Overcoming Corporate "Personhood"

How'd you like to attend a class that teaches community persons how to overcome corporate "persons"? The following outline itself offers some outstanding history and educational empowerment for regular persons like us. Be the Change.

Democracy School Curriculum Outline



Section “A” – Our Work Within the Regulatory System:
What is Law and How is it Used?

1. The regulatory system guarantees that the environment will be damaged, that the system actually permits it to occur, and that the system is built to recognize certain constitutional constraints.
2. Our “engaging in the regulatory system”, while limiting some of the harms done by corporations, cannot achieve the types of change we need, and that our minds are colonized to believe that the untruth that we can create change by these means.
3. Our thinking is colonized not only by the law – which establishes certain constraints that deny us the goals of our activism – but that our thinking is colonized by a culture that is  created by those who benefit from the way that the system operates.
4. On the issue of land application of sewage sludge, we’ve been colonized that a bad is a good, through language used to frame the issue.
5. On the issue of the corporatization of agriculture, we’ve been colonized that a bad is a good, through language used to frame the issue.
6. Both the regulatory system of law and the culture produce a system of activism that cannot stop a corporate minority from governing community majorities, and that the regulatory system of law and culture effectively drives us like cattle down to a point of activism where we cannot win the issue that we’re working on.
7. A regulatory system of law governs employer-employee relationships, and that regulatory system of law codifies the rights of the employer over the employee law codifies the rights of the employer over the employee.
8. Regulatory systems of law were created not to protect health, safety, and welfare, but as a governmental barrier to prevent majority governance by the people.
9. The traditional use of the regulatory system of law, and the operation of today’s regulatory agencies, are not mistakes or errors, but a logical use of the law to assert minority control over majorities.
10. Law itself has a long history of being used by a minority to govern, that it was used by William the Conqueror to create an English structure of law; and that the mere existence of Constitutions does not guarantee democratic government.
11. Throughout history, there have always been people who have seen the illegitimate structure of governance, and demanded something else, like the English Levelers and Diggers in the 1600’s. 

DAY TWO

Section “B”- Colonialism:  Replicating the English Structure of Law and Culture Across the Globe and in the American Colonies

1. Western Europeans colonized other countries through various means of legally sanctioned violence and terror.
2. The English colonized the Caribbean through various means of violence and terror.
3. The Church intervened repeatedly to legalize and authorize state colonialism.
4. The English colonized America through the use of corporate charters which transferred full governing authority to one or several men, and that charters are, in reality, instruments of exclusion.
5. The English Structure of Law was positioned to recognize the legality of colonizing “discovered” lands, and that the American Indians were dispossessed of lands through that legal sanction.
6. The English Structure of Law viewed nature as a resource to be used, and thus, that it was man’s rightful role to subjugate, dominate and manage nature; and that through colonialism, the English imposed that view and forcibly eliminated those cultures that sustainably used natural systems.
7. The English Structure of Law treated African-Americans as property, leading to a system of slavery as the dominant economic institution both north and south, and that imposition of that understanding led to thousands of slave revolts prior to the Civil War in the United States.
8. The English Structure of law treated women as property.

Section “C” – The American Revolutionaries Rebel Against the English Structure of Law and Culture

1. Early colonists understood that English colonialism, carried out by multinational trading corporations chartered by England, resulted in the actions taken by Parliament against the American colonies.
2. Some revolutionaries understood that solving their problem meant replacing the English structure of law and culture, and transforming the chartered corporate colonies from property to constitutionalized states, and that the corporate form must be subordinated to the governance of the people.
3. That understanding led to the declaration of a new theory of governance, expounded as part of the Declaration of Independence, that people have inherent rights and create governments to secure and protect those rights, and that when government fails to secure and protect those rights, is the duty of people to abolish that government.
4. The authorship and release of the Declaration of Independence was illegal.
5. The colonists drafted a First Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, and those Articles envisioned a decentralized confederation of the States that retained local governing authority.
6. Lack of a centralized, preemptive federal government created delays for those engaged in multi-state commerce, and that Washington’s incorporation of the Potomac Company spotlighted those problems.

