buck those laws.

It all boils down to this: If you have the financial and legal ability to control the uppermost levels of lawmaking and decision making, you don’t have to abide by the rights and wishes of the communities in which you operate.

But it Gets Even Better – Corporate “Rights”

There are rare cases in which people have actually been able to use their state or federal government to adopt laws that benefit the public interest. However, corporations then use the courts to either overturn those laws or severely limit their reach.

Corporations are the dominant economic players in our system. They have pioneered the use of corporate constitutional “rights” to attack any law that infringes upon their ability to engage in commerce or use corporate property. In today’s world, in which almost every meaningful reform affects commerce or property, it’s relatively easy to apply those “rights” to overturn laws that affect certain industries.

Thus, corporate free speech rights have been leveraged to overturn federal laws limiting corporate campaign donations; corporate religious rights have been used to limit healthcare legislation; corporate property rights have been used to overturn environmental regulations; and corporate commerce rights have been used to strike down regulations on coal mining, trucking, pipelines, waste disposal, and landfills.

Thus, when corporations lose at the ballot box, or in legislatures, they can resort to the safe harbor of the judiciary. This branch of government has shown itself more than willing to vindicate corporate “rights” to nullify laws that corporations don’t like. Making matters worse, state legislatures often take those court rulings and write them directly into state law – thus safeguarding those corporate “rights” by providing statutory protection for them.

Each round of this makes it harder to remove those corporate protections, adding more and more layers that must be peeled back in the future.

For “we the people” to get anything to stick, we are forced to successfully navigate every single gauntlet. We not only work to convince legislators to pass our laws, but then hope against hope that we can beat back the corporations as they sue us for violating the rules of preemption and corporate “rights.”

While we have to win at every level to succeed, corporations only need to win at one to put us back on the defensive.

It’s the ultimate rigged game. It works only because the system is so camouflaged to give it the appearance of being open to change, and so few people understand the degree to which it is rigged.

Is it any surprise that we’ve ended up where we are?

The New

Over the past twenty years, people in hundreds of communities across the U.S. have come face-to-face with the machinery of this system and its inevitable results.

Poll after poll and study after study reveal the same thing: People want healthy, safe communities and protections for nature. And yet our system has been engineered to deliver the opposite. Instead of recognizing the power of people to build those communities, it gives power to those interested in exploiting them.

Those trying to stop the spread of GMOs at the community level run up against state and federal laws that override their efforts. Those trying to stop corporate water withdrawals run up against state water resources laws. Those trying to stop the dumping of sewage sludge run up against state nutrient management acts. Those trying to ban fracking run up against state oil and gas acts. Those trying to stop oil and gas pipelines run up against preemptive federal authority lodged in agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Many of those communities try to use traditional nuisance, land use, or zoning laws to stop those corporate projects. In doing so, they labor to find a loophole in the preemption laws, or they hire lawyers who have convinced the communities that concocting some kind of exception to those laws is possible.

They almost always lose. And even in those rare circumstances when they win, like a self-sealing tire, the system develops new laws that permanently seal the leak – so that other communities are unable to use the same arguments.

Many communities have learned from those losses and have begun to drive a new theory of law – one not focused on trying to find loopholes, crawling through exemptions, or finding the “right” judge who might look favorably on their lawmaking.

These communities have begun to understand that the individual threat or issue facing their community – fracking, GMOs, or otherwise – is just a symptom of this system, not the problem itself. That’s because the system we have doesn’t care what we want or need, no matter what the consequences to our communities and nature.

People in communities under threat are confronted with the reality of this existing system. They are concluding that without true decentralization of decision-making authority down to the community level, they’ll never be able to stop fracking or other threats from invading their communities. Further, they are realizing we’ll never be able to move toward anything close to sustainability. They’re arguing that the people of their communities possess a constitutional right of local, community self-government – the authority to govern themselves on issues that the corporate state has removed from their control.

What will it take for communities to actually have control over whether fossil fuels are shipped through them? To decide if pipelines are laid? To vote if GMOs are planted? To determine whether they are forced to become the unwilling hosts of factory farms, toxic dumps, or pollution factories?

It will take the entire system of law turned upside down.

That means that communities must be able to pass laws and make them stick. It means making those communities immune from corporate “rights” and the authority of “higher” governments to define what communities can and cannot do.

It means giving birth to community democracy – a concept that, itself, is actually older than the system we currently have.

The New – A Constitutional Right of Local Community Self-Government

Recognition by the courts of a constitutional right of local community self-government would have far-reaching consequences. A finding that the right exists would force other legal doctrines to give way to that right. This means, for example, that the use of corporate “rights” to overturn local laws would be precluded as running afoul of the right of self-government. So would the authority of the state and federal government to override certain types of local lawmaking.

Consider a rural community facing fracking. Today, under the old (existing) system, let’s say the community adopts a law, either by their elected officials or through an initiative process, to ban fracking for shale gas. The law perhaps establishes a local “bill of rights” that recognizes rights to clean air, pure water, and sustainable energy, and then bans fracking as a violation of those rights.

The law is inevitably challenged by oil and gas corporations affected by the ban. The constitutional right of the people to local community self-government is thus pitted directly against the corporate claimed constitutional “rights” and against the state government’s authority to prevent the community from adopting the law.

With the recognition of a constitutional right of local self-government, however, those corporate “rights” and the authority of the state government must give way to the people’s constitutional right to govern themselves.

Such a system, while recognizing the authority of the state and federal government to set a minimum “floor” for environmental, labor, and other standards, would prevent the state and federal government from prohibiting communities from setting higher standards, or from expanding civil and environmental rights at the local level. It is precisely that “ceiling” preemption where corporations have run amok – using that power to stop communities from prohibiting harmful corporate projects.

The Clash of the Old and the New

Because this new system is so unlike the old, it would be surprising if the corporate defenders of the old system wouldn’t be investing huge sums of money to stop this new system of law from being adopted by communities.

Over the past decade, as over two hundred communities in ten states have driven this new system into being, affected corporations have challenged a handful of those laws. Today, understanding the scope of change envisioned by the community rights movement, those corporations are now reaching into the elections system itself, to stop those laws even before they are adopted.

We need to understand that these corporate challenges are proof that the new system of law envisioned by communities is striking exactly as intended – directly at the very power currently wielded by corporations against people and nature.

We must respond by challenging not only the ability of corporations to stop these initiatives, but by directly challenging the authority of judges and courts to help them do it. If the actions of the corporations violate the people’s rights of self-government, and the corporations are unable to prevent community votes without the courts, then it’s time for more and more people to understand how the system itself stands in direct contrast to the “we the people” myth of American lore.

From there, rather than trying to reform the existing structure, more and more people will begin the real work of building a new one.

Please make a donation to help us support communities doing on-the-ground work to advance Community Rights in 2017. Your donation makes our work with communities to build the Community Rights Movement possible!

DONATE

Feature Photo: Flickr Creative Commons: Black Lives Matter by Ella

In 2015, residents of several rural Ohio counties watched in shock as Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted unilaterally removed citizen-sponsored initiatives from county ballots. The initiatives, which had already qualified for the ballot, would have banned oil and gas drilling and fracking in those communities.

The Ohio Supreme Court sharply rapped Husted’s knuckles for using authority he didn’t have. However, a year later, the people of those same counties watched in disbelief as Husted again blocked their initiatives.  This time, the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed his actions.

It is not surprising that Husted – who as of this writing is running for governor – is the darling of the very oil and gas industry targeted by those local initiatives. Indeed, the industry has long-supported his electoral campaigns.

Democratic Rights Matter

The people of Ohio aren’t the only victims of their own government. Across the country we are seeing government efforts, often at the behest of corporations, to restrict the authority of “we the people” to the initiative. Government officials are taking this action even though the authority for initiative is codified in nearly half the state constitutions in the United States.

In Oregon, a cat-and-mouse game is underway between some of the country’s largest agribusiness corporations and residents of rural counties. People there are proposing local initiatives to ban aerial pesticide spraying and genetically modified crops. In response, corporations affected by those initiatives have lawyered-up, using obscure legal provisions to try to stop the initiatives from ever reaching the ballot.

In Washington State, at the urging of industry, courts have now adopted a rule that allows virtually any proposed citizen-sponsored initiative to be blocked by corporations before ever reaching the ballot and a vote of the people.

In New Hampshire and Maine, some local elected officials have gone even further – refusing to allow duly-qualified citizen initiatives to be voted upon at annual Town Meeting. In at least one New Hampshire town, local elected officials have refused to sign an initiative even after it was legally adopted by the people of the town.

Corporations are working to restrict democratic rights to initiative as communities are advancing structural change – challenging the current system of law we live under, which insulates corporate projects from democratic control. In its place, these communities are moving forward a new system of law based on recognizing the right of communities to decide their own futures, and then elevating that community right above corporate “rights.” This new system is now beginning to forcibly crash into the older, existing one.

The ballot clashes in Ohio, Oregon, and elsewhere are all about the old system not going quietly.

The Old

Here’s how the system works today. Decisions made by the federal government trump the decisions and laws of state governments. Decisions and laws made by both federal and state governments trump the laws of local governments.

So, when the State of Vermont adopts a law requiring the labeling of food products containing genetically modified ingredients, the U.S. Congress can simply override it. It did so in 2016 when our representatives passed a law nullifying state efforts to mandate food labeling.

The more central an issue is to affecting commerce, the more preemptive rules you will find around it. For example, the federal government controls almost all issues dealing with oil and gas pipelines and the rail transportation of fossil fuels. Thus, those issues are lifted out of the hands of local and state governments.

State-level preemption operates in a similar fashion. Almost all states have oil and gas laws. Those laws regulate and control how fossil fuels are extracted. Those state laws have generally been found to abolish not only the authority of localities to determine how oil and gas is extracted, but whether oil and gas is extracted.  Thus, state laws – such as those in Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Ohio – eliminate the authority of local communities to ban oil and gas extraction altogether.

