Rights of gas drillers vs people before Ohio Legislature

A message from an Northeast Ohio artist-activist who I’ve worked with on other issues. Please act on this issue TODAY!

Dear Friends,
We need your help to protect our residential neighborhoods in NE Ohio from gas well drillers. During the fall, two revisions to current State law were introduced in the State Senate. The weaker bill of the two, known as SB165, was passed out of committee last week; it will likely be voted on by the full Senate early this week. Please ask your Senator to vote for several amendments. We expect SB165 to pass, but the more senators who vote to amend it, the more it strengthens the hand of our supporters in the House when the bill is presented and discussed there early next year.
So, I am asking you to
1. Write or call your senator to amend or vote “no” on SB 165 because it does not substantially change the oil and gas permitting laws of Ohio, give us control over our own lives, or adequately protect our environment. Even if you don’t live in northeast Ohio, please write to your Senator so he/she knows that there are concerned citizens throughout Ohio who care about this law. Feel free to include background information when you write.
E-mail the sample letter below to your friends all around Ohio and ask them to write their Senators, urging them to help us make changes to this bill.
Please send letters to the five Senators whose E-mail addresses are listed below. We think they may be persuadable. We need your help to fight the powerful lobby of the oil and gas industry that contributes well over a million dollars each year to try to persuade Ohio’s senators to vote with them. Be hopeful! You can make a difference! An e-mail campaign like this helped to save our state parks from being drilled!
THANK YOU!
Linda Butler, Mayfield Village, OH 44040

Sample letter:
Dear Senator_______,
During the next few days, SB165 will be voted on in the Senate. This bill may determine the safety of oil and gas drilling in Ohio for the next decade. Unfortunately it is sorely lacking in the sorts of changes that will protect homeowners and residents, protect drinking water sources, or protect the environment from the known hazards caused by drilling. To achieve these protections SB 165 at a minimum should be amended
A. to increase setbacks to a far greater distance than the proposed 150 feet;
B. to allow homeowners to have the right to refuse to have a hazardous industrial oil and gas operations in their neighborhoods or near their homes; and
C. to return control over the locating of oil and gas wells to local communities by requiring State regulators to abide by local zoning ordinances which determine appropriate land use throughout the State.
Thank you for refusing to pass SB165 without additional amendments.
Sincerely,
Your name, address zip code and (phone number)


If you don’t know your senator please go to Google and look up “Ohio State Senate”
On the left, please type in your zip code and you will find the name of your senator.

I. First, please write to your senator wherever you live. You will help our cause. Do it today!
II. Please write to these persuadable senators who may help our cause
Sen. Nina Turner (D), Cleveland (ward 2), Euclid, S Euclid
Fax 614-664-6164, Tel 614-466-4583, email, SD25@maild.sen.state.oh.us

Sen. Tom Sawyer (D), S and SE Summit County and Portage County
Fax 614-466-6660, Tel (614) 466-7041, e-mail SD28@maild.sen.state.oh.us

Sen. Tom Patton (R), Bay Village, Rocky River, Westlake, Fairview, N. Omstead, Berea, Olmstead Falls, Strongsville, N. Royalton, Broadview Hts., Brecksville, Chagrin Falls, Moreland Hills, Hunting Valley, Pepper Pike, Mayfield Hts, 7 Hills, Lyndhurst, Independence, Valley View, Walton Hills, Oakwood, Solon, Glenwillow
Fax 614-466-7662, Tel (614) 466-8056, e mail: SD24@senate.state.oh.us

Sen. Shirley Smith (D), Cleveland (e of Cuyahoga River), East Cleveland, Cleveland Heights, Cuyahoga Heights, Brooklyn Heights, Newburgh Heights
Tel (614) 466-4582; Email SD25@maild.sen.state.oh.us

Sen. Kevin Coughlin (R), Cuyahoga Falls, Brunswick, Medina, Hudson, Boston Hts, Twinsburg, Macedoina, Sagamore Hills, Corthfiield Center, Peninsula, Bath, Monroe Falls, Silver Lake, part of Stow
Tel. 614-466-4823; Email SD27@senate.state.oh.us

