Over the past few months, the environmental organizing and strategy work of Thomas Linzey and Richard Grossman has come onto our radar screen through "Democracy School" -- a weekend workshop at which Linzey and Grossman have presented their work to local environmental and community activists. ONE/Northwest ally Jeff Reifman has been working with them to present Democracy School sessions in Seattle, and he offers the following introduction to their work. We think it's interesting reading for any Northwest environmental organizer who is looking for ideas about what next-generation environmental organizing could look like.

In rural central Pennsylvania, which is both culturally and politically conservative, a group of community organizers have been slowly building a movement that may point the way to future strategies for Northwest environmentalists. While we’ve been reading Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant wondering how to reframe our issues, these organizers are already successfully challenging the legitimacy of corporate power by organizing in terms of their Constitutional rights and our country’s supposed democracy. Over the past seven years, they’ve stopped industrial hog farms and land-applied sewage sludge spreading, fought gargantuan rock quarries and organized to prevent other corporate environmental, economic and quality-of-life harms from coming into their communities.

Much of the organizing in Pennsylvania is based on the work of Richard Grossman, co-founder of Programs on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD), and Thomas Linzey, founder of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund and attorney for many of these rural Pennsylvania communities.

Grossman and Linzey recently came to Seattle to lecture and teach a Democracy School, a weekend event where they train activists in these new organizing strategies.

“There’s never been an environmental movement in this country. People’s movements in this country, however, have been much different,” Linzey told the Seattle audience. “The Abolitionists, the Suffragists, the Populists: they sought to drive themselves and rights for themselves into the Constitution, the fundamental governing framework in this country. Herons, ecosystems, rivers, trees, mountains, they have no rights under our system. They are property.” Linzey questions whether there can be such a thing as a “movement” without an explicit focus on expanding rights.

Linzey works closely with Grossman, putting his research and writing into practice. Long before George W. Bush, Grossman had the courage to ask himself if the tactics he’d dedicated his life to as an activist were working, and if not, why not. Grossman saw that the vast majority of actions in this country centered on defending communities from corporate harm. Why was it that corporate power so easily trumped the democratic rights of people in communities all over our country? Grossman and his colleagues formed POCLAD and began studying the history of our democracy and the rise of corporate power.

“The problem is not when corporations break the law, because there are laws to deal with that,” Grossman told the audience in Seattle. “I’m much more concerned with what the people running corporations do that’s considered legal by the law and considered legal by the lore, l-o-r-e, the culture.”

Said Grossman: “Most of the harms, most of the violations of people’s rights and the harms to life and community which corporations are causing today in this country are considered by the law as legal and considered by the lore, by the culture, as essential for the American way of life, as essential for jobs, as essential for liberty, as essential for security, as essential for progress.”

In the network of Democracy Schools Grossman and Linzey have set up around the country, they teach that the work of the abolitionist movement which resulted in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution was co-opted by activist judges on the supreme court operating on behalf of corporations.

“At one point in this country, people were property: slaves,” said Linzey. “Abolitionists didn’t work together to put a slavery protection agency in place, after all. They worked for much more fundamental things.”

Said Grossman: “So, think of it this way, you’ve got a people’s movement one of the greatest, noblest people’s movements in the history of the earth driving the struggle to end slavery in this country into the Constitution across several generations. It took a lot of blood, a lot of suffering. And out of that blood and suffering and struggle, they drive it into the Constitution of the United States, they drive it into the culture…and only twenty years later you get some judges on the supreme court without even a drop of sweat coming down their brow taking the fourteenth amendment and just wrapping it around the corporate class enabling them to wield the Constitution against us over a hundred years later.”

In other words, we’ve been raised in a society that affords rights to corporations without the knowledge that the decision to grant such powers was illegitimately “found” in the Constitution on the basis of an amendment intended to protect freed slaves.

If you didn’t learn this in school, you’re not alone. Without this history, we don’t have a sense of the degree to which our democracy has been violated. We don’t even know enough to be rightfully infuriated.

“[We’ve had] a hundred years of accumulated corporate-state law. We’ve had a hundred years of accumulated corporate-state lore,” says Grossman. “They have rewritten our creation story. They have gotten into our minds. They channel our thinking. They channel our civic activism. They diminish our aspirations. We don’t talk about what we really want. We think about, oh, maybe this is the best we can do.”

In Pennsylvania, they’re winning environmental battles by framing issues in a way that pits the rights of communities for self-determination that have been written into the Constitution vs. the rights of corporations which have only been “found” in the Constitution by the courts in a long series of questionable legal rulings.

With Linzey’s help, 78 municipal governments across Pennsylvania have written laws that ban corporations from environmentally destructive agribusiness such as industrial hog farming and sewage-sludge spreading. Corporations in turn have had to sue to assert their “rights” – setting up court battles framed in favor of local communities seeking to protect their way of life and rights of self-governance.

A key piece of the Democracy School curriculum is retraining activists to see that the traditional avenues of fighting corporations e.g. the state and federal regulatory arena exist primarily to permit corporate harms. “The only things these laws regulate are workers and environmentalists. And they enable and empower the corporations,” said Grossman.

Richard Smith, an attorney with the environmental law firm Smith and Lowney, launched his career suing corporations for environmental regulatory violations. “The Clean Water Act says that it is the national goal to eliminate the discharge of pollution by like 1985,” says Smith. “[Its goal was] to end the point source pollution.” Clearly, it hasn’t.

Smith recently attended a Democracy School in Seattle. “Working with the system that we have, are we ever going to get anywhere near where we need to be to deal with the crises that we’re facing?” he asks. “I don’t think we are.”

Says Smith of Democracy School: “This is really a long term organizing and education effort to get more and more people to view things through a new framework. Democracy is for people and rights are for people, not for corporations.”

Richard Grossman will be back in Seattle for the May Democracy School. Although the school is full, Grossman is available for speaking engagements. Seattle Democracy School is also accepting reservations for the next Democracy School session in September. The support of the Northwest environmental community will be important to educating funders to help build capacity in the Democracy School program and to recruit and train community leaders as instructors. Seattle Democracy School organizers and alumni are also beginning to discuss the idea of building a rights-based organizing coalition in Seattle to launch a citywide bill of rights initiative.

If you’re interested in learning more about these programs, please contact jeff@democracyschool.info or check out the links below.

For more information on Democracy Schools, visit: http://www.constitution411.org/natldemschl/main/schedule_ds.html

To listen to Thomas Linzey and Richard Grossman’s lectures in Seattle, visit: http://www.commonbits.org/linzey and http://www.commonbits.org/grossman

To learn more about the St. Thomas Township case, visit: http://www.commonbits.org/frost and http://www.celdf.org

Jeff Reifman is the organizer of Seattle Democracy School, the founder of CommonTimes.org, and a freelance writer.