Similarly, state legislatures across the country have adopted a slew of laws prohibiting communities from banning large corporate water withdrawals, dumping of toxic sewage sludge, and GMOs. Some states, including Pennsylvania and New York, have even authorized their state Attorneys General to act as private attorneys for corporations to sue communities who buck those laws.

It all boils down to this: If you have the financial and legal ability to control the uppermost levels of lawmaking and decision making, you don’t have to abide by the rights and wishes of the communities in which you operate.

But it Gets Even Better – Corporate “Rights”

There are rare cases in which people have actually been able to use their state or federal government to adopt laws that benefit the public interest. However, corporations then use the courts to either overturn those laws or severely limit their reach.

Corporations are the dominant economic players in our system. They have pioneered the use of corporate constitutional “rights” to attack any law that infringes upon their ability to engage in commerce or use corporate property. In today’s world, in which almost every meaningful reform affects commerce or property, it’s relatively easy to apply those “rights” to overturn laws that affect certain industries.

Thus, corporate free speech rights have been leveraged to overturn federal laws limiting corporate campaign donations; corporate religious rights have been used to limit healthcare legislation; corporate property rights have been used to overturn environmental regulations; and corporate commerce rights have been used to strike down regulations on coal mining, trucking, pipelines, waste disposal, and landfills.

Thus, when corporations lose at the ballot box, or in legislatures, they can resort to the safe harbor of the judiciary. This branch of government has shown itself more than willing to vindicate corporate “rights” to nullify laws that corporations don’t like. Making matters worse, state legislatures often take those court rulings and write them directly into state law – thus safeguarding those corporate “rights” by providing statutory protection for them.

Each round of this makes it harder to remove those corporate protections, adding more and more layers that must be peeled back in the future.

For “we the people” to get anything to stick, we are forced to successfully navigate every single gauntlet. We not only work to convince legislators to pass our laws, but then hope against hope that we can beat back the corporations as they sue us for violating the rules of preemption and corporate “rights.”

While we have to win at every level to succeed, corporations only need to win at one to put us back on the defensive.

It’s the ultimate rigged game. It works only because the system is so camouflaged to give it the appearance of being open to change, and so few people understand the degree to which it is rigged.

Is it any surprise that we’ve ended up where we are?

The New

Over the past twenty years, people in hundreds of communities across the U.S. have come face-to-face with the machinery of this system and its inevitable results.

Poll after poll and study after study reveal the same thing: People want healthy, safe communities and protections for nature. And yet our system has been engineered to deliver the opposite. Instead of recognizing the power of people to build those communities, it gives power to those interested in exploiting them.

Those trying to stop the spread of GMOs at the community level run up against state and federal laws that override their efforts. Those trying to stop corporate water withdrawals run up against state water resources laws. Those trying to stop the dumping of sewage sludge run up against state nutrient management acts. Those trying to ban fracking run up against state oil and gas acts. Those trying to stop oil and gas pipelines run up against preemptive federal authority lodged in agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Many of those communities try to use traditional nuisance, land use, or zoning laws to stop those corporate projects. In doing so, they labor to find a loophole in the preemption laws, or they hire lawyers who have convinced the communities that concocting some kind of exception to those laws is possible.

They almost always lose. And even in those rare circumstances when they win, like a self-sealing tire, the system develops new laws that permanently seal the leak – so that other communities are unable to use the same arguments.

Many communities have learned from those losses and have begun to drive a new theory of law – one not focused on trying to find loopholes, crawling through exemptions, or finding the “right” judge who might look favorably on their lawmaking.

These communities have begun to understand that the individual threat or issue facing their community – fracking, GMOs, or otherwise – is just a symptom of this system, not the problem itself. That’s because the system we have doesn’t care what we want or need, no matter what the consequences to our communities and nature.

People in communities under threat are confronted with the reality of this existing system. They are concluding that without true decentralization of decision-making authority down to the community level, they’ll never be able to stop fracking or other threats from invading their communities. Further, they are realizing we’ll never be able to move toward anything close to sustainability. They’re arguing that the people of their communities possess a constitutional right of local, community self-government – the authority to govern themselves on issues that the corporate state has removed from their control.

What will it take for communities to actually have control over whether fossil fuels are shipped through them? To decide if pipelines are laid? To vote if GMOs are planted? To determine whether they are forced to become the unwilling hosts of factory farms, toxic dumps, or pollution factories?

It will take the entire system of law turned upside down.

That means that communities must be able to pass laws and make them stick. It means making those communities immune from corporate “rights” and the authority of “higher” governments to define what communities can and cannot do.

It means giving birth to community democracy – a concept that, itself, is actually older than the system we currently have.

The New – A Constitutional Right of Local Community Self-Government

Recognition by the courts of a constitutional right of local community self-government would have far-reaching consequences. A finding that the right exists would force other legal doctrines to give way to that right. This means, for example, that the use of corporate “rights” to overturn local laws would be precluded as running afoul of the right of self-government. So would the authority of the state and federal government to override certain types of local lawmaking.

Consider a rural community facing fracking. Today, under the old (existing) system, let’s say the community adopts a law, either by their elected officials or through an initiative process, to ban fracking for shale gas. The law perhaps establishes a local “bill of rights” that recognizes rights to clean air, pure water, and sustainable energy, and then bans fracking as a violation of those rights.

The law is inevitably challenged by oil and gas corporations affected by the ban. The constitutional right of the people to local community self-government is thus pitted directly against the corporate claimed constitutional “rights” and against the state government’s authority to prevent the community from adopting the law.

With the recognition of a constitutional right of local self-government, however, those corporate “rights” and the authority of the state government must give way to the people’s constitutional right to govern themselves.

Such a system, while recognizing the authority of the state and federal government to set a minimum “floor” for environmental, labor, and other standards, would prevent the state and federal government from prohibiting communities from setting higher standards, or from expanding civil and environmental rights at the local level. It is precisely that “ceiling” preemption where corporations have run amok – using that power to stop communities from prohibiting harmful corporate projects.

The Clash of the Old and the New

Because this new system is so unlike the old, it would be surprising if the corporate defenders of the old system wouldn’t be investing huge sums of money to stop this new system of law from being adopted by communities.

Over the past decade, as over two hundred communities in ten states have driven this new system into being, affected corporations have challenged a handful of those laws. Today, understanding the scope of change envisioned by the community rights movement, those corporations are now reaching into the elections system itself, to stop those laws even before they are adopted.

We need to understand that these corporate challenges are proof that the new system of law envisioned by communities is striking exactly as intended – directly at the very power currently wielded by corporations against people and nature.

We must respond by challenging not only the ability of corporations to stop these initiatives, but by directly challenging the authority of judges and courts to help them do it. If the actions of the corporations violate the people’s rights of self-government, and the corporations are unable to prevent community votes without the courts, then it’s time for more and more people to understand how the system itself stands in direct contrast to the “we the people” myth of American lore.

From there, rather than trying to reform the existing structure, more and more people will begin the real work of building a new one.

Please make a donation to help us support communities doing on-the-ground work to advance Community Rights in 2017. Your donation makes our work with communities to build the Community Rights Movement possible!

DONATE

Feature Photo: Flickr Creative Commons: Black Lives Matter by Ella

In 2015, residents of several rural Ohio counties watched in shock as Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted unilaterally removed citizen-sponsored initiatives from county ballots. The initiatives, which had already qualified for the ballot, would have banned oil and gas drilling and fracking in those communities.

The Ohio Supreme Court sharply rapped Husted’s knuckles for using authority he didn’t have. However, a year later, the people of those same counties watched in disbelief as Husted again blocked their initiatives.  This time, the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed his actions.

It is not surprising that Husted – who as of this writing is running for governor – is the darling of the very oil and gas industry targeted by those local initiatives. Indeed, the industry has long-supported his electoral campaigns.

Democratic Rights Matter

The people of Ohio aren’t the only victims of their own government. Across the country we are seeing government efforts, often at the behest of corporations, to restrict the authority of “we the people” to the initiative. Government officials are taking this action even though the authority for initiative is codified in nearly half the state constitutions in the United States.

In Oregon, a cat-and-mouse game is underway between some of the country’s largest agribusiness corporations and residents of rural counties. People there are proposing local initiatives to ban aerial pesticide spraying and genetically modified crops. In response, corporations affected by those initiatives have lawyered-up, using obscure legal provisions to try to stop the initiatives from ever reaching the ballot.

In Washington State, at the urging of industry, courts have now adopted a rule that allows virtually any proposed citizen-sponsored initiative to be blocked by corporations before ever reaching the ballot and a vote of the people.

In New Hampshire and Maine, some local elected officials have gone even further – refusing to allow duly-qualified citizen initiatives to be voted upon at annual Town Meeting. In at least one New Hampshire town, local elected officials have refused to sign an initiative even after it was legally adopted by the people of the town.

Corporations are working to restrict democratic rights to initiative as communities are advancing structural change – challenging the current system of law we live under, which insulates corporate projects from democratic control. In its place, these communities are moving forward a new system of law based on recognizing the right of communities to decide their own futures, and then elevating that community right above corporate “rights.” This new system is now beginning to forcibly crash into the older, existing one.

The ballot clashes in Ohio, Oregon, and elsewhere are all about the old system not going quietly.

The Old

Here’s how the system works today. Decisions made by the federal government trump the decisions and laws of state governments. Decisions and laws made by both federal and state governments trump the laws of local governments.

So, when the State of Vermont adopts a law requiring the labeling of food products containing genetically modified ingredients, the U.S. Congress can simply override it. It did so in 2016 when our representatives passed a law nullifying state efforts to mandate food labeling.