III. Why not write these NE Ohio senators? Senators Grendell, Cafaro, and Miller already support our bill. Please write to thank them! Unfortunately Sen. Morano voted against our alternative bill (SB196) in the Senate’s Natural Resources Committee. But who knows, you may get her to change her vote in the Senate. Why not try!
Sen Tim Grendell (R) Highland Hts, Mayfield Village, Mayfield Hts, Gates Mills and Geauga and Lake Counties; Tel (614) 644-7718 Email SD18@senate.state.oh.us
Sen. Capri Cafaro (D), Minority Whip Ashtabula and Trumbull Counties;
Tel (614) 466-7182; Email SD32@maild.sen.state.oh.us
Sen. Dale Miller (D), Lakewood, Lindale, Brook Park, Middleburg Heights, Parma Hts. Parma and Cleveland on the west side of the Cuyahoga River
Tel (614) 466-5123; Email SD23@maild.sen.state.oh.us
Sen. Sue Morano (D) Huron & Lorain counties and part of Seneca
Fax 614-466-4120, Tel 614-644-7613 e-mail: SD13@maild.sen.state.oh.us

Resources:
For further information: NEOGAP website: www.NEOGAP.ORG
Short local films by Linda Butler about this subject are on UTube under “Earthophiles”
Ohio Environmental Council website: www.theOEC.org

Background
In 2004, a bill was passed in Ohio that dramatically changed oil and gas well regulation throughout Ohio. Who cares? I admit that I didn’t even know about it until drillers attempted to drill four wells near me in Mayfield Village--1 2, 4, and 6 blocks from my house! 20 volunteers rose up to defend ourselves from the drillers; we worked tirelessly to fend off proposed wells in our village, but other communities were not so fortunate. Gates Mills now has 45 residential gas wells; and Broadview Heights has 65 oil wells in residential areas.
A new form of drilling technique allows companies to extract oil and gas from shale formations in the eastern half of Ohio that were previously inaccessible. Using this technique known as “fracking.” drillers drill down to an underground shale formation about 3500 feet below the surface and ignite an underground explosion that breaks up the shale. Then brine and other undisclosed chemicals are thrust into the shale under high pressure to further damage the shale’s structure. This technique releases gas, and oil, but we do not know its future ramifications. We do know that it can seriously contaminate drinking water supplies by polluting underground water sources with toxic chemicals and hazardous waste products. Under current law, gas wells can be drilled without regard to watershed issues (the EPA does not regulate gas drilling until there is a spill!). New York recently passed a law to prevent gas drilling near NYC’s reservoir, fearing contamination of NYC’s water supply.
Imagine this; it’s true! Ohio’s 2004 law
1. Eliminates the ability of local zoning laws to control whether or not gas wells can be in the middle of residential neighborhoods.
2. Even though the oil companies must put together drilling units of 20 acres, they can force property owners who dissent to join those “pools” through “mandatory pooling.”
3. Drillers frequently lie or use pressure tactics to persuade residents to sign drilling leases;
4. Drillers can drill within 100 feet of a house—even if the owner does not want a well near his/her home;
5. A person who lives next door to a gas well can expect his/her home will lose at least 10% of its value just by being close to a well. Who wants to buy property next door to a gas or oil well?
Two years ago an accident occurred in Bainbridge Township (near Chagrin Falls) that alerted us all to the dangers of drilling. A driller bored through a local aquifer seeking gas; the gas seeped into the aquifer irreparably polluting the wells of 43 homes. One of the homes exploded at night blasting its 85-year-old occupants out of bed. This caused home values to drop by more than a 60%!
Since 2007, NEOGAP, a grassroots group, has been fighting for better laws. A weak new law known as “SB165” will be voted on in the next week. SB165 may be approved “as is” or amended by the Senate. The Governor is supporting the bill in part because it increases state revenues. Although the new bill contains increased enforcement powers for the regulators in Columbus, it contains no provisions that would give local residents control over placement of wells in residential neighborhoods. It limits drillers to five requests for mandatory pooling per year, but does nothing to end intimidation. It increases minimum setbacks from 100 to 150 ft from homes—but this distance is still far too close to homes for a hazardous industrial activity.
We need your support for amendments to the present bill. The more senators who vote to amend this bill, or vote against SB 165, the more likely Ohio’s House will add important additional changes in 2010.
If you do one thing, please write to your senator. It will take less than 5 minutes.
Thank you for your help! Linda Butler, photographer, Mayfield Village, OH 44040

Tribute to John Logue

John Logue, a pre-eminent educator and practitioner for economic democracy in Ohio and around the world, passed away December 9.