Section “D”- Betraying the Revolution: A Minority Replicates the English Structure of Law Through the Adoption of the U.S. Constitution

1. The Mount Vernon Conference was convened to solve the problems encountered by the Potomac Company, and the Conference led to the Annapolis Convention, which sent a report to Congress urging for a broader meeting to be held in Philadelphia.
2. Delegates to the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention were a select group representing property-owning white males, that the proceedings were secret and sentries were positioned at the doors, that Madison and Randolph presented the Virginia Plan on the first day, and that minutes of the Convention were not released for over 53 years.
3. Most of the delegates viewed democracy as rule by the rabble, and called for the crafting of a Constitution that enabled a minority to govern, and which protected the property of the minority from majority governance.
4. There were a group of people called the anti-federalists who understood what the delegates were attempting, and attempted to stop the ratification of the Constitution.
5. The Constitution is an anti-majoritarian, slave document that established a minority-rule, slave state.

Section “E” – The Second American Revolution: Abolitionists and Women’s Rights Agitators Lead a Revolt Against the Constitution

1. The Abolitionists launched a frontal attack on the Constitution as a slave document, and that the Abolitionists used the Declaration of Independence as the foundation for that attack.
2. The Abolitionists were forced to dismantle the popular American Colonization Society, which called for the expatriation of slaves to slave colonies, because their goals were not the goals of the Abolitionists.
3. The Abolitionists and Radical Republicans drove the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments into the Constitution following the Civil War.
4. The Abolitionists saw those Amendments as the beginning of a constitutional revolution, to replace a slave Constitution with a rights Constitution.
5. Southern and northern business interests reunited after the Civil War, and with the election of Hayes, pulled the federal troops out of the south and brought them north to put down labor uprisings.
6. The United States Supreme Court concocted legal theories that withdrew the protections of the Amendments from African-Americans in the South.
7. That women attempted to enforce the guarantees of those Amendments and were denied, and that suffragists broke the law as part of their efforts to drive universal suffrage into the Constitution.

Section F:  Building a Corporate State: A Minority Uses the Constitution to Override Community Self-Government

1. Accumulations of property and capital, in the form of the corporation, have been given constitutional "rights" and protections over the past one hundred and thirty years.
2. As early as 1819, corporations were recognized as being protected by the Contracts Clause of the Constitution, making their corporate charters exempt from unilateral authority exercised by the State seeking to change the charter.
3. Even though private corporations and municipal corporations are both corporations, separate sets of law have evolved which empower private corporations but keep municipal corporations under very strict State control.
4. The system of law guarantees that the rights of private corporations and their decisionmakers will almost always trump the rights of communities, even though municipal corporations ostensibly represent “we the people.”
5. The system of law does not recognize a right of local self-government, but that municipalities are wholly controlled by State governments, as a parent/child relationship.
6. The Commerce Clause has been used by corporations and the courts to strip state and municipal governments of lawmaking in the area of commerce, and that major environmental, labor, and civil rights laws were passed under the authority of that Clause.
7. The accumulation of rights for corporate minorities combined with the corporate grip on culture, has resulted in the creation of a Corporate State.

Section “G” – Shaping a Movement: Communities Assert Local Self-Governance in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Virginia and Beyond


DAY THREE

Optional - offered to Communities that are ready to organize a Rights-Based campaign to assert Self-Governing Rights through their Municipal government

Getting a Local Campaign Started

The Curriculum, Themes, and Structure for this Optional portion of the Course will be Tailored Specially for Each Community

Dmitry Orlov - Definancialization, Deglobalization, Relocalization

Dmitry Orlov - Definancialisation, Deglobalisation, Relocalisation from Feasta on Vimeo.

Meet the Farmer - Joel Salatin

Future Farming: The Call for a 50-Year Perspective on Agriculture

An Interview with Wes Jackson by Robert Jensen

[Excerpt] As everyone scrambles for a solution to the crises in the nation’s economy, Wes Jackson suggests we look to nature’s economy for some of the answers. With everyone focused on a stimulus package in the short term, he counsels that we pay more attention to the soil over the long haul.

“We live off of what comes out of the soil, not what’s in the bank,” said Jackson, president of The Land Institute. “If we squander the ecological capital of the soil, the capital on paper won’t much matter.”

Jackson doesn’t minimize the threat of the current financial problems but argues that the new administration should consider a “50-year farm bill,” which he and the writer/farmer Wendell Berry proposed in a New York Times op/ed earlier this month.