The more central an issue is to affecting commerce, the more preemptive rules you will find around it. For example, the federal government controls almost all issues dealing with oil and gas pipelines and the rail transportation of fossil fuels. Thus, those issues are lifted out of the hands of local and state governments.

State-level preemption operates in a similar fashion. Almost all states have oil and gas laws. Those laws regulate and control how fossil fuels are extracted. Those state laws have generally been found to abolish not only the authority of localities to determine how oil and gas is extracted, but whether oil and gas is extracted.  Thus, state laws – such as those in Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Ohio – eliminate the authority of local communities to ban oil and gas extraction altogether.

Similarly, state legislatures across the country have adopted a slew of laws prohibiting communities from banning large corporate water withdrawals, dumping of toxic sewage sludge, and GMOs. Some states, including Pennsylvania and New York, have even authorized their state Attorneys General to act as private attorneys for corporations to sue communities who buck those laws.

It all boils down to this: If you have the financial and legal ability to control the uppermost levels of lawmaking and decision making, you don’t have to abide by the rights and wishes of the communities in which you operate.

But it Gets Even Better – Corporate “Rights”

There are rare cases in which people have actually been able to use their state or federal government to adopt laws that benefit the public interest. However, corporations then use the courts to either overturn those laws or severely limit their reach.

Corporations are the dominant economic players in our system. They have pioneered the use of corporate constitutional “rights” to attack any law that infringes upon their ability to engage in commerce or use corporate property. In today’s world, in which almost every meaningful reform affects commerce or property, it’s relatively easy to apply those “rights” to overturn laws that affect certain industries.

Thus, corporate free speech rights have been leveraged to overturn federal laws limiting corporate campaign donations; corporate religious rights have been used to limit healthcare legislation; corporate property rights have been used to overturn environmental regulations; and corporate commerce rights have been used to strike down regulations on coal mining, trucking, pipelines, waste disposal, and landfills.

Thus, when corporations lose at the ballot box, or in legislatures, they can resort to the safe harbor of the judiciary. This branch of government has shown itself more than willing to vindicate corporate “rights” to nullify laws that corporations don’t like. Making matters worse, state legislatures often take those court rulings and write them directly into state law – thus safeguarding those corporate “rights” by providing statutory protection for them.

Each round of this makes it harder to remove those corporate protections, adding more and more layers that must be peeled back in the future.

For “we the people” to get anything to stick, we are forced to successfully navigate every single gauntlet. We not only work to convince legislators to pass our laws, but then hope against hope that we can beat back the corporations as they sue us for violating the rules of preemption and corporate “rights.”

While we have to win at every level to succeed, corporations only need to win at one to put us back on the defensive.

It’s the ultimate rigged game. It works only because the system is so camouflaged to give it the appearance of being open to change, and so few people understand the degree to which it is rigged.

Is it any surprise that we’ve ended up where we are?

The New

Over the past twenty years, people in hundreds of communities across the U.S. have come face-to-face with the machinery of this system and its inevitable results.

Poll after poll and study after study reveal the same thing: People want healthy, safe communities and protections for nature. And yet our system has been engineered to deliver the opposite. Instead of recognizing the power of people to build those communities, it gives power to those interested in exploiting them.

Those trying to stop the spread of GMOs at the community level run up against state and federal laws that override their efforts. Those trying to stop corporate water withdrawals run up against state water resources laws. Those trying to stop the dumping of sewage sludge run up against state nutrient management acts. Those trying to ban fracking run up against state oil and gas acts. Those trying to stop oil and gas pipelines run up against preemptive federal authority lodged in agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Many of those communities try to use traditional nuisance, land use, or zoning laws to stop those corporate projects. In doing so, they labor to find a loophole in the preemption laws, or they hire lawyers who have convinced the communities that concocting some kind of exception to those laws is possible.

They almost always lose. And even in those rare circumstances when they win, like a self-sealing tire, the system develops new laws that permanently seal the leak – so that other communities are unable to use the same arguments.

Many communities have learned from those losses and have begun to drive a new theory of law – one not focused on trying to find loopholes, crawling through exemptions, or finding the “right” judge who might look favorably on their lawmaking.

These communities have begun to understand that the individual threat or issue facing their community – fracking, GMOs, or otherwise – is just a symptom of this system, not the problem itself. That’s because the system we have doesn’t care what we want or need, no matter what the consequences to our communities and nature.

People in communities under threat are confronted with the reality of this existing system. They are concluding that without true decentralization of decision-making authority down to the community level, they’ll never be able to stop fracking or other threats from invading their communities. Further, they are realizing we’ll never be able to move toward anything close to sustainability. They’re arguing that the people of their communities possess a constitutional right of local, community self-government – the authority to govern themselves on issues that the corporate state has removed from their control.

What will it take for communities to actually have control over whether fossil fuels are shipped through them? To decide if pipelines are laid? To vote if GMOs are planted? To determine whether they are forced to become the unwilling hosts of factory farms, toxic dumps, or pollution factories?

It will take the entire system of law turned upside down.

That means that communities must be able to pass laws and make them stick. It means making those communities immune from corporate “rights” and the authority of “higher” governments to define what communities can and cannot do.

It means giving birth to community democracy – a concept that, itself, is actually older than the system we currently have.

The New – A Constitutional Right of Local Community Self-Government

Recognition by the courts of a constitutional right of local community self-government would have far-reaching consequences. A finding that the right exists would force other legal doctrines to give way to that right. This means, for example, that the use of corporate “rights” to overturn local laws would be precluded as running afoul of the right of self-government. So would the authority of the state and federal government to override certain types of local lawmaking.

Consider a rural community facing fracking. Today, under the old (existing) system, let’s say the community adopts a law, either by their elected officials or through an initiative process, to ban fracking for shale gas. The law perhaps establishes a local “bill of rights” that recognizes rights to clean air, pure water, and sustainable energy, and then bans fracking as a violation of those rights.

The law is inevitably challenged by oil and gas corporations affected by the ban. The constitutional right of the people to local community self-government is thus pitted directly against the corporate claimed constitutional “rights” and against the state government’s authority to prevent the community from adopting the law.

With the recognition of a constitutional right of local self-government, however, those corporate “rights” and the authority of the state government must give way to the people’s constitutional right to govern themselves.

Such a system, while recognizing the authority of the state and federal government to set a minimum “floor” for environmental, labor, and other standards, would prevent the state and federal government from prohibiting communities from setting higher standards, or from expanding civil and environmental rights at the local level. It is precisely that “ceiling” preemption where corporations have run amok – using that power to stop communities from prohibiting harmful corporate projects.

The Clash of the Old and the New

Because this new system is so unlike the old, it would be surprising if the corporate defenders of the old system wouldn’t be investing huge sums of money to stop this new system of law from being adopted by communities.

Over the past decade, as over two hundred communities in ten states have driven this new system into being, affected corporations have challenged a handful of those laws. Today, understanding the scope of change envisioned by the community rights movement, those corporations are now reaching into the elections system itself, to stop those laws even before they are adopted.

We need to understand that these corporate challenges are proof that the new system of law envisioned by communities is striking exactly as intended – directly at the very power currently wielded by corporations against people and nature.

We must respond by challenging not only the ability of corporations to stop these initiatives, but by directly challenging the authority of judges and courts to help them do it. If the actions of the corporations violate the people’s rights of self-government, and the corporations are unable to prevent community votes without the courts, then it’s time for more and more people to understand how the system itself stands in direct contrast to the “we the people” myth of American lore.

From there, rather than trying to reform the existing structure, more and more people will begin the real work of building a new one.

Please make a donation to help us support communities doing on-the-ground work to advance Community Rights in 2017. Your donation makes our work with communities to build the Community Rights Movement possible!

DONATE

Feature Photo: Flickr Creative Commons: Black Lives Matter by Ella

In 2015, residents of several rural Ohio counties watched in shock as Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted unilaterally removed citizen-sponsored initiatives from county ballots. The initiatives, which had already qualified for the ballot, would have banned oil and gas drilling and fracking in those communities.

The Ohio Supreme Court sharply rapped Husted’s knuckles for using authority he didn’t have. However, a year later, the people of those same counties watched in disbelief as Husted again blocked their initiatives.  This time, the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed his actions.

It is not surprising that Husted – who as of this writing is running for governor – is the darling of the very oil and gas industry targeted by those local initiatives. Indeed, the industry has long-supported his electoral campaigns.

Democratic Rights Matter

The people of Ohio aren’t the only victims of their own government. Across the country we are seeing government efforts, often at the behest of corporations, to restrict the authority of “we the people” to the initiative. Government officials are taking this action even though the authority for initiative is codified in nearly half the state constitutions in the United States.

In Oregon, a cat-and-mouse game is underway between some of the country’s largest agribusiness corporations and residents of rural counties. People there are proposing local initiatives to ban aerial pesticide spraying and genetically modified crops. In response, corporations affected by those initiatives have lawyered-up, using obscure legal provisions to try to stop the initiatives from ever reaching the ballot.

In Washington State, at the urging of industry, courts have now adopted a rule that allows virtually any proposed citizen-sponsored initiative to be blocked by corporations before ever reaching the ballot and a vote of the people.

In New Hampshire and Maine, some local elected officials have gone even further – refusing to allow duly-qualified citizen initiatives to be voted upon at annual Town Meeting. In at least one New Hampshire town, local elected officials have refused to sign an initiative even after it was legally adopted by the people of the town.

Corporations are working to restrict democratic rights to initiative as communities are advancing structural change – challenging the current system of law we live under, which insulates corporate projects from democratic control. In its place, these communities are moving forward a new system of law based on recognizing the right of communities to decide their own futures, and then elevating that community right above corporate “rights.” This new system is now beginning to forcibly crash into the older, existing one.

The ballot clashes in Ohio, Oregon, and elsewhere are all about the old system not going quietly.