Obituary at:
http://obits.cleveland.com/obituaries/cleveland/obituary.aspx?n=john-logue&pid=137219284

Scholars are often not very adept at translated their ideas and ideals into reality while social doers can often be not well grounded in the theories and history of what they’re creating.

John was adept at applying theory and practice to an arena that must be widely expanded in our unsustainable corporate-dominated economy – ownership by workers of the place of their employment.

Founder of the Ohio Employee Ownership Center at Kent State University, Logue assisted more than 10,000 workers in more than 70 firms in Ohio and elsewhere to gain greater direct control of their workplace.

Worker-owned firms aren’t likely to move off shore, exploit employees, or bleed their companies to pay executives exorbitant bonuses. Rather, they provide workers power to control their own workplaces – all the while operating in the “free market.” Worker ownership is thus a third category of economic institution – neither corporate which are controlled by management and stockholders or state which is owned and run by the government.

Logue organized over the years several delegations of diverse participants to the Mondragon region of Spain to witness first-hand the incredible network of hundreds of worker-owned cooperatives which employ 100,000 employees. A recent visit included representatives of the Cleveland Foundation and others from the area desperate to find a way to bring back to life an inner city that corporations had abandoned and government handouts had failed to empower. The result was the launch in October of a network of employee-owned cooperatives to employ area residents, give them power over their own economic lives, and provide needed goods and services to area hospitals and universities.

I sat near John at the announcement of the first of those cooperatives, Evergreen Laundry. True to his graceful and humble form, he wasn’t up front with the politicians, hospital and university presidents or supporting non-profit heads. He sat back in the audience almost intentionally trying to stay away from the limelight. That was John.

Several months ago, we launched an educational campaign to help activists and concerned citizens better understand the sources and solutions to the global economic crisis. I invited John to speak about worker ownership at a program in Cleveland, saying the audience might not be very large. He didn’t care. He showed up and provided an incredible in-depth, intelligent, clear and hopeful description of how our economy could be transformed if only public incentives (loans, grants, subsidies, tax breaks, etc.) favored employee-owned and cooperative businesses at even a fraction that they currently favor large corporations. And it did with humor, respect and a genuineness that was disarming no matter what preconceived notions one possessed. That was John.

Martin Luther King said once in response to the incompleteness of sit-down strikes of the south: what good is it to have the right to sit down in a restaurant if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger. The point was racial justice doesn’t go very far without economic justice.

Logue might have understood a corollary today; the realization of real political democracy isn’t possible without real economic democracy. Business corporations and wealthy individuals under our current economic rules and institutions amass ever-increasing wealth which distort, if not demolish, the ability of citizens without money either directly or through their elected representatives to shape public policies.

Worker owned businesses and cooperatives are different economic institutions – more democratic ones that provide workers the ability to become owners and exert their own economic power.

That may have been why as a political science professor he worked so hard for economic democracy. Greater economic power is connected to greater political power.

That was John.

Battle in Seattle, against Banks and for Democracy

Ten years ago this week I marched with labor activists and environmentalists (dubbed “Teamsters and Turtles”) and indigenous people from across the world against the corporate policies of the World Trade Organization.

The famed “Battle in Seattle” that shut down the meetings wasn’t at its core about the police vs. demonstrators or even about free vs. fair trade. It was about the power and rights of people and their elected representatives to set labor, consumer, environmental and commercial laws vs. the power of transnational corporations to abolish those laws and prevent new ones from being enacted.

The WTO’s agenda of trade liberalization and deregulation (i.e. fancy words for abolishing democratically-enacted laws passed by nations, states and regions) includes not only cars, toys, clothing and other stuff manufactured in one nation and shipped to another. Very relevant to today, it also includes a Treaty enacted under the WTO called the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), which has gutted banking, financial, and insurance rules across the planet over the past decade.

Virtually unpublicized in the corporate press, WTO’s financial deregulation provisions under GATS locked in domestically, and exported internationally, the model of extreme financial service deregulation that most analysts consider a prime cause of the current global economic crisis.

Worse still, the final statement from the recent G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh called for completion of the next round of WTO negotiations (the Doha Round) that would further financial deregulation at the same time that the G-20 nations called for financial reregulation.

