A Bill of Rights for Occupied Communities

[marmar]

from YES! Magazine:



A Bill of Rights for Occupied Communities
A bill of rights that protects the rights of people and nature, but removes them from corporations? Your community could be next.

by Jeff Reifman, Thomas Linzey
posted Jan 03, 2012


When communities try to keep corporations from engaging in activities they don’t want, they often find they don’t have the legal power to say “no.” Why? Because our current legal structure too often protects the “rights” of corporations over the rights of actual human beings.

If we are to elevate our rights and the rights of our communities above those of a corporate few, we, too, need to transform the way laws work.

As we wrote in Turning Occupation into Lasting Change, mainstream progressive groups have failed by constraining their activities within legal and regulatory systems purposefully structured to subordinate communities to corporate power. Truly effective movements don’t operate that way. Abolitionists never sought to regulate the slave trade; they sought to transform the legal structure that supported it by treating slaves as property rather than people under the law. Suffragists did the same with the legal status of women.

This style of organizing moves away from traditional activism—mired in letter writing campaigns and lowest common denominator federal and state legislation—toward a new activism in which communities claim the right to make their own decisions, directly. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/a-bill-of-rights-for-occupied-communities

[meow2u3]

1. This stealth corporate legal power is exactly what we're up against

Politicians sneaked in provisions in trade laws that allow corporations, especially those who flout the laws everybody else have to follow, to sue sovereign nations for damages if they have the temerity to pass laws that protect their citizens from the predatory multinational craportions.

These riders were so deeply buried in thousands of pages of legislation that most of those who passed those laws don't even know those bombshells exist.