Re: No Coal! Initiative Blocked from Bellingham BallotExcerpt from:
Response to Judge Snyder's Decision
By Thomas Linzey
We all know it, even if we don’t often say it out loud.
Development corporations decide our land use policies, energy corporations make our energy policy, agribusiness corporations make our farm policies, finance and banking corporations make our economic policies.
Behind them all, of course, are a relatively small number of people who make those decisions on behalf of the corporations that they run.
And they’ve been making them for a long, long time.
Meanwhile, as a result of those decisions, the world burns.
Scientists now predict a warming of the planet that is almost irreversible – countries like the Maldives are now buying land in India to move their populations – and studies now document that 70% of all biodiversity on the planet has been extinguished. 4 billion pounds of toxic chemicals, including 72 million pounds of carcinogens are released into the atmosphere annually; 11 million people live within one mile of a Superfund site, and 700 industrial chemicals are now found within each of our bodies.
In fact, by almost all major environmental statistics, we’re in worse shape now than prior to the adoption of the country’s first major environmental laws over 40 years ago.
It’s not for lack of trying. People watching the destruction of their communities right before their eyes have used all of the legal tools that the system has deigned to give them – appealing regulatory permits, challenging Environmental Impact Statements.
But it has all miserably failed to turn the boat around. And the boat is rapidly running aground.
Our activism has failed because the problem isn’t coal, or incinerators, or sludge dumping, or factory farms – the problem is something much harder to get our hands around - a system that recognizes the right of a small number of corporate decision-makers to make decisions about energy, agriculture, transportation, and waste management. A system that enforces those corporate decisions over ours.
And that decision-making structure – of corporate minorities over community majorities – is ingrained throughout our local, state, and federal governments as a result of over two hundred years’ worth of governmental gifts of “rights” and powers onto corporations.
It’s driving this planet of ours directly into the ground.
If we’re really interested in actually stopping the harms, we must recognize that structural changes are necessary – ones that permanently elevate community power above corporate power.
Because without real, local control, we will never be able to move towards any semblance of sustainability.
Because state and federal governments are so hopelessly locked down and beyond our control; and are so hopelessly dedicated to mowing down anything that stands in the way of the corporate mantra of “the endless production of more", we must seize the only governments we can – the ones that supposedly represent us, and turn them upwards against the other layers of government to force those other layers of government to change.
And change requires raw force. As author Derrick Jensen is fond of saying – “do we really think that Monsanto will stop Monsantoing because we ask nicely?”
When we try to use our community governments to force that change, however, corporate decision makers have long been there before us. They’ve managed to transform our municipal governments into mere puppets; they’ve obtained “rights” for their corporations that punish governments when they attempt to control them; and they’ve used our state and federal governments to preempt “we the people” from moving to stop what harms us.
What’s tragic, of course, is that this structure places municipal corporations on the side of the corporations; and our elected officials become defenders of corporate “rights.”
Which is what just happened in Bellingham. And, it’s not the first time that the City of Bellingham municipal corporation has reacted this way – the City, of course, acted to bar the healthy bay initiative, which sought waterfront cleanup; and when the City signed the contract with American Traffic Solutions - the red light camera corporation - to put traffic cameras into Bellingham, the City explicitly recognized the corporation’s authority to take action against any citizen lawmaking that would interfere with the corporation’s “rights".
The courts – programmed to keep municipalities from interfering with corporate “rights” - have created a myriad of ways in which citizen lawmaking can be prevented. The recent decision by the County Court essentially allows any initiative to be challenged pre-election for any reason. So much for citizen lawmaking power - even when it’s just about the right of the people simply to vote on an initiative.
If you want to stop getting screwed, you have to change who makes the decisions that are screwing you. And changing “who decides” means coming face-to-face with a structure of law and government that has been designed very carefully to eliminate the democratic process; and then openly and frontally challenging that system of law.
That’s why the Bellingham initiative has very little to do with coal – and everything to do with restoring the right of people to make decisions about what happens within their own communities, where they live.
Because right now, decision-makers two thousand miles away from Bellingham have more rights than you. And if it stays that way, get ready for more of the same.
Thomas Linzey, Executive Director
Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund]
Link to complete article:
http://www.facebook.com/notes/coal-free-bellingham/respone-to-judge-snyders-decision-by-thomas-linzey/
SHELTON BLOG NOTE:
Link to previous related post:
http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2012/08/03/2631100/no-coal-initiative-blocked-from.html
The people of Mason County know exactly how the people of Bellingham feel after this decision; we too have been denied the right to vote, even in a non-binding advisory capacity, if only to share with our "leaders" our wants and desires.
ReplyDeleteWhen citizens are denied the right to EVEN vote on an issue which so directly affects their community, and the health of their citizens, then we are in very scary territory.
Mason County, we are still in an election season, we better do the best we can with the hand we were dealt last night in the primary.
We have to elect citizen legislators who will help us defend the rights of our communities to even exist.
Don't wait until we are trying to stop fracking in our county before coming to the realization that Mason County needs new leadership, and that Tim Sheldon and Lynda Ring Erickson are too high maintenance for our blood, and we simply cannot afford to keep THEM ON OUR PAYROLL after 2012!!