What further deregulation would transnational financial corporations like to see under the next round of WTO negotiations? According to Public Citizen, they include:
- No limits on size of financial firms or operations
- Reduced controls on risky new products and services from foreign financial firms – such as any next generation of credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations that fueled the financial crisis.
- A standstill on reregulating financial sectors
- Difficulty in regulated financial transactions from corporations in tax haven offshore nations
- Eliminating differences in regulations between local, state and federal governments
- Reducing accounting regulations of banks and financial corporations
- Issuance of a list of 70 grounds to challenge any new banking and financial laws passed by governments.

At the very time when governments around the world are responding to more than a decade worth of banking and financial liberalization and deregulation, the World Trade Organization and its corporate globalization agenda wants to cut regulations further, giving banking and financial institutions more power and rights.

Ten years after the “Battle in Seattle” is the battle in Congress – to press our elected representatives to push for an exit from the WTO and all other misnamed “free trade” agreements that serve corporate interests at the expense of people, the planet, and self-governance.

6 Ways Corporations Profit from War

The Obama administration will soon decide on sending tens of thousands of additional troops into Afghanistan
-- further expanding a war and occupation with no end in sight.

Why the US engages in war after war, decade after decade is due to no single reason.

A major reason is profit earned by various business corporations that influence government policies – corporations that benefit both abroad and at home from war during every step of the process. The same is true for other nations as well.

There are 6 major ways business corporations profit from war.

1. Control of strategic resources. Gold, silver and slaves (defined as property not persons) used to be the preferred resources of pillagers. Today oil, natural gas, and other physical resources (water in the future) are the aim of business corporations to either control or gain access to. US- and UK-based transnational energy corporations initiated the drive for war in Iraq for oil and in Afghanistan for natural gas. It’s hardly surprising that Exxon-Mobil, Chevron and other energy corporations have enjoyed record profits over the last several years.

2. Building weapons. Plans, tanks, guns, bullets, food, and bases are among the many items supplied to governments by Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics and other military contractors to wage wars and indefinitely occupy foreign countries. Military contractors benefit from “cost-plus” contracts – contracts that guarantee a certain percentage profit. The more expensive the military item, the greater the profit.

3. Waging wars. No longer are government-paid troops the only soldiers waging wars and occupying cities and villages. The Iraq war saw an explosion of business corporations receiving US government contracts to hire soldiers. Paid mercenaries provide an ever-increasing role in fighting “enemies” and protecting people and property.

4. Reconstruction. After corporate-made bombs blow up buildings, governments pay other corporations, such as Bechtel corporation, to rebuild buildings. Sometimes it’s the same corporations (i.e. Halliburton corporation). This cycle is akin to those who criticized some New Deal depression-era programs of paying people to dig holes and then to fill them back in. The military economic prime-pump equivalent, however, is no myth but is much more lethal and expensive.

These are the more obvious ways business corporations profit from wars and occupations. There are 2 other paths to profits that are not as widely acknowledged – but at least as devastating economically and democratically to nation-states.

5. Debt. Waging wars costs more money that what governments have in their treasuries. This requires taking out loans. This takes the form of selling government bonds that are purchased by central banks (the Federal Reserve in the case of the US) and private banks. The government allows banks to literally create money out of thin air to purchase US Treasury notes. Governments are on the hook for not only the principle of the loans but interest. Thus, banks profit from receiving interest payments and whatever principle may be repaid for money they never had to begin with. This is profit of glorious proportions to banking corporations. Wars, thus, create government dependency to banks – which explains why throughout history banks have encouraged Kings and other royalty to war with each other. Governments lose sovereignty when they lose their ability to shape their own budgets. More of our federal budget goes to debt service each and every year. Not all of US debt is war-incurred – the trillions for bank bailouts is another major cause. But the truth remains the more money set aside for war that can’t be paid for yields more debt…and bank profits. This was the reason President Lincoln scorned British and US banks and created interest free US money, called Greenbacks, to pay for the Civil War – saving billions in interest payments that would have been paid to banking corporations.