Central to such a bill would be soil. A plan for sustainable agriculture capable of producing healthful food has to come to solve the twin problems of soil erosion and contamination, said Jackson, who co-founded the research center in 1976 after leaving his job as an environmental studies professor at California State University-Sacramento.

Jackson believes that a key part of the solution is in approaches to growing food that mimic nature instead of trying to subdue it. While Jackson and his fellow researchers at The Land Institute continue their work on Natural Systems Agriculture, he also ponders how to turn the possibilities into policy. He spoke with me from his office in Salina, Kansas.

Robert Jensen: This is a short-term culture, and federal policies typically are aimed at short-term results. Why call for a farm bill that looks so far ahead, especially in tough economic times?
Wes Jackson: For the past 50 or 60 years, we have followed industrialized agricultural policies that have increased the rate of destruction of productive farmland. For those 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe the absurd notion that as long as we have money we will have food. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy.
Read full article

BLOOMINGTON EATS GREEN Conference

Bloomington’s small size, open‐minded community, world‐class university, and location make it the perfect place to develop a pro‐active, community organized, sustainable food system. The upcoming BLOOMINGTON EATS GREEN conference will lay the groundwork for a new decade of local food system development. Please join your fellow community representatives for a day of discussion and planning aimed at developing and researching sustainable food practices. How can we make our local food system healthier, more secure and equitable, and more sustainable?

Thank you if you have already RSVP’d. In order to get an accurate headcount and arrange for a set of breakout sessions, we would like everyone who is coming to please send a brief message to mailto:sminard@indiana.edu indicating your interest in the following panels so that we may schedule you in an appropriate discussion (choose your favorite 2 from each session, and we will aim to assign you to one of those two):

Morning Breakout Sessions: What are we doing now? Where are we today?

• Urban Gardening and Animal Husbandry
• Farm to Schools and Institutions – Creating Connections
• CSAs and Alternative Distribution Networks
• Food Waste and Recycling/Composting
• Food Security
• Local Entrepreneurship – Local Food Business Development

Afternoon Breakout Sessions: Future Work – Where Do We Go From Here?

• Shaping the Food System: Public Policy
• Indiana UniversityCommunity
Partnerships in Learning and Research
• Community Education and Outreach
• Bridging Food Access Disparities
• Reducing Food Waste and Offering Alternatives
• Building an Awareness of Local, Regional and National Environmental Impacts of Farming

We would like to create a database in order to build connections between groups and individuals participating in the local food system. Therefore, along with your choice of breakout sessions, please send a brief description of your business, organization, or individual project, along with your current contact information, so that we may accomplish this goal.

Further questions may be directed to Sara Minard at (773) 547‐1721. Thank you— we look forward to seeing you in the New Year, and working with you to make Bloomington’s food system better for everyone in the community!!
Sincerely,
Richard Wilk
Peter Todd
Sara Minard

Bloomington Eats Green: A Campus/Community Conference on Building a Sustainable Local Food System

MEETING AGENDA JANUARY 23, 2010
Sponsered By: Indiana University, Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs, the Departments of Anthropology, Geography & Political Science, Kelley School of Business, and Bloomingfoods

Organized by:
Richard Wilk, Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies
Peter Todd, Professor of Cognitive Science and Informatics
Sara Minard, Graduate Student in Anthropology of Food Studies

WHERE: Indiana Memorial Union
For Driving and Parking directions: http://www.imu.indiana.edu/about/index.shtml
Parking in the Union lot will be validated with attendance.
Contact the Indiana Memorial Union at: 812-856-6381

9:00-9:30 AM Registration and Coffee
9:30-10:30 AM Welcome and Morning Plenary – Dogwood Room
10:30-12:00 PM Morning Breakout Sessions: Where We Are Today
• Urban Gardening and Animal Husbandry
• Farm to Schools and Institutions -- Creating Connections
• CSAs and Alternative Distribution Networks
• Food Waste and Recycling/Composting
• Food Security
• Local Entrepreneurship – Local Food Business Development

12:00-1:30 PM Lunch in the Union’s Georgian Room (free of charge)