The Old

Here’s how the system works today. Decisions made by the federal government trump the decisions and laws of state governments. Decisions and laws made by both federal and state governments trump the laws of local governments.

So, when the State of Vermont adopts a law requiring the labeling of food products containing genetically modified ingredients, the U.S. Congress can simply override it. It did so in 2016 when our representatives passed a law nullifying state efforts to mandate food labeling.

The more central an issue is to affecting commerce, the more preemptive rules you will find around it. For example, the federal government controls almost all issues dealing with oil and gas pipelines and the rail transportation of fossil fuels. Thus, those issues are lifted out of the hands of local and state governments.

State-level preemption operates in a similar fashion. Almost all states have oil and gas laws. Those laws regulate and control how fossil fuels are extracted. Those state laws have generally been found to abolish not only the authority of localities to determine how oil and gas is extracted, but whether oil and gas is extracted.  Thus, state laws – such as those in Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Ohio – eliminate the authority of local communities to ban oil and gas extraction altogether.

Similarly, state legislatures across the country have adopted a slew of laws prohibiting communities from banning large corporate water withdrawals, dumping of toxic sewage sludge, and GMOs. Some states, including Pennsylvania and New York, have even authorized their state Attorneys General to act as private attorneys for corporations to sue communities who buck those laws.

It all boils down to this: If you have the financial and legal ability to control the uppermost levels of lawmaking and decision making, you don’t have to abide by the rights and wishes of the communities in which you operate.

But it Gets Even Better – Corporate “Rights”

There are rare cases in which people have actually been able to use their state or federal government to adopt laws that benefit the public interest. However, corporations then use the courts to either overturn those laws or severely limit their reach.

Corporations are the dominant economic players in our system. They have pioneered the use of corporate constitutional “rights” to attack any law that infringes upon their ability to engage in commerce or use corporate property. In today’s world, in which almost every meaningful reform affects commerce or property, it’s relatively easy to apply those “rights” to overturn laws that affect certain industries.

Thus, corporate free speech rights have been leveraged to overturn federal laws limiting corporate campaign donations; corporate religious rights have been used to limit healthcare legislation; corporate property rights have been used to overturn environmental regulations; and corporate commerce rights have been used to strike down regulations on coal mining, trucking, pipelines, waste disposal, and landfills.

Thus, when corporations lose at the ballot box, or in legislatures, they can resort to the safe harbor of the judiciary. This branch of government has shown itself more than willing to vindicate corporate “rights” to nullify laws that corporations don’t like. Making matters worse, state legislatures often take those court rulings and write them directly into state law – thus safeguarding those corporate “rights” by providing statutory protection for them.

Each round of this makes it harder to remove those corporate protections, adding more and more layers that must be peeled back in the future.

For “we the people” to get anything to stick, we are forced to successfully navigate every single gauntlet. We not only work to convince legislators to pass our laws, but then hope against hope that we can beat back the corporations as they sue us for violating the rules of preemption and corporate “rights.”

While we have to win at every level to succeed, corporations only need to win at one to put us back on the defensive.

It’s the ultimate rigged game. It works only because the system is so camouflaged to give it the appearance of being open to change, and so few people understand the degree to which it is rigged.

Is it any surprise that we’ve ended up where we are?

The New

Over the past twenty years, people in hundreds of communities across the U.S. have come face-to-face with the machinery of this system and its inevitable results.

Poll after poll and study after study reveal the same thing: People want healthy, safe communities and protections for nature. And yet our system has been engineered to deliver the opposite. Instead of recognizing the power of people to build those communities, it gives power to those interested in exploiting them.

Those trying to stop the spread of GMOs at the community level run up against state and federal laws that override their efforts. Those trying to stop corporate water withdrawals run up against state water resources laws. Those trying to stop the dumping of sewage sludge run up against state nutrient management acts. Those trying to ban fracking run up against state oil and gas acts. Those trying to stop oil and gas pipelines run up against preemptive federal authority lodged in agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Many of those communities try to use traditional nuisance, land use, or zoning laws to stop those corporate projects. In doing so, they labor to find a loophole in the preemption laws, or they hire lawyers who have convinced the communities that concocting some kind of exception to those laws is possible.

They almost always lose. And even in those rare circumstances when they win, like a self-sealing tire, the system develops new laws that permanently seal the leak – so that other communities are unable to use the same arguments.

Many communities have learned from those losses and have begun to drive a new theory of law – one not focused on trying to find loopholes, crawling through exemptions, or finding the “right” judge who might look favorably on their lawmaking.

These communities have begun to understand that the individual threat or issue facing their community – fracking, GMOs, or otherwise – is just a symptom of this system, not the problem itself. That’s because the system we have doesn’t care what we want or need, no matter what the consequences to our communities and nature.

People in communities under threat are confronted with the reality of this existing system. They are concluding that without true decentralization of decision-making authority down to the community level, they’ll never be able to stop fracking or other threats from invading their communities. Further, they are realizing we’ll never be able to move toward anything close to sustainability. They’re arguing that the people of their communities possess a constitutional right of local, community self-government – the authority to govern themselves on issues that the corporate state has removed from their control.

What will it take for communities to actually have control over whether fossil fuels are shipped through them? To decide if pipelines are laid? To vote if GMOs are planted? To determine whether they are forced to become the unwilling hosts of factory farms, toxic dumps, or pollution factories?

It will take the entire system of law turned upside down.

That means that communities must be able to pass laws and make them stick. It means making those communities immune from corporate “rights” and the authority of “higher” governments to define what communities can and cannot do.

It means giving birth to community democracy – a concept that, itself, is actually older than the system we currently have.

The New – A Constitutional Right of Local Community Self-Government

Recognition by the courts of a constitutional right of local community self-government would have far-reaching consequences. A finding that the right exists would force other legal doctrines to give way to that right. This means, for example, that the use of corporate “rights” to overturn local laws would be precluded as running afoul of the right of self-government. So would the authority of the state and federal government to override certain types of local lawmaking.

Consider a rural community facing fracking. Today, under the old (existing) system, let’s say the community adopts a law, either by their elected officials or through an initiative process, to ban fracking for shale gas. The law perhaps establishes a local “bill of rights” that recognizes rights to clean air, pure water, and sustainable energy, and then bans fracking as a violation of those rights.

The law is inevitably challenged by oil and gas corporations affected by the ban. The constitutional right of the people to local community self-government is thus pitted directly against the corporate claimed constitutional “rights” and against the state government’s authority to prevent the community from adopting the law.

With the recognition of a constitutional right of local self-government, however, those corporate “rights” and the authority of the state government must give way to the people’s constitutional right to govern themselves.

Such a system, while recognizing the authority of the state and federal government to set a minimum “floor” for environmental, labor, and other standards, would prevent the state and federal government from prohibiting communities from setting higher standards, or from expanding civil and environmental rights at the local level. It is precisely that “ceiling” preemption where corporations have run amok – using that power to stop communities from prohibiting harmful corporate projects.

The Clash of the Old and the New

Because this new system is so unlike the old, it would be surprising if the corporate defenders of the old system wouldn’t be investing huge sums of money to stop this new system of law from being adopted by communities.

Over the past decade, as over two hundred communities in ten states have driven this new system into being, affected corporations have challenged a handful of those laws. Today, understanding the scope of change envisioned by the community rights movement, those corporations are now reaching into the elections system itself, to stop those laws even before they are adopted.

We need to understand that these corporate challenges are proof that the new system of law envisioned by communities is striking exactly as intended – directly at the very power currently wielded by corporations against people and nature.

We must respond by challenging not only the ability of corporations to stop these initiatives, but by directly challenging the authority of judges and courts to help them do it. If the actions of the corporations violate the people’s rights of self-government, and the corporations are unable to prevent community votes without the courts, then it’s time for more and more people to understand how the system itself stands in direct contrast to the “we the people” myth of American lore.

From there, rather than trying to reform the existing structure, more and more people will begin the real work of building a new one.

Please make a donation to help us support communities doing on-the-ground work to advance Community Rights in 2017. Your donation makes our work with communities to build the Community Rights Movement possible!

DONATE

Feature Photo: Flickr Creative Commons: Black Lives Matter by Ella

In 2015, residents of several rural Ohio counties watched in shock as Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted unilaterally removed citizen-sponsored initiatives from county ballots. The initiatives, which had already qualified for the ballot, would have banned oil and gas drilling and fracking in those communities.

The Ohio Supreme Court sharply rapped Husted’s knuckles for using authority he didn’t have. However, a year later, the people of those same counties watched in disbelief as Husted again blocked their initiatives.  This time, the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed his actions.

It is not surprising that Husted – who as of this writing is running for governor – is the darling of the very oil and gas industry targeted by those local initiatives. Indeed, the industry has long-supported his electoral campaigns.

Democratic Rights Matter

The people of Ohio aren’t the only victims of their own government. Across the country we are seeing government efforts, often at the behest of corporations, to restrict the authority of “we the people” to the initiative. Government officials are taking this action even though the authority for initiative is codified in nearly half the state constitutions in the United States.

In Oregon, a cat-and-mouse game is underway between some of the country’s largest agribusiness corporations and residents of rural counties. People there are proposing local initiatives to ban aerial pesticide spraying and genetically modified crops. In response, corporations affected by those initiatives have lawyered-up, using obscure legal provisions to try to stop the initiatives from ever reaching the ballot.

In Washington State, at the urging of industry, courts have now adopted a rule that allows virtually any proposed citizen-sponsored initiative to be blocked by corporations before ever reaching the ballot and a vote of the people.

In New Hampshire and Maine, some local elected officials have gone even further – refusing to allow duly-qualified citizen initiatives to be voted upon at annual Town Meeting. In at least one New Hampshire town, local elected officials have refused to sign an initiative even after it was legally adopted by the people of the town.