6. Privatization/corporatization of domestic public assets. Greater public debt eventually leads to an inability to fund domestic needs. Governments are left with two choices – raise taxes or sell off public assets to fill budgetary holes. If debts soar due to further war spending and too-big-to-fail bank bailouts, we can expect to see a massive sell off of public assets to business corporations – with massive corporate profits and loss of public control. The drive to “privatize” social security and Medicare are likely to intensify as our federal debt explodes. Financial corporations eager to invest our retirement savings in the market and insurance corporations more that willing to set up private health savings accounts would be huge winners.

Wars are costly in many ways to most of us here and abroad – but oh so profitable for a very few.

Spokane Considers Community Bill of Rights

While this initiative unfortunately failed, the process of bringing people together across issues to affirm the rights of people to decide their own quality of life over the rights of corporations was very impressive. Other initiatives like this will surely follow.

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Published on Thursday, November 5, 2009 by YES! Magazine
Spokane Considers Community Bill of Rights
Thousands of people voted to protect nine basic rights, ranging from the right of the environment to exist and flourish to the rights of residents to have a locally based economy and to determine the future of their neighborhoods.

by Mari Margil

Of all the candidates, bills, and proposals on ballots around the country yesterday, one of the most exciting is a proposition that didn't pass.

In Spokane, Washington, despite intense opposition from business interests, a coalition of residents succeeded in bringing an innovative "Community Bill of Rights" to the ballot. Proposition 4 would have amended the city's Home Rule Charter (akin to a local constitution) to recognize nine basic rights, ranging from the right of the environment to exist and flourish to the rights of residents to have a locally based economy and to determine the future of their neighborhoods.

A coalition of the city's residents drafted the amendments after finding that they didn't have the legal authority to make decisions about their own neighborhoods; the amendments were debated and fine-tuned in town hall meetings.

Although the proposition failed to pass, it garnered approximately 25 percent of the vote--despite the fact that opponents of the proposal (developers, the local Chamber of Commerce, and the Spokane Homebuilders) outspent supporters by more than four to one. In particular, they targeted the Sixth Amendment, which would have given residents the ability, for the very first time, to make legally binding, enforceable decisions about what development would be appropriate for their own neighborhood. If a developer sought to build a big-box store, for example, it would need to conform to the neighborhood's plans.

Nor is development the only issue in which resident would have gained a voice. The drafters and supporters of Proposition 4 sought to build a "healthy, sustainable, and democratic Spokane" by expanding and creating rights for neighborhoods, residents, workers, and the natural environment.
Legal Rights for Communities

Patty Norton, a longtime neighborhood advocate who lives in the Peaceful Valley neighborhood of Spokane, and her neighbors spent years fighting a proposed condominium development that would loom 200 feet high, casting a literal shadow over Peaceful Valley's historic homes.

Proposition 4 would ensure that "decisions about our neighborhoods are made by the people living there, not big developers," Patty said.

For years, she and her neighbors have participated in protests, spoke at City Council hearings, attended meetings, and educated their neighbors. But, as with other neighborhoods in Spokane who've come together to fight off Wal-Mart stores and other unwanted developments, the residents of Peaceful Valley found that they didn't seem to have the legal authority to make a decision about something that would have a significant impact on their neighborhood.

Then, in 2007, Patty and several of her neighbors went to a Democracy School in Spokane. Democracy Schools--run by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund--are weekend workshops in which communities examine why the structure of law often gives corporations more power to make decisions than the communities in which they seek to do business. Participants look at why our system of government seems to hamper our efforts to protect the places where we live, rather than to help us protect them.

Because the U.S. Constitution legalized slavery, abolitionists had to change existing law in order to end it. Democracy School students study this and other examples of people's movements fighting unjust laws, recognizing that sometimes legal changes are the only way to protect their communities and the environment.

Patty and other Spokane graduates of Democracy School began talking with one another about how they might address their concerns about the future of their neighborhoods, the health of the local economy, the heavily polluted Spokane River, and a host of other issues.
A Community Bill of Rights

In the spring of 2008, grassroots organizations, labor unions, neighborhood councils, and other groups across the city began meeting together as part of a coalition they called Envision Spokane. Over the spring and summer, they drafted a series of ideas for addressing the needs of residents, workers, neighborhoods, and the environment. These ideas formed a draft "Community Bill of Rights" for the city.

During the winter, Envision Spokane held a series of 12 Town Halls across the city to engage the community in a conversation about the proposed Bill of Rights.

