Paul K. HaederDown to Earth NW Correspondent
What's different
This year's Envision Spokane ballot measure has four amendments compared to 10 in 2009. These include:
• neighborhood residents have a right to determine the futures of their neighborhoods
• the right to a healthy Spokane River and aquifer
• employees have the right to constitutional protections in the workplace
• corporate powers shall be subordinate to people's rights
For more details visit
http://envisionspokane.org
.
Here’s one credo that scares guys like Frank Schaeffer, son of evangelist Francis Schaeffer and author of “Crazy for God: How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back.” “God’s Word gives women respect and respectability which they had never enjoyed in any other culture, and we must do what we can to preserve biblical standards. But it establishes the man as the head of the house.”
Now replace the word “man” with “corporation” and you have what amounts to what many in the world – not just the U.S. – see as the dictum of the 21st century: Corporations are the head of our house.
Many are fighting back this imbalance of power and justice, including grassroots groups. Via Campesino, the Transition Cities movements, even foodies are fighting the corporate “infection” to preserve rights to safe, non-genetically modified, animal-cruelty free food. One local impetus to give people more say in how neighborhoods form and evolve is on Spokane’s November ballot. Envision Spokane, which gained 25 percent of the yea votes in 2010, is returning.
Kai Huschke, campaign director of Envision Spokane and leader of Proposition 1, cites several past movements in the U.S. to gain citizen rights – like abolishing slavery and giving full citizenship to people of color.
He references a quote from Abigail Adams, urging her husband John in 1776 to treat women as equals in the Declaration of Independence:
“We are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
A second quote, “I saw clearly that the power to make the laws was the right through which all other rights could be secured” came in 1884 when 32-year-old Elizabeth Cady Stanton – joined by Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth – spoke at a women’s rally to gain the constitutional right to vote.
Huschke compares U.S. women getting the vote in 1920 after dozens of defeats to the heavy lifting he and his supporters must do to get a community bill of rights approved.
“Many would say that what we have today is a corporate state,” Huschke said. “Living within the corporate state there are no remedies to protecting safety, health, and welfare of communities.
Adopting amendments to the Spokane’s home rule charter puts in place remedies to protect and nourish neighborhoods, river and workplaces. These amendments acknowledge our protections and that the power is with the people where it comes to significant impacts to neighborhoods and river.”
The 10 amendments to the 2009 bill of rights were defeated, Huschke said, by corporate bucks to the tune of $400,000 from Spokane Home Builder’s Association, Associated Builders and Contractors and other unlimited pro-growth groups. Recently, the local GOP’s executive committee voted to oppose the 2011 proposition.
That doesn’t faze Kai.
“The rhetoric will get turned up as the powerful, monied interests make claims about property rights being under attack and costs if the Community Bill of Rights is adopted. The same stuff was said in 2009,” he said. “I’ve talked to people who voted against it in 2009, who said once they took the time to read it they would’ve voted yes. If I have to ask anything of Spokane voters, it’s to cover your ears and read what’s being proposed.”
When you have the Greater Spokane Incorporated throwing weight and money behind an anti-Community Bill of Rights movement, it’s easy to see the greater good. “Spokane is long overdue in recognizing the value of our neighborhoods, our river, and workplaces,” Kai said.
“We have a golden opportunity to show how to build a sustainable community. By honoring and protecting our assets we put ourselves in a position advocating for health and welfare over profit for profit sake, that other communities aren’t even close to considering.”
The history of communities gaining power back from outside agitators, carpetbaggers or corporate conglomerates is tied to public health and safety, centered around bad corporate behavior like factory farms’ waste ponds causing human and animal health issues; coal companies’ slurry lakes leaking millions of gallons of waste into rivers; quarry works that foul water; or energy companies that pollute the air along the Houston to Baton Rouge corridor where asthma and cancers are sky-high, according to CDC studies.
A community movement similar to Envision Spokane recently rose up against the energy lobby to put brakes on exploitation of shale deposits. The process known as hydraulic fracturing to get at natural gas fouls the water and has been implicated in earthquakes. Arkansas has temporarily stopped this process.
The Spokane Community Bill of Rights has its roots in a larger, more holistic frame – the Rights of Nature, something that sticks in the craws of GOP party loyalists, Chambers of Commerce and business interests.
Bolivia’s Law of the Rights of Mother Earth was enacted by President Evo Morales January 2011. It addresses that country’s natural resources as “blessings” and grants Earth rights to life, water and clean air; the right to repair livelihoods affected by human activities; and the right to be free from pollution.
Bolivia has established a Ministry of Mother Earth, a sort of global ombudsman whose job is to listen to nature’s complaints voiced by activists and others, including the state.
“If you want to have balance, and you think that the only (entities) with rights are humans or companies, how can you reach balance?” says Pablo Salon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the U.N. “But if you recognize nature has rights, and (if you provide) legal forums to protect and preserve those rights, you can achieve balance.”
Kai understands the power of people bicycling safely in Spokane with engineering and land use changes guided by citizens. He sees the power of community gardens and programs like Riverfront Farm putting disadvantaged youth to work in farming and landscaping experiential learning experiences.
He sees corporations destroying community-based tools to fight their shock doctrine of financial wizards, disturbances created by climate change, or volatility of food and energy. Communities under the current regulatory system are poorly suited to manage under the current political system, Kai insists.
It’s clear that even presidential aspirants like Mitt Romney can end up tongue-tied when a citizen at a rally asked about the power and rights of corporations: “Corporations are people, my friends.”
For Envision Spokane’s backers this line of logic is a slap in the face of our own bill of rights and democratic institutions tied to a government of the people, by the people and for the people. Kai said this effort is a vital one.
“The assault on public workers from corporate interests has been daunting. There is no reason not to believe that this attack won’t carry into the private sector. In the spring the Spokane City Council passed a resolution supporting collective bargaining for city employees. The Community Bill of Rights would protect that right with binding law for all unionized city workers. There is a power grab happening across the country, and Spokane needs to make sure it protects its workers.”
(The previous column is the opinion of columnist Paul K. Haeder and doesn’t necessarily reflect the opinions of Down to EarthNW, The Spokesman-Review or the Cowles Company.)
Community Bill of Rights -- Spokane Style