Corporations are working to restrict democratic rights to initiative as communities are advancing structural change – challenging the current system of law we live under, which insulates corporate projects from democratic control. In its place, these communities are moving forward a new system of law based on recognizing the right of communities to decide their own futures, and then elevating that community right above corporate “rights.” This new system is now beginning to forcibly crash into the older, existing one.

The ballot clashes in Ohio, Oregon, and elsewhere are all about the old system not going quietly.

The Old

Here’s how the system works today. Decisions made by the federal government trump the decisions and laws of state governments. Decisions and laws made by both federal and state governments trump the laws of local governments.

So, when the State of Vermont adopts a law requiring the labeling of food products containing genetically modified ingredients, the U.S. Congress can simply override it. It did so in 2016 when our representatives passed a law nullifying state efforts to mandate food labeling.

The more central an issue is to affecting commerce, the more preemptive rules you will find around it. For example, the federal government controls almost all issues dealing with oil and gas pipelines and the rail transportation of fossil fuels. Thus, those issues are lifted out of the hands of local and state governments.

State-level preemption operates in a similar fashion. Almost all states have oil and gas laws. Those laws regulate and control how fossil fuels are extracted. Those state laws have generally been found to abolish not only the authority of localities to determine how oil and gas is extracted, but whether oil and gas is extracted.  Thus, state laws – such as those in Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Ohio – eliminate the authority of local communities to ban oil and gas extraction altogether.

Similarly, state legislatures across the country have adopted a slew of laws prohibiting communities from banning large corporate water withdrawals, dumping of toxic sewage sludge, and GMOs. Some states, including Pennsylvania and New York, have even authorized their state Attorneys General to act as private attorneys for corporations to sue communities who buck those laws.

It all boils down to this: If you have the financial and legal ability to control the uppermost levels of lawmaking and decision making, you don’t have to abide by the rights and wishes of the communities in which you operate.

But it Gets Even Better – Corporate “Rights”

There are rare cases in which people have actually been able to use their state or federal government to adopt laws that benefit the public interest. However, corporations then use the courts to either overturn those laws or severely limit their reach.

Corporations are the dominant economic players in our system. They have pioneered the use of corporate constitutional “rights” to attack any law that infringes upon their ability to engage in commerce or use corporate property. In today’s world, in which almost every meaningful reform affects commerce or property, it’s relatively easy to apply those “rights” to overturn laws that affect certain industries.

Thus, corporate free speech rights have been leveraged to overturn federal laws limiting corporate campaign donations; corporate religious rights have been used to limit healthcare legislation; corporate property rights have been used to overturn environmental regulations; and corporate commerce rights have been used to strike down regulations on coal mining, trucking, pipelines, waste disposal, and landfills.

Thus, when corporations lose at the ballot box, or in legislatures, they can resort to the safe harbor of the judiciary. This branch of government has shown itself more than willing to vindicate corporate “rights” to nullify laws that corporations don’t like. Making matters worse, state legislatures often take those court rulings and write them directly into state law – thus safeguarding those corporate “rights” by providing statutory protection for them.

Each round of this makes it harder to remove those corporate protections, adding more and more layers that must be peeled back in the future.

For “we the people” to get anything to stick, we are forced to successfully navigate every single gauntlet. We not only work to convince legislators to pass our laws, but then hope against hope that we can beat back the corporations as they sue us for violating the rules of preemption and corporate “rights.”

While we have to win at every level to succeed, corporations only need to win at one to put us back on the defensive.

It’s the ultimate rigged game. It works only because the system is so camouflaged to give it the appearance of being open to change, and so few people understand the degree to which it is rigged.

Is it any surprise that we’ve ended up where we are?

The New

Over the past twenty years, people in hundreds of communities across the U.S. have come face-to-face with the machinery of this system and its inevitable results.

Poll after poll and study after study reveal the same thing: People want healthy, safe communities and protections for nature. And yet our system has been engineered to deliver the opposite. Instead of recognizing the power of people to build those communities, it gives power to those interested in exploiting them.

Those trying to stop the spread of GMOs at the community level run up against state and federal laws that override their efforts. Those trying to stop corporate water withdrawals run up against state water resources laws. Those trying to stop the dumping of sewage sludge run up against state nutrient management acts. Those trying to ban fracking run up against state oil and gas acts. Those trying to stop oil and gas pipelines run up against preemptive federal authority lodged in agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Many of those communities try to use traditional nuisance, land use, or zoning laws to stop those corporate projects. In doing so, they labor to find a loophole in the preemption laws, or they hire lawyers who have convinced the communities that concocting some kind of exception to those laws is possible.

They almost always lose. And even in those rare circumstances when they win, like a self-sealing tire, the system develops new laws that permanently seal the leak – so that other communities are unable to use the same arguments.

Many communities have learned from those losses and have begun to drive a new theory of law – one not focused on trying to find loopholes, crawling through exemptions, or finding the “right” judge who might look favorably on their lawmaking.

These communities have begun to understand that the individual threat or issue facing their community – fracking, GMOs, or otherwise – is just a symptom of this system, not the problem itself. That’s because the system we have doesn’t care what we want or need, no matter what the consequences to our communities and nature.

People in communities under threat are confronted with the reality of this existing system. They are concluding that without true decentralization of decision-making authority down to the community level, they’ll never be able to stop fracking or other threats from invading their communities. Further, they are realizing we’ll never be able to move toward anything close to sustainability. They’re arguing that the people of their communities possess a constitutional right of local, community self-government – the authority to govern themselves on issues that the corporate state has removed from their control.

What will it take for communities to actually have control over whether fossil fuels are shipped through them? To decide if pipelines are laid? To vote if GMOs are planted? To determine whether they are forced to become the unwilling hosts of factory farms, toxic dumps, or pollution factories?

It will take the entire system of law turned upside down.

That means that communities must be able to pass laws and make them stick. It means making those communities immune from corporate “rights” and the authority of “higher” governments to define what communities can and cannot do.

It means giving birth to community democracy – a concept that, itself, is actually older than the system we currently have.

The New – A Constitutional Right of Local Community Self-Government

Recognition by the courts of a constitutional right of local community self-government would have far-reaching consequences. A finding that the right exists would force other legal doctrines to give way to that right. This means, for example, that the use of corporate “rights” to overturn local laws would be precluded as running afoul of the right of self-government. So would the authority of the state and federal government to override certain types of local lawmaking.

Consider a rural community facing fracking. Today, under the old (existing) system, let’s say the community adopts a law, either by their elected officials or through an initiative process, to ban fracking for shale gas. The law perhaps establishes a local “bill of rights” that recognizes rights to clean air, pure water, and sustainable energy, and then bans fracking as a violation of those rights.

The law is inevitably challenged by oil and gas corporations affected by the ban. The constitutional right of the people to local community self-government is thus pitted directly against the corporate claimed constitutional “rights” and against the state government’s authority to prevent the community from adopting the law.

With the recognition of a constitutional right of local self-government, however, those corporate “rights” and the authority of the state government must give way to the people’s constitutional right to govern themselves.

Such a system, while recognizing the authority of the state and federal government to set a minimum “floor” for environmental, labor, and other standards, would prevent the state and federal government from prohibiting communities from setting higher standards, or from expanding civil and environmental rights at the local level. It is precisely that “ceiling” preemption where corporations have run amok – using that power to stop communities from prohibiting harmful corporate projects.

The Clash of the Old and the New

Because this new system is so unlike the old, it would be surprising if the corporate defenders of the old system wouldn’t be investing huge sums of money to stop this new system of law from being adopted by communities.

Over the past decade, as over two hundred communities in ten states have driven this new system into being, affected corporations have challenged a handful of those laws. Today, understanding the scope of change envisioned by the community rights movement, those corporations are now reaching into the elections system itself, to stop those laws even before they are adopted.

We need to understand that these corporate challenges are proof that the new system of law envisioned by communities is striking exactly as intended – directly at the very power currently wielded by corporations against people and nature.

We must respond by challenging not only the ability of corporations to stop these initiatives, but by directly challenging the authority of judges and courts to help them do it. If the actions of the corporations violate the people’s rights of self-government, and the corporations are unable to prevent community votes without the courts, then it’s time for more and more people to understand how the system itself stands in direct contrast to the “we the people” myth of American lore.

From there, rather than trying to reform the existing structure, more and more people will begin the real work of building a new one.

Please make a donation to help us support communities doing on-the-ground work to advance Community Rights in 2017. Your donation makes our work with communities to build the Community Rights Movement possible!

DONATE

Feature Photo: Flickr Creative Commons: Black Lives Matter by Ella

In 2015, residents of several rural Ohio counties watched in shock as Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted unilaterally removed citizen-sponsored initiatives from county ballots. The initiatives, which had already qualified for the ballot, would have banned oil and gas drilling and fracking in those communities.

The Ohio Supreme Court sharply rapped Husted’s knuckles for using authority he didn’t have. However, a year later, the people of those same counties watched in disbelief as Husted again blocked their initiatives.  This time, the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed his actions.

It is not surprising that Husted – who as of this writing is running for governor – is the darling of the very oil and gas industry targeted by those local initiatives. Indeed, the industry has long-supported his electoral campaigns.

Democratic Rights Matter

The people of Ohio aren’t the only victims of their own government. Across the country we are seeing government efforts, often at the behest of corporations, to restrict the authority of “we the people” to the initiative. Government officials are taking this action even though the authority for initiative is codified in nearly half the state constitutions in the United States.

In Oregon, a cat-and-mouse game is underway between some of the country’s largest agribusiness corporations and residents of rural counties. People there are proposing local initiatives to ban aerial pesticide spraying and genetically modified crops. In response, corporations affected by those initiatives have lawyered-up, using obscure legal provisions to try to stop the initiatives from ever reaching the ballot.