Taking the community's feedback, the board of Envision Spokane revised the Bill of Rights and, in March of 2009, began to collect signatures. Despite opposition from the Spokane City Council and a concerted effort by business interests to block the Bill of Rights from reaching the ballot, Envision Spokane collected over 5,000 signatures from voters, successfully qualifying the Community Bill of Rights for the November ballot.

The Community Bill of Rights proposed nine amendments, written to address some very real needs in Spokane, to the city's Home Rule Charter. By recognizing broad rights instead of proposing specific legislation, the amendments were written to change the fundamental structure of Spokane's legal system so that it would prioritize the protection of the local environment, economy, neighborhoods and residents.

* First. Residents have the right to a locally-based economy. Recognizes the rights of residents to protect their local economy by denying permits to big-box and chain stores.
* Second. Residents have the right to affordable preventive health care. Creates a fee-for-service program for the thousands of Spokane residents who lack health insurance and currently rely on the emergency room for health care.
* Third. Residents have the right to affordable housing. In response to the loss of thousands of units of affordable housing in Spokane over the past few years, the city would have been obliged, through incentives or other measures, to ensure that an adequate supply of affordable housing is available for those most in need.
* Fourth. Residents have the right to affordable and renewable energy. Requires the city and local utilities to make renewable energy accessible to residents.
* Fifth. The natural environment has the right to exist and flourish. Under current law, nature has no legal standing--to prove environmental damage, a person has to prove that he or she has been harmed. The Fifth Amendment would have protected the Spokane River, one of the most polluted in the nation following years of mining and toxic dumping, would have been protected under the Bill of Rights.
* Sixth. Residents have the right to determine the future of their neighborhoods. Patty Norton and her neighbors--and other residents of Spokane--would have been able to enforce their decisions about what's best for them. (The condominium complex hasn't been built yet, but it is approved. The Sixth Amendment would have done what years of protesting haven't been able to: allow the residents to say, "No.")
* Seventh. Workers have the right to be paid the prevailing wage and to work as apprentices on certain construction projects. As skilled labor leaves Spokane, the Bill of Rights would have protected workers' right to competitive wages and created apprenticeship opportunities so that young people could learn a trade and stay in the city.
* Eighth. Workers have the right to employer neutrality when unionizing, and the right to constitutional protections within the workplace. Workers would have been free from interference by employers when seeking to form a labor union, as well as from having to attend "captive audience" meetings.
* Ninth. Residents, workers, neighborhoods, neighborhood councils, and the city of Spokane shall have the right to enforce the Community Bill of Rights. For the first time, residents would have the legal authority to enforce their own decisions.

While Spokane is the largest city to attempt these legal changes, and the first whose adoption would have meant a change to a city constitution, other communities have already succeeded in securing similar rights. Towns in Maine, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Virginia have passed ordinances recognizing the rights of nature, prohibiting corporate mining and water extraction, and stripping corporations of constitutional protections and the right to contribute to political campaigns.

The board of directors of Envision Spokane recognizes that fundamental change doesn't come easily or quickly, and will be meeting in the next few weeks to discuss how to continue the work that they've started. Other communities are now reaching out to learn from Spokane about how they might do something similar.

Mari Margil wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Mari, the first associate director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), teaches Democracy Schools across the country. She also advised Ecuador's Constituent Assembly in its decision to recognize the "rights of nature" in the nation's new constitution.

Further Reflections on Ohio Issue 2

My reflections on Issue 2 are through the prism of sovereignty — what we are rapidly losing on virtually all fronts as executives and legislators willingly give up their authority on the one hand and business corporations shielding themselves under rules, laws, constitutions, and international agreements as having “rights” on the other -- with the public further disempowered. My view is that Issue 2 is an example of all the above — with the unelected Livestock Board becoming a de facto 4th branch of Ohio government.

The General Assembly doesn’t need a constitutional amendment to the state constitution to acquire final say on anything — they already possess that authority. If there is concern that a there are too many regulatory agencies concerning different facets of livestock oversight, they simply pass a law combining/consolidating such oversight into one agency — and increasing public input. Better still would be to restore the intention of those who founded Ohio and this nation — direct oversight and control of corporations and their actions by legislatures, that is, no separate regulatory agency powers and no privatizing/corporatizing of state and natural assets or public functions.

