The Massachusetts Public Banking (www.masspublicbanking.org) campaign, a sponsored project of Alliance for Democracy, got some bad news and some good news in February.
 
The bad news was that their bill, which would have created a public bank for municipal infrastructure projects, didn’t make it out of committee. The good news is that the bill’s House and Senate sponsors are eager to refile it in 2021.
 
More good news: the project’s advisory committee has grown, with the addition of expertise on community organizing and urban planning, and a new co-chair, Alliance for Democracy vice co-chair Ruth Caplan, formerly a coordinator for the DC Public Banking Center. Ruth was the editor of our Spring 2014 issue of Justice Rising, focusing on public banking and the role these banks play in protecting local economies. (link) Ruth relocated from Washington DC to Boston over the winter, and for someone with her experience working on democratizing finance, getting involved with the state’s public banking campaign was a given.

David Delk has given this talk on Citizens United v. FEC to several groups in Oregon. In it, he explains the need for an amendment to the Constitution saying that its rights belong to people, not corporations, and that governments must regulate campaign finance, and gives a call to action to support a Senate version of HJR48, the We the People Amendment.

My topic today is Deepening Democracy.
 
You might expect that I will talk about how to get out the vote, how to get rid of the Electoral College, how we need to reinstate the Voting Rights Act of 1964 which the Supreme Court punched a big hole in recently.  Or maybe about, here in Oregon especially, how to control the flow of unlimited money into the political process, specifically by supporting the legislative referral to the Nov 2020 ballot amending the OR constitution to allow limits on political campaign contributions in Oregon.   We all need to support this referral in our communities.
 
But instead I want to talk about Citizen United, because Jan 21st is the 10 anniversary of that awful decision.  It struck yet another blow against democracy by allowing even more special interest corporate money into the politics system, swamping the voices of ordinary people like you and I.
I want to talk about corporate personhood and the court system’s granting of human rights to corporations. Court-created corporate personhood has given the rights and privileges of human beings to corporations while removing them from the duties and obligation of being our servants.   

In 2013, Dave Lewit, active with the Massachusetts Public Banking working group and a former Alliance chapter coordinator, looked at the aftermath of the "Great Recession" and what organizations and theorists were proposing to address systemic problems with our global and national financial systems. 

He wrote this article, which was first published in Empirical magazine. It looks at the link between money and rebellion, and some of the groundbreaking changes advocated by those working to democratize finance and money, including public banks, unemployed worker co-op formation, government-created credit bypassing private banks, and a trillion-dollar coin to jump start the economy and shrink public debt. Just as in 2013, it's time for popular education to lay out these issues and solutions. 

​Public banking activists in California and across the country are celebrating the passage of AB 857, authorizing California cities, counties, and the state to create their own public banks. The bill was signed into law in October by Governor Gavin Newsom after being filed at the start of the session by Assembly members David Chiu and Miguel Santiago.  But the bill’s filing was preceded by years of city-level advocacy, with local public bank groups in Los Angeles, Oakland, Humboldt County, and San Francisco, among others. These groups worked with city councils and county government and built connections across issues to bring a diverse coalition together in support of the bill once it was filed.
 
With San Francisco and Los Angeles both working on filing bank plans under the new bill, look for these cities to join North Dakota and American Samoa, as well as dozens of other countries where public banks are established, in being able to provide non-profit, transparent, accountable and affordable finances for public purposes—putting public money to work for the common good, rather than Wall Street profits.
 
Alliance Co-chair Nancy Price was one of dozens of CA Public Banking Alliance campaigners who met with Assembly and Senate committee members in the spring and early summer to help shepherd the bill through several committee hearings and votes, and to help fend off unfriendly amendments. “The combined efforts of Coalition members and endorsers of this bill, as well as calls to the legislature and committee members and in-district visits led to success,” she said. “And this California win will give a huge push to Alliance sponsored campaigns” for public banks, currently underway in Massachusetts and Portland OR.

At a time when, across the country, communities are told to cut back on water usage to protect the environment while bottled water corporations pump water for their own profit, the people of a small town in southwest Maine have taken a large step toward local control and long term protection of water.
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At their August 20 town meeting, Brownfield residents voted 136-17 to enact a new “Town of Brownfield ME Water Extraction Ordinance.” The ordinance puts limits on how much groundwater can be pumped from local wells. It also ensures the town can stop water extraction if testing demonstrates that groundwater levels are falling. In addition, the ordinance also bars large-scale extraction for bottling and sale, and puts controls on water-related truck traffic.

Voters in Edison NJ have overwhelmingly rejected their mayor's plan to turn over the township's wastewater system, and part of its water system, to a joint venture between two corporations.

SUEZ North America, a private water utility company, and KKR, an equity firm, would have operated the facilities under the name Edison Environmental Partners, and leased the equipment from the town. Instead, following a landslide "no" on the proposal in a special election, the township will create a water department and beef up its existing sewer department to do maintenance and repair.

The election was the result of a grassroots petition drive and local organizing over most of the past year. While SUEZ and KKR modified their proposals in response to opposition by the community, cutting the length of the contract from 40 to 25 years and offering money to install air conditioning in township schools, Edison residents held their ground. In June, nearly 5,000 petitions were received by the township council asking that an ordinance be introduced to require Edison to permanently own and operate the sewer and water systems that were to be turned over to SUEZ and KKR. In response, SUEZ and KKR sent out investigators who posed as representatives of the "Edison Utility Improvement Program," showing up at the homes of petition signers, reportedly inquiring about whether they signed the petition and why. 

