by Advocates for Community Empowerment (ACE)
We live in a society where it is a reality that corporations (especially large ones) almost always get what they want.

And if they want to come into your community and build a profitable toxic plant, spread GMOs, extract your water or dump trash they probably will be able to do so under our current, corporate-controlled system.

That’s because they have the motivation (profit) huge sums of money and guess what? They also have the very same constitutional rights as you and I.

For over one hundred years very passionate, very concerned citizens have been trying to protect our environment, our health and our quality of life and have been fighting an incessant march of corporations as they extract our resources, pollute our air, water, land and bodies and dictate to us how we are to live.

Tens of thousands of citizens have said “No” and fought to “Stop the _” or “End the _”, to no avail. Almost always the corporations get their way. The effect we have had on stopping this march to “endless more” has been miniscule. As a result, we now find our planet. our communities and our health facing serious, catastrophic changes.

Over and over activists go to the regulatory agencies in hopes that they will help protect us and the environment. The truth is that they won’t and they don’t. We need to do something different. We need to change our tactics. We need to be effective in standing up for our rights as citizens in our democracy. We need to create our own vision for how we should live rather than have one handed to us by corporations.

The truth is, we as the people of this democracy need to reassert our rights over illegitimate, non-sensical corporate “rights.”

We need to proactively proclaim that our rights to clean air, clear water, toxic free environment and healthy, organic food is inalienable and shall not be trumped by corporate domination and greed.

That sounds all well and good, you may say but how do we go about bringing this to fruition, how do we “reassert our rights” over corporations? Well, it is happening right now in visionary communities in Pennsylvania and New England. Read on.

The truth is, this should be our nation, our democracy and our vision, “of, by and for the people”, not of corporations. The rights articulated in our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution and in the various state constitutions clearly empower “the people” with the rights to life to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness

For too long, we have been ineffective in articulating our vision. Even if we are able to create a vision we have been stripped of our rights and rendered ineffective in enacting that vision. We have been powerless in fighting corporate, federal, and state governments because we always find ourselves pleading to them to please not pave over and decimate our environment and our health. The reality is, we nearly always lose because their agenda is different than ours, and they make us play by their rules.

It is now time, if we believe we are a democratic nation, for communities to stand up and assert their sovereignty, assert their rights to determine the future of their community.

It’s Time to Stop Saying No
We have a choice. We can continue to say “No” and try to get corporations to be kinder and gentler. We can continue to fight in regulatory meetings to get them to comply over “parts per million.” We can continue with the same results of being ineffective. We can continue to see our environment, health and way of life deteriorate.

Or we can abandon our “Stop the” rhetoric and refocus. We can instead start to establish our rights, our sovereignty to a healthy environment and how we want to live.

The Democracy-based Approach
There is something fundamentally wrong when a handful of corporate executives can come into a town or community, exert their power and override the wishes of the thousands of people who call that community their home. It directly contradicts and is a repudiation of everything that is inherent in a true democracy.

The work of Advocates for Community Empowerment (ACE) in New England directly challenges this contradiction. ACE draws upon the successful community democracy work initiated in Pennsylvania by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (Thomas Linzey and Richard Grossman, www.CELDF.org ), ACE works with community groups helping to drive into local law essential democratic protections. These by-laws, ordinances and local Ecological-Constitutions enacted by the people, create democratic precedence in helping communities define and protect their environment, health, economy and way of life.

Democracy School
The Daniel Pennock Democracy School Democracy is an essential 16 hour intensive for community activists, selectmen and concerned citizens who want to enact positive, fundamental protection for their communities and environment.

It is a stimulating and illuminating weekend course that teaches citizens and activists how to reframe exhausting and often discouraging single issue work (such as GMOs, water extraction, dumps etc.) in a way that we can confront corporate control on a powerful single front: people’s constitutional rights.

Democracy School explores the hidden history of the United States, how corporations have systematically usurped the rights of “we the people” and how visionary communities in PA and NH have taken progressive steps to enact laws that protect their democratic rights to decide while stripping corporations of their illegitimate power.

It exposes the limits of conventional regulatory organizing and offers a new organizing model that helps citizens confront the usurpation by corporations of the rights of communities, people, and the earth. Lectures cover the history of people’s movements and corporate power, and the dramatic recent organizing in Pennsylvania by communities confronting agribusiness, sewage sludge, and quarry corporations. Included with enrollment in the Democracy School is a 300 plus-page notebook of background reading material.

For a historical review of the Pennsylvania work through the end of 2003, see a feature article that appeared in Orion Magazine. (see http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/132/)

Created by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) and Richard Grossman, co-founder of the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy (POCLAD), Democracy Schools were launched at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania in 2003. Since then, the number of schools has grown rapidly. Over 130 schools have been taught from Alaska to New Hampshire.

As Kenny Ausubel, Founder and Co-Executive Director of Bioneers says, “If you take no other training this year, do the Democracy School. It is a superlative unfolding revelation of how corporations have hijacked democracy. It meticulously deconstructs the historical arc that brought us to this precipice. But most importantly, it then departs into the highly pragmatic and inspiring work now underway that is slowly turning the tide. . . This Second American Revolution may be the most important political work going on anywhere in the country or the world.”

For more information visit www.ACEne.org or call 603-431-9333

This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 4:38 am and is filed under Perspectives, Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.