In Washington State, at the urging of industry, courts have now adopted a rule that allows virtually any proposed citizen-sponsored initiative to be blocked by corporations before ever reaching the ballot and a vote of the people.

In New Hampshire and Maine, some local elected officials have gone even further – refusing to allow duly-qualified citizen initiatives to be voted upon at annual Town Meeting. In at least one New Hampshire town, local elected officials have refused to sign an initiative even after it was legally adopted by the people of the town.

Corporations are working to restrict democratic rights to initiative as communities are advancing structural change – challenging the current system of law we live under, which insulates corporate projects from democratic control. In its place, these communities are moving forward a new system of law based on recognizing the right of communities to decide their own futures, and then elevating that community right above corporate “rights.” This new system is now beginning to forcibly crash into the older, existing one.

The ballot clashes in Ohio, Oregon, and elsewhere are all about the old system not going quietly.

The Old

Here’s how the system works today. Decisions made by the federal government trump the decisions and laws of state governments. Decisions and laws made by both federal and state governments trump the laws of local governments.

So, when the State of Vermont adopts a law requiring the labeling of food products containing genetically modified ingredients, the U.S. Congress can simply override it. It did so in 2016 when our representatives passed a law nullifying state efforts to mandate food labeling.

The more central an issue is to affecting commerce, the more preemptive rules you will find around it. For example, the federal government controls almost all issues dealing with oil and gas pipelines and the rail transportation of fossil fuels. Thus, those issues are lifted out of the hands of local and state governments.

State-level preemption operates in a similar fashion. Almost all states have oil and gas laws. Those laws regulate and control how fossil fuels are extracted. Those state laws have generally been found to abolish not only the authority of localities to determine how oil and gas is extracted, but whether oil and gas is extracted.  Thus, state laws – such as those in Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Ohio – eliminate the authority of local communities to ban oil and gas extraction altogether.

Similarly, state legislatures across the country have adopted a slew of laws prohibiting communities from banning large corporate water withdrawals, dumping of toxic sewage sludge, and GMOs. Some states, including Pennsylvania and New York, have even authorized their state Attorneys General to act as private attorneys for corporations to sue communities who buck those laws.

It all boils down to this: If you have the financial and legal ability to control the uppermost levels of lawmaking and decision making, you don’t have to abide by the rights and wishes of the communities in which you operate.

But it Gets Even Better – Corporate “Rights”

There are rare cases in which people have actually been able to use their state or federal government to adopt laws that benefit the public interest. However, corporations then use the courts to either overturn those laws or severely limit their reach.

Corporations are the dominant economic players in our system. They have pioneered the use of corporate constitutional “rights” to attack any law that infringes upon their ability to engage in commerce or use corporate property. In today’s world, in which almost every meaningful reform affects commerce or property, it’s relatively easy to apply those “rights” to overturn laws that affect certain industries.

Thus, corporate free speech rights have been leveraged to overturn federal laws limiting corporate campaign donations; corporate religious rights have been used to limit healthcare legislation; corporate property rights have been used to overturn environmental regulations; and corporate commerce rights have been used to strike down regulations on coal mining, trucking, pipelines, waste disposal, and landfills.

Thus, when corporations lose at the ballot box, or in legislatures, they can resort to the safe harbor of the judiciary. This branch of government has shown itself more than willing to vindicate corporate “rights” to nullify laws that corporations don’t like. Making matters worse, state legislatures often take those court rulings and write them directly into state law – thus safeguarding those corporate “rights” by providing statutory protection for them.

Each round of this makes it harder to remove those corporate protections, adding more and more layers that must be peeled back in the future.

For “we the people” to get anything to stick, we are forced to successfully navigate every single gauntlet. We not only work to convince legislators to pass our laws, but then hope against hope that we can beat back the corporations as they sue us for violating the rules of preemption and corporate “rights.”

While we have to win at every level to succeed, corporations only need to win at one to put us back on the defensive.

It’s the ultimate rigged game. It works only because the system is so camouflaged to give it the appearance of being open to change, and so few people understand the degree to which it is rigged.

Is it any surprise that we’ve ended up where we are?

The New

Over the past twenty years, people in hundreds of communities across the U.S. have come face-to-face with the machinery of this system and its inevitable results.

Poll after poll and study after study reveal the same thing: People want healthy, safe communities and protections for nature. And yet our system has been engineered to deliver the opposite. Instead of recognizing the power of people to build those communities, it gives power to those interested in exploiting them.

Those trying to stop the spread of GMOs at the community level run up against state and federal laws that override their efforts. Those trying to stop corporate water withdrawals run up against state water resources laws. Those trying to stop the dumping of sewage sludge run up against state nutrient management acts. Those trying to ban fracking run up against state oil and gas acts. Those trying to stop oil and gas pipelines run up against preemptive federal authority lodged in agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Many of those communities try to use traditional nuisance, land use, or zoning laws to stop those corporate projects. In doing so, they labor to find a loophole in the preemption laws, or they hire lawyers who have convinced the communities that concocting some kind of exception to those laws is possible.

They almost always lose. And even in those rare circumstances when they win, like a self-sealing tire, the system develops new laws that permanently seal the leak – so that other communities are unable to use the same arguments.

Many communities have learned from those losses and have begun to drive a new theory of law – one not focused on trying to find loopholes, crawling through exemptions, or finding the “right” judge who might look favorably on their lawmaking.

These communities have begun to understand that the individual threat or issue facing their community – fracking, GMOs, or otherwise – is just a symptom of this system, not the problem itself. That’s because the system we have doesn’t care what we want or need, no matter what the consequences to our communities and nature.

People in communities under threat are confronted with the reality of this existing system. They are concluding that without true decentralization of decision-making authority down to the community level, they’ll never be able to stop fracking or other threats from invading their communities. Further, they are realizing we’ll never be able to move toward anything close to sustainability. They’re arguing that the people of their communities possess a constitutional right of local, community self-government – the authority to govern themselves on issues that the corporate state has removed from their control.

What will it take for communities to actually have control over whether fossil fuels are shipped through them? To decide if pipelines are laid? To vote if GMOs are planted? To determine whether they are forced to become the unwilling hosts of factory farms, toxic dumps, or pollution factories?

It will take the entire system of law turned upside down.

That means that communities must be able to pass laws and make them stick. It means making those communities immune from corporate “rights” and the authority of “higher” governments to define what communities can and cannot do.

It means giving birth to community democracy – a concept that, itself, is actually older than the system we currently have.

The New – A Constitutional Right of Local Community Self-Government

Recognition by the courts of a constitutional right of local community self-government would have far-reaching consequences. A finding that the right exists would force other legal doctrines to give way to that right. This means, for example, that the use of corporate “rights” to overturn local laws would be precluded as running afoul of the right of self-government. So would the authority of the state and federal government to override certain types of local lawmaking.

Consider a rural community facing fracking. Today, under the old (existing) system, let’s say the community adopts a law, either by their elected officials or through an initiative process, to ban fracking for shale gas. The law perhaps establishes a local “bill of rights” that recognizes rights to clean air, pure water, and sustainable energy, and then bans fracking as a violation of those rights.

The law is inevitably challenged by oil and gas corporations affected by the ban. The constitutional right of the people to local community self-government is thus pitted directly against the corporate claimed constitutional “rights” and against the state government’s authority to prevent the community from adopting the law.

With the recognition of a constitutional right of local self-government, however, those corporate “rights” and the authority of the state government must give way to the people’s constitutional right to govern themselves.

Such a system, while recognizing the authority of the state and federal government to set a minimum “floor” for environmental, labor, and other standards, would prevent the state and federal government from prohibiting communities from setting higher standards, or from expanding civil and environmental rights at the local level. It is precisely that “ceiling” preemption where corporations have run amok – using that power to stop communities from prohibiting harmful corporate projects.

The Clash of the Old and the New

Because this new system is so unlike the old, it would be surprising if the corporate defenders of the old system wouldn’t be investing huge sums of money to stop this new system of law from being adopted by communities.

Over the past decade, as over two hundred communities in ten states have driven this new system into being, affected corporations have challenged a handful of those laws. Today, understanding the scope of change envisioned by the community rights movement, those corporations are now reaching into the elections system itself, to stop those laws even before they are adopted.

We need to understand that these corporate challenges are proof that the new system of law envisioned by communities is striking exactly as intended – directly at the very power currently wielded by corporations against people and nature.

We must respond by challenging not only the ability of corporations to stop these initiatives, but by directly challenging the authority of judges and courts to help them do it. If the actions of the corporations violate the people’s rights of self-government, and the corporations are unable to prevent community votes without the courts, then it’s time for more and more people to understand how the system itself stands in direct contrast to the “we the people” myth of American lore.

From there, rather than trying to reform the existing structure, more and more people will begin the real work of building a new one.

Please make a donation to help us support communities doing on-the-ground work to advance Community Rights in 2017. Your donation makes our work with communities to build the Community Rights Movement possible!

DONATE

Feature Photo: Flickr Creative Commons: Black Lives Matter by Ella

In 2015, residents of several rural Ohio counties watched in shock as Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted unilaterally removed citizen-sponsored initiatives from county ballots. The initiatives, which had already qualified for the ballot, would have banned oil and gas drilling and fracking in those communities.

The Ohio Supreme Court sharply rapped Husted’s knuckles for using authority he didn’t have. However, a year later, the people of those same counties watched in disbelief as Husted again blocked their initiatives.  This time, the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed his actions.

It is not surprising that Husted – who as of this writing is running for governor – is the darling of the very oil and gas industry targeted by those local initiatives. Indeed, the industry has long-supported his electoral campaigns.

Democratic Rights Matter

The people of Ohio aren’t the only victims of their own government. Across the country we are seeing government efforts, often at the behest of corporations, to restrict the authority of “we the people” to the initiative. Government officials are taking this action even though the authority for initiative is codified in nearly half the state constitutions in the United States.