Water privatization, whether of resources or infrastructure, is not the answer. Edison needed only to look to Hoboken to see a pattern of indifference from water profiteers to real concerns about service and safety of the public water supply.

The Alliance for Democracy worked with residents in Lawrence MA, many years ago to prevent the private takeover of their municipally-managed sanitation system, and from our support of local rights-of-nature ordinances to local control of producer to consumer food sales, we are big fans of keeping vital systems under the public's oversight. We hope that Edison residents remain involved in setting up the new water department and that this example of democratically-determined municipal control of water is an inspiration to other communities looking to take back control of their water and sanitation systems. 

Oregon’s legislature has approved a ballot measure for the Nov 2020 ballot to amend the state’s Constitution to allow limits on campaign contribution at the state, county and city levels, to allow disclosure of contributors, and to allow political advertisements to also include information on who paid for them. But that hasn’t put a stop to a citizen effort to collect enough signatures to get a similar measure on the ballot.
 
Oregon is one of only five states that have no enforced campaign contribution limits—the others are Alabama, Nebraska, Utah and Virginia. The result is outlandish amounts of money given and spent in elections--$37 million in the last gubernatorial race, with $2.5 million coming from Nike founder Phil Knight alone--and an increasingly clear line between money and inaction on issues of concern to voters. For instance, Republican legislators who skipped the state to block a vote on a clean energy jobs bill also received large donations from companies whose bottom lines would have been impacted by the legislation. 
 
Still, Oregonians are continuing to collect 220,000 signatures statewide to get the a similar measure on the ballot, since it’s possible for the state legislature to rescind their approval.  Alliance council member Joan Horton said that legislators take the signature drive seriously, and knowing that people in their districts were out working for the measure spurred them to support a referral “A continuing signature drive is “insurance” that the legislature will not rescind their referral of SJR18 during 2020’s short session. According to our attorney, we are not on the ballot for certain until that short-session is over next year. He says it’s very unlikely to be rescinded, but it’s a chance we don’t want or need to take”, she said.
 
Alliance national co-chair David Delk noted that in Portland, the local chapter’s efforts will be focused on having the 2020 state ballot measure approved by city and county voters and supporting efforts elsewhere in the state. Every expectation is that it will pass locally, since Portland and Multnomah county voters have already approved two other local ballot measures by about 90%, though implementation is still partly tied up in court. The chapter will also join with other supporting organizations to make sure that when the question passes, contribution limits established under it are not too high and the implementing legislation is loophole-free.
 
In another legislative win Oregon also approved two legislative study committees on a single payer health care plan for the state, and a state public option. David, who also leads the Health Care for All Oregon Metro chapter, said “The single payer study committee is expected to write legislation to implement such a program in Oregon.  Passage of this study committee is quite exciting for Oregonians and moves the ball forward for Oregon to be the first state in the nation to create a single payer health care system.  Remember, everybody in, no one out!"

 

by Jim Tarbell

After the rousing launch of our map of the Economy for the Common Good in Mendocino County on April 29 with Emily Kawano and Keith Taylor, we quickly began the process of capturing that energy and launching the whole project into the future. On May 19, over two dozen citizens dedicated to fulfilling the promise of the Economy for Our Common Good, gathered to outline all of the issues, projects and campaigns that need to be part of the new economy. These themes were then taken up by a larger public gathering on June 15 that covered many issues involved in Building the Economy for Our Common Good. 

We began with a great communal singing of the Melanie DeMore song Lead with Love, which led into testimonials from organizations already on the map and a community-base media group aiming to be citizen-driven and worker-owned. From there we broke into three groups looking at:

• Issues around the availability and affordability of housing and the viability of establishing a Community Land Trust to ensure long-term affordable housing;
• Our natural commons and the state of restoration forestry, including pushing the County to enforce a publicly passed ordinance that “put a wrench in the longstanding timber-management practice” of using carcinogenic chemicals to kill hardwood trees. We also discussed how to support the County’s newly formed Climate Action Advisory Committee; 
• Establishing co-ops and collectives in the County and organizing a regular media presence for presenting current news on our progress  in Building the Economy for the Common Good in Mendocino County.

At the conclusion of the gathering we also outlined plans to hold more workshops at Mendocino College, concentrating on both adding organizations to and expanding our Map of the Economy for Our Common Good, as well as exploring new issues and campaigns necessary for a robust Economy for the Common Good and the development of new organizations to fulfill that promise.

As we ere breaking up, one enthusiastic participant exclaimed, “this is the best meeting I have been at in years. We did not just talk, we came up with actions to do.”

Not in Mendocino County? Visit this page for information on the Grassroots Institute's solidarity economy mapping curriculum, and consider organizing to create a similar map where you live. 

by Bonnie Preston

Since Maine’s town meeting season of 2011, 55 towns have passed the Local Food and Community Self Governance Ordinance (LFCSGO), which gives small farmers who sell directly to their customers an exemption to licensing and inspection requirements.

For some reason, the Maine Municipal Association (MMA), a statewide membership organization which provides an array of services to assist municipalities in their governance, has never supported the LFCSGO. The MMA doesn't set policy, but instead supports needs that are frequently beyond the scope of what small towns in particular can do for themselves. Yet they have recently recommended a seriously modified version of the LFCSGO to towns that ask for their advice on this issue.