Morning groups prepare report for next plenary

1:30-2:30 PM Plenary – Overview of AM Breakout Sessions
2:30-4:00 PM Afternoon Breakout Sessions: Future Work – Where Do We Go From Here?
• Shaping the Food System: Public Policy
• Indiana University-Community Partnerships in Learning and Research
• Community Education and Outreach
• Bridging Food Access Disparities
• Reducing Food Waste and Offering Alternatives
• Building an Awareness of the Local, Regional and National Environmental Impacts of Farming
4:00-4:15 PM Short Break, with coffee/snacks
4:20-5:30 PM Afternoon Plenary and Concluding Remarks
6:00-7:30 PM Joel Salatin’s “Holy Cows and Hog Heaven” talk -- Woodburn Hall 100

Alcohol Fuel for Sustainable Living

This is a 2.5 hr, not to be missed, video. Stay tuned. We will be bringing Dave Blume to Bloomington in 2010 for a two-day Alcohol Can Be a Gas training. Download the outline for the workshop. Date to be announced here.

In Transition - the Movie

'In Transition' shows a practical vision for creating a post-consumer society, where ordinary people make a difference. Coming to a theater near you. Stay tuned...

Urban Food Growing in Havana, Cuba

Be Aware of Falling Food.....

The following is an excerpt from David Jacke's and Eric Toensmeier's two-volume book Edible Forest Gardens (available from Permaculture Activist magazine).

Picture yourself in a forest where almost everything around you is food. Mature and maturing fruit and nut trees form an open canopy. If you look carefully, you can see fruits swelling on many branches—pears, apples, persimmons, pecans, and chestnuts. Shrubs fill the gaps in the canopy. They bear raspberries, blueberries, currants, hazelnuts, and other lesser-known fruits, flowers, and nuts at different times of the year. Assorted native wildflowers, wild edibles, herbs, and perennial vegetables thickly cover the ground. You use many of these plants for food or medicine. Some attract beneficial insects, birds, and butterflies. Others act as soil builders, or simply help keep out weeds. Here and there vines climb on trees, shrubs, or arbors with fruit hanging through the foliage—hardy kiwis, grapes, and passionflower fruits. In sunnier glades large stands of Jerusalem artichokes grow together with groundnut vines. These plants support one another as they store energy in their roots for later harvest and winter storage. Their bright yellow and deep violet flowers enjoy the radiant warmth from the sky. This is an edible forest garden.

What is Edible Forest Gardening?

Edible forest gardening is the art and science of putting plants together in woodlandlike patterns that forge mutually beneficial relationships, creating a garden ecosystem that is more than the sum of its parts. You can grow fruits, nuts, vegetables, herbs, mushrooms, other useful plants, and animals in a way that mimics natural ecosystems. You can create a beautiful, diverse, high-yield garden. If designed with care and deep understanding of ecosystem function, you can also design a garden that is largely self-maintaining. In many of the world's temperate-climate regions, your garden would soon start reverting to forest if you were to stop managing it. We humans work hard to hold back succession—mowing, weeding, plowing, and spraying. If the successional process were the wind, we would be constantly motoring against it. Why not put up a sail and glide along with the land's natural tendency to grow trees? By mimicking the structure and function of forest ecosystems we can gain a number of benefits.

Why Grow an Edible Forest Garden? While each forest gardener will have unique design goals, forest gardening in general has three primary practical intentions:

• High yields of diverse products such as food, fuel, fiber, fodder, fertilizer, 'farmaceuticals' and fun;
• A largely self-maintaining garden and;
• A healthy ecosystem.

These three goals are mutually reinforcing. For example, diverse crops make it easier to design a healthy, self-maintaining ecosystem, and a healthy garden ecosystem should have reduced maintenance requirements. However, forest gardening also has higher aims. As Masanobu Fukuoka once said, "The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings." How we garden reflects our worldview.

The ultimate goal of forest gardening is not only the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of new ways of seeing, of thinking, and of acting in the world. Forest gardening gives us a visceral experience of ecology in action, teaching us how the planet works and changing our self-perceptions. Forest gardening helps us take our rightful place as part of nature doing nature's work, rather than as separate entities intervening in and dominating the natural world.

Read the rest of the article....
Buy the book here...

Rob Hopkins at TED

Rob Hopkins reminds us that the oil our world depends on is steadily running out. He proposes a unique solution to this problem -- the Transition response, where we prepare ourselves for life without oil and sacrifice our luxuries to build systems and communities that are completely independent of fossil fuels.

Rob Hopkins is the founder of the Transition movement, a radically hopeful and community-driven approach to creating societies independent of fossil fuel.