In Oregon, a cat-and-mouse game is underway between some of the country’s largest agribusiness corporations and residents of rural counties. People there are proposing local initiatives to ban aerial pesticide spraying and genetically modified crops. In response, corporations affected by those initiatives have lawyered-up, using obscure legal provisions to try to stop the initiatives from ever reaching the ballot.

In Washington State, at the urging of industry, courts have now adopted a rule that allows virtually any proposed citizen-sponsored initiative to be blocked by corporations before ever reaching the ballot and a vote of the people.

In New Hampshire and Maine, some local elected officials have gone even further – refusing to allow duly-qualified citizen initiatives to be voted upon at annual Town Meeting. In at least one New Hampshire town, local elected officials have refused to sign an initiative even after it was legally adopted by the people of the town.

Corporations are working to restrict democratic rights to initiative as communities are advancing structural change – challenging the current system of law we live under, which insulates corporate projects from democratic control. In its place, these communities are moving forward a new system of law based on recognizing the right of communities to decide their own futures, and then elevating that community right above corporate “rights.” This new system is now beginning to forcibly crash into the older, existing one.

The ballot clashes in Ohio, Oregon, and elsewhere are all about the old system not going quietly.

The Old

Here’s how the system works today. Decisions made by the federal government trump the decisions and laws of state governments. Decisions and laws made by both federal and state governments trump the laws of local governments.

So, when the State of Vermont adopts a law requiring the labeling of food products containing genetically modified ingredients, the U.S. Congress can simply override it. It did so in 2016 when our representatives passed a law nullifying state efforts to mandate food labeling.

The more central an issue is to affecting commerce, the more preemptive rules you will find around it. For example, the federal government controls almost all issues dealing with oil and gas pipelines and the rail transportation of fossil fuels. Thus, those issues are lifted out of the hands of local and state governments.

State-level preemption operates in a similar fashion. Almost all states have oil and gas laws. Those laws regulate and control how fossil fuels are extracted. Those state laws have generally been found to abolish not only the authority of localities to determine how oil and gas is extracted, but whether oil and gas is extracted.  Thus, state laws – such as those in Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Ohio – eliminate the authority of local communities to ban oil and gas extraction altogether.

Similarly, state legislatures across the country have adopted a slew of laws prohibiting communities from banning large corporate water withdrawals, dumping of toxic sewage sludge, and GMOs. Some states, including Pennsylvania and New York, have even authorized their state Attorneys General to act as private attorneys for corporations to sue communities who buck those laws.

It all boils down to this: If you have the financial and legal ability to control the uppermost levels of lawmaking and decision making, you don’t have to abide by the rights and wishes of the communities in which you operate.

But it Gets Even Better – Corporate “Rights”

There are rare cases in which people have actually been able to use their state or federal government to adopt laws that benefit the public interest. However, corporations then use the courts to either overturn those laws or severely limit their reach.

Corporations are the dominant economic players in our system. They have pioneered the use of corporate constitutional “rights” to attack any law that infringes upon their ability to engage in commerce or use corporate property. In today’s world, in which almost every meaningful reform affects commerce or property, it’s relatively easy to apply those “rights” to overturn laws that affect certain industries.

Thus, corporate free speech rights have been leveraged to overturn federal laws limiting corporate campaign donations; corporate religious rights have been used to limit healthcare legislation; corporate property rights have been used to overturn environmental regulations; and corporate commerce rights have been used to strike down regulations on coal mining, trucking, pipelines, waste disposal, and landfills.

Thus, when corporations lose at the ballot box, or in legislatures, they can resort to the safe harbor of the judiciary. This branch of government has shown itself more than willing to vindicate corporate “rights” to nullify laws that corporations don’t like. Making matters worse, state legislatures often take those court rulings and write them directly into state law – thus safeguarding those corporate “rights” by providing statutory protection for them.

Each round of this makes it harder to remove those corporate protections, adding more and more layers that must be peeled back in the future.

For “we the people” to get anything to stick, we are forced to successfully navigate every single gauntlet. We not only work to convince legislators to pass our laws, but then hope against hope that we can beat back the corporations as they sue us for violating the rules of preemption and corporate “rights.”

While we have to win at every level to succeed, corporations only need to win at one to put us back on the defensive.

It’s the ultimate rigged game. It works only because the system is so camouflaged to give it the appearance of being open to change, and so few people understand the degree to which it is rigged.

Is it any surprise that we’ve ended up where we are?

The New

Over the past twenty years, people in hundreds of communities across the U.S. have come face-to-face with the machinery of this system and its inevitable results.

Poll after poll and study after study reveal the same thing: People want healthy, safe communities and protections for nature. And yet our system has been engineered to deliver the opposite. Instead of recognizing the power of people to build those communities, it gives power to those interested in exploiting them.

Those trying to stop the spread of GMOs at the community level run up against state and federal laws that override their efforts. Those trying to stop corporate water withdrawals run up against state water resources laws. Those trying to stop the dumping of sewage sludge run up against state nutrient management acts. Those trying to ban fracking run up against state oil and gas acts. Those trying to stop oil and gas pipelines run up against preemptive federal authority lodged in agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Many of those communities try to use traditional nuisance, land use, or zoning laws to stop those corporate projects. In doing so, they labor to find a loophole in the preemption laws, or they hire lawyers who have convinced the communities that concocting some kind of exception to those laws is possible.

They almost always lose. And even in those rare circumstances when they win, like a self-sealing tire, the system develops new laws that permanently seal the leak – so that other communities are unable to use the same arguments.

Many communities have learned from those losses and have begun to drive a new theory of law – one not focused on trying to find loopholes, crawling through exemptions, or finding the “right” judge who might look favorably on their lawmaking.

These communities have begun to understand that the individual threat or issue facing their community – fracking, GMOs, or otherwise – is just a symptom of this system, not the problem itself. That’s because the system we have doesn’t care what we want or need, no matter what the consequences to our communities and nature.

People in communities under threat are confronted with the reality of this existing system. They are concluding that without true decentralization of decision-making authority down to the community level, they’ll never be able to stop fracking or other threats from invading their communities. Further, they are realizing we’ll never be able to move toward anything close to sustainability. They’re arguing that the people of their communities possess a constitutional right of local, community self-government – the authority to govern themselves on issues that the corporate state has removed from their control.

What will it take for communities to actually have control over whether fossil fuels are shipped through them? To decide if pipelines are laid? To vote if GMOs are planted? To determine whether they are forced to become the unwilling hosts of factory farms, toxic dumps, or pollution factories?

It will take the entire system of law turned upside down.

That means that communities must be able to pass laws and make them stick. It means making those communities immune from corporate “rights” and the authority of “higher” governments to define what communities can and cannot do.

It means giving birth to community democracy – a concept that, itself, is actually older than the system we currently have.

The New – A Constitutional Right of Local Community Self-Government

Recognition by the courts of a constitutional right of local community self-government would have far-reaching consequences. A finding that the right exists would force other legal doctrines to give way to that right. This means, for example, that the use of corporate “rights” to overturn local laws would be precluded as running afoul of the right of self-government. So would the authority of the state and federal government to override certain types of local lawmaking.

Consider a rural community facing fracking. Today, under the old (existing) system, let’s say the community adopts a law, either by their elected officials or through an initiative process, to ban fracking for shale gas. The law perhaps establishes a local “bill of rights” that recognizes rights to clean air, pure water, and sustainable energy, and then bans fracking as a violation of those rights.

The law is inevitably challenged by oil and gas corporations affected by the ban. The constitutional right of the people to local community self-government is thus pitted directly against the corporate claimed constitutional “rights” and against the state government’s authority to prevent the community from adopting the law.

With the recognition of a constitutional right of local self-government, however, those corporate “rights” and the authority of the state government must give way to the people’s constitutional right to govern themselves.

Such a system, while recognizing the authority of the state and federal government to set a minimum “floor” for environmental, labor, and other standards, would prevent the state and federal government from prohibiting communities from setting higher standards, or from expanding civil and environmental rights at the local level. It is precisely that “ceiling” preemption where corporations have run amok – using that power to stop communities from prohibiting harmful corporate projects.

The Clash of the Old and the New

Because this new system is so unlike the old, it would be surprising if the corporate defenders of the old system wouldn’t be investing huge sums of money to stop this new system of law from being adopted by communities.

Over the past decade, as over two hundred communities in ten states have driven this new system into being, affected corporations have challenged a handful of those laws. Today, understanding the scope of change envisioned by the community rights movement, those corporations are now reaching into the elections system itself, to stop those laws even before they are adopted.

We need to understand that these corporate challenges are proof that the new system of law envisioned by communities is striking exactly as intended – directly at the very power currently wielded by corporations against people and nature.

We must respond by challenging not only the ability of corporations to stop these initiatives, but by directly challenging the authority of judges and courts to help them do it. If the actions of the corporations violate the people’s rights of self-government, and the corporations are unable to prevent community votes without the courts, then it’s time for more and more people to understand how the system itself stands in direct contrast to the “we the people” myth of American lore.

From there, rather than trying to reform the existing structure, more and more people will begin the real work of building a new one.

Please make a donation to help us support communities doing on-the-ground work to advance Community Rights in 2017. Your donation makes our work with communities to build the Community Rights Movement possible!

DONATE

Feature Photo: Flickr Creative Commons: Black Lives Matter by Ella

In 2015, residents of several rural Ohio counties watched in shock as Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted unilaterally removed citizen-sponsored initiatives from county ballots. The initiatives, which had already qualified for the ballot, would have banned oil and gas drilling and fracking in those communities.

The Ohio Supreme Court sharply rapped Husted’s knuckles for using authority he didn’t have. However, a year later, the people of those same counties watched in disbelief as Husted again blocked their initiatives.  This time, the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed his actions.