Proposing a constitutional amendment on anything is a serious matter as it locks in rules, requirements and protocols. One has to ask why basic regulatory functions overseen by an elected body (namely the General Assembly) needs embedding into the state constitution? What’s next? Will transportation interests push for a constitutional amendment claiming they need a Governor-appointed body to oversee transportation policies beyond the direct reach of the General Assembly? Energy interests? Rehabilitation and corrections interests? The list of current state functions is potentially endless.

Making changes to the Livestock Board and its authority if there are problems if Issue 2 passes will only be possible through another constitutional amendment — which will be opposed with as much money by corporate livestock interests as they are currently investing for its passage. The fact that corporations back this thing with as much money as they do should raise all sorts of red “in whose ultimate interests will this serve” flags.

At a time when privatizing/corporatizing almost every sphere of our lives is in rapid motion, I’m just not in favor of any law, edict, mandate, manifesto...or constitutional amendment...that reduces the ability of the public or their elected representatives to make decisions, that diminishes the dignity of each and every person whose voice is being increasingly drowned out in our society by the voices of money and power. Handing over authority to an unelected oversight body whose functions will be legitimized and grounded in the state constitution (not to mention further moved from public input than other alternatives) is to me exactly the opposite direction we need to move.

Economic Democracy in Cleveland

Cleveland and its people have been hit hard over the last several years and decades by the decisions of corporate dictators. Steel corporations and their factories left town. Then it was automobile corporations. Banking corporations and their adjustable rate mortgages have hit the city like a cyclone. Jobs were lost. Homes were abandoned. Money disappeared. People fled. Poverty is rampant.

The economic desperation accounts, in part, for those schooled in traditional corporate formulas of economic development (i.e. abatements, tax credits, other give-a-ways) to try a new idea.

Economic democracy.

Namely economic cooperatives.

Sowed by the Employee Ownership Center at Kent State University and the Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland and bankrolled by the Cleveland Foundation, Case Western Reserve University, and other local, state and national institutions and organizations, the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry was officially launched today in the Glenville neighborhood of Cleveland before several hundred people. Evergreen is an industrial laundry that has secured contracts from several area health care, nursing homes and hotels

What makes Evergreen Laundry unique?

It’s not its location — in a poor inner city neighborhood

It’s not its employment policy — hiring residents from low- and moderate-income neighborhoods of the University Circle area.

It’s its business model — employees not only paid living wages and benefits but who own the business where they work. They make the business decisions. They share in whatever wealth is generated.

There’s no chance Evergreen will relocate to Evergreen, Washington or Ecuador.

There’s a good chance Evergreen will treat their employees fairly and be genuinely concerned about their community

Evergreen Laundry is one of three employee-owned business of the Evergreen Cooperatives. Ohio Solar will install solar panels on the roofs of some of the larges nonprofit insitutions in town, including the Cleveland Clinic. Green City Growers will produce several million heads of lettuce and herbs to Cleveland health care and other institutions.

Up to 20 additional cooperatives may be launched and join this network.

Economic cooperatives exist all across the US and around the world. Cooperatives are widespread and numerous, are of every size, operate in virtually every industry in more than 100 countries, and serve more than 750 million members. In the US alone, there are 30,000 cooperatives, employing 2 million people, generating $652 billion in revenue, $3 trillion in assets, and $133 billion in income.

Evergreen Cooperatives has a chance to succeed quickly because of its support from traditional “establishment” institutions and the effort to develop a network of cooperatives, not simply one here or there.

The Populists of the late 19th century understood that challenging corporate power involved both reshaping macro structures and institutions (corporate and governmental) and creating alternative micro structures and institutions that they controlled which met their needs -- like cooperatives.

Political democracy can never be realized without economic democracy. Workers running their own economic lives doesn’t happen very often as our economy is dominated by a corporate business model that is dictatorial, secret, undemocratic, committed to externalize as many costs as possible, and is driven by profit maximization.

The Evergreen Cooperatives present a different framework — one that is more humane, sustainable, and inclusive.

It is a part of what democracy looks like.

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Other examples across Ohio of people taking charge of their own communities by building and maintaining a democratic infrastructure:
This is What Democracy in Ohio Looks Like!: Ohio’s democratic/self-determination “infrastructure’
Updated: July, 2009
http://www.afsc.net/PDFFiles/DemocraticInfrastructureJuly09.pdf