It is not surprising that Husted – who as of this writing is running for governor – is the darling of the very oil and gas industry targeted by those local initiatives. Indeed, the industry has long-supported his electoral campaigns.

Democratic Rights Matter

The people of Ohio aren’t the only victims of their own government. Across the country we are seeing government efforts, often at the behest of corporations, to restrict the authority of “we the people” to the initiative. Government officials are taking this action even though the authority for initiative is codified in nearly half the state constitutions in the United States.

In Oregon, a cat-and-mouse game is underway between some of the country’s largest agribusiness corporations and residents of rural counties. People there are proposing local initiatives to ban aerial pesticide spraying and genetically modified crops. In response, corporations affected by those initiatives have lawyered-up, using obscure legal provisions to try to stop the initiatives from ever reaching the ballot.

In Washington State, at the urging of industry, courts have now adopted a rule that allows virtually any proposed citizen-sponsored initiative to be blocked by corporations before ever reaching the ballot and a vote of the people.

In New Hampshire and Maine, some local elected officials have gone even further – refusing to allow duly-qualified citizen initiatives to be voted upon at annual Town Meeting. In at least one New Hampshire town, local elected officials have refused to sign an initiative even after it was legally adopted by the people of the town.

Corporations are working to restrict democratic rights to initiative as communities are advancing structural change – challenging the current system of law we live under, which insulates corporate projects from democratic control. In its place, these communities are moving forward a new system of law based on recognizing the right of communities to decide their own futures, and then elevating that community right above corporate “rights.” This new system is now beginning to forcibly crash into the older, existing one.

The ballot clashes in Ohio, Oregon, and elsewhere are all about the old system not going quietly.

The Old

Here’s how the system works today. Decisions made by the federal government trump the decisions and laws of state governments. Decisions and laws made by both federal and state governments trump the laws of local governments.

So, when the State of Vermont adopts a law requiring the labeling of food products containing genetically modified ingredients, the U.S. Congress can simply override it. It did so in 2016 when our representatives passed a law nullifying state efforts to mandate food labeling.

The more central an issue is to affecting commerce, the more preemptive rules you will find around it. For example, the federal government controls almost all issues dealing with oil and gas pipelines and the rail transportation of fossil fuels. Thus, those issues are lifted out of the hands of local and state governments.

State-level preemption operates in a similar fashion. Almost all states have oil and gas laws. Those laws regulate and control how fossil fuels are extracted. Those state laws have generally been found to abolish not only the authority of localities to determine how oil and gas is extracted, but whether oil and gas is extracted.  Thus, state laws – such as those in Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Ohio – eliminate the authority of local communities to ban oil and gas extraction altogether.

Similarly, state legislatures across the country have adopted a slew of laws prohibiting communities from banning large corporate water withdrawals, dumping of toxic sewage sludge, and GMOs. Some states, including Pennsylvania and New York, have even authorized their state Attorneys General to act as private attorneys for corporations to sue communities who buck those laws.

It all boils down to this: If you have the financial and legal ability to control the uppermost levels of lawmaking and decision making, you don’t have to abide by the rights and wishes of the communities in which you operate.

But it Gets Even Better – Corporate “Rights”

There are rare cases in which people have actually been able to use their state or federal government to adopt laws that benefit the public interest. However, corporations then use the courts to either overturn those laws or severely limit their reach.

Corporations are the dominant economic players in our system. They have pioneered the use of corporate constitutional “rights” to attack any law that infringes upon their ability to engage in commerce or use corporate property. In today’s world, in which almost every meaningful reform affects commerce or property, it’s relatively easy to apply those “rights” to overturn laws that affect certain industries.

Thus, corporate free speech rights have been leveraged to overturn federal laws limiting corporate campaign donations; corporate religious rights have been used to limit healthcare legislation; corporate property rights have been used to overturn environmental regulations; and corporate commerce rights have been used to strike down regulations on coal mining, trucking, pipelines, waste disposal, and landfills.

Thus, when corporations lose at the ballot box, or in legislatures, they can resort to the safe harbor of the judiciary. This branch of government has shown itself more than willing to vindicate corporate “rights” to nullify laws that corporations don’t like. Making matters worse, state legislatures often take those court rulings and write them directly into state law – thus safeguarding those corporate “rights” by providing statutory protection for them.

Each round of this makes it harder to remove those corporate protections, adding more and more layers that must be peeled back in the future.

For “we the people” to get anything to stick, we are forced to successfully navigate every single gauntlet. We not only work to convince legislators to pass our laws, but then hope against hope that we can beat back the corporations as they sue us for violating the rules of preemption and corporate “rights.”

While we have to win at every level to succeed, corporations only need to win at one to put us back on the defensive.

It’s the ultimate rigged game. It works only because the system is so camouflaged to give it the appearance of being open to change, and so few people understand the degree to which it is rigged.

Is it any surprise that we’ve ended up where we are?

The New

Over the past twenty years, people in hundreds of communities across the U.S. have come face-to-face with the machinery of this system and its inevitable results.

Poll after poll and study after study reveal the same thing: People want healthy, safe communities and protections for nature. And yet our system has been engineered to deliver the opposite. Instead of recognizing the power of people to build those communities, it gives power to those interested in exploiting them.

Those trying to stop the spread of GMOs at the community level run up against state and federal laws that override their efforts. Those trying to stop corporate water withdrawals run up against state water resources laws. Those trying to stop the dumping of sewage sludge run up against state nutrient management acts. Those trying to ban fracking run up against state oil and gas acts. Those trying to stop oil and gas pipelines run up against preemptive federal authority lodged in agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Many of those communities try to use traditional nuisance, land use, or zoning laws to stop those corporate projects. In doing so, they labor to find a loophole in the preemption laws, or they hire lawyers who have convinced the communities that concocting some kind of exception to those laws is possible.

They almost always lose. And even in those rare circumstances when they win, like a self-sealing tire, the system develops new laws that permanently seal the leak – so that other communities are unable to use the same arguments.

Many communities have learned from those losses and have begun to drive a new theory of law – one not focused on trying to find loopholes, crawling through exemptions, or finding the “right” judge who might look favorably on their lawmaking.

These communities have begun to understand that the individual threat or issue facing their community – fracking, GMOs, or otherwise – is just a symptom of this system, not the problem itself. That’s because the system we have doesn’t care what we want or need, no matter what the consequences to our communities and nature.

People in communities under threat are confronted with the reality of this existing system. They are concluding that without true decentralization of decision-making authority down to the community level, they’ll never be able to stop fracking or other threats from invading their communities. Further, they are realizing we’ll never be able to move toward anything close to sustainability. They’re arguing that the people of their communities possess a constitutional right of local, community self-government – the authority to govern themselves on issues that the corporate state has removed from their control.

What will it take for communities to actually have control over whether fossil fuels are shipped through them? To decide if pipelines are laid? To vote if GMOs are planted? To determine whether they are forced to become the unwilling hosts of factory farms, toxic dumps, or pollution factories?

It will take the entire system of law turned upside down.

That means that communities must be able to pass laws and make them stick. It means making those communities immune from corporate “rights” and the authority of “higher” governments to define what communities can and cannot do.

It means giving birth to community democracy – a concept that, itself, is actually older than the system we currently have.

The New – A Constitutional Right of Local Community Self-Government

Recognition by the courts of a constitutional right of local community self-government would have far-reaching consequences. A finding that the right exists would force other legal doctrines to give way to that right. This means, for example, that the use of corporate “rights” to overturn local laws would be precluded as running afoul of the right of self-government. So would the authority of the state and federal government to override certain types of local lawmaking.

Consider a rural community facing fracking. Today, under the old (existing) system, let’s say the community adopts a law, either by their elected officials or through an initiative process, to ban fracking for shale gas. The law perhaps establishes a local “bill of rights” that recognizes rights to clean air, pure water, and sustainable energy, and then bans fracking as a violation of those rights.

The law is inevitably challenged by oil and gas corporations affected by the ban. The constitutional right of the people to local community self-government is thus pitted directly against the corporate claimed constitutional “rights” and against the state government’s authority to prevent the community from adopting the law.

With the recognition of a constitutional right of local self-government, however, those corporate “rights” and the authority of the state government must give way to the people’s constitutional right to govern themselves.

Such a system, while recognizing the authority of the state and federal government to set a minimum “floor” for environmental, labor, and other standards, would prevent the state and federal government from prohibiting communities from setting higher standards, or from expanding civil and environmental rights at the local level. It is precisely that “ceiling” preemption where corporations have run amok – using that power to stop communities from prohibiting harmful corporate projects.

The Clash of the Old and the New

Because this new system is so unlike the old, it would be surprising if the corporate defenders of the old system wouldn’t be investing huge sums of money to stop this new system of law from being adopted by communities.

Over the past decade, as over two hundred communities in ten states have driven this new system into being, affected corporations have challenged a handful of those laws. Today, understanding the scope of change envisioned by the community rights movement, those corporations are now reaching into the elections system itself, to stop those laws even before they are adopted.

We need to understand that these corporate challenges are proof that the new system of law envisioned by communities is striking exactly as intended – directly at the very power currently wielded by corporations against people and nature.

We must respond by challenging not only the ability of corporations to stop these initiatives, but by directly challenging the authority of judges and courts to help them do it. If the actions of the corporations violate the people’s rights of self-government, and the corporations are unable to prevent community votes without the courts, then it’s time for more and more people to understand how the system itself stands in direct contrast to the “we the people” myth of American lore.

From there, rather than trying to reform the existing structure, more and more people will begin the real work of building a new one.

Please make a donation to help us support communities doing on-the-ground work to advance Community Rights in 2017. Your donation makes our work with communities to build the Community Rights Movement possible!

DONATE

Feature Photo: Flickr Creative Commons: Black Lives